Archive - Edition 0: Philosophy

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Cooper Interaction Design Enjoys SAP

By Steve Calde, Senior Designer and Alan Cooper, President, Cooper Interaction Design – April 2000

Disclaimer: Please note that this article was written in 2000. Therefore, statements in the articles, particularly those regarding SAP's products, product strategy, branding stratey, and organizational structure, are no longer valid.

Abstract

Founded in 1992 by Alan Cooper, the world's foremost interaction design expert and the "father of Visual Basic," Cooper Interaction Design is dedicated to designing digital products, services, and appliances that bring power and pleasure to the people who use them. During an ongoing partnership with SAP, Cooper has applied its Goal-Directed® design methodology – which puts customers' goals first – to several SAP web and desktop products and services.

Is SAP dedicated to making their powerful products enjoyable to use? They are so dedicated that they hired Cooper Interaction Design, whose mission statement is "to create digital products, services, and appliances that bring power and pleasure to the people who use them." This partnership has been a success for both companies: Cooper contributes extensive interaction design and strategy expertise, and SAP has provided valuable experience, usability data, and access to customers, all of which are necessary ingredients for creating great products and services.

Cooper Interaction Design creates products that bring power and pleasure to the people who use them.

Founded in 1992 by Alan Cooper (the "father of Visual Basic"), Cooper Interaction Design is dedicated to helping companies define their business strategies, create new digital products, services, and appliances, or refine existing products, services, and appliances. They have extensive experience creating designs for desktop software, web applications, consumer electronic products, and kiosks. Cooper has worked on projects across the board with SAP, including classic R/3 transactions, employee self service applications, Advanced Planning and Optimization (APO), and web interfaces for the mysap.com initiative. In addition to ERP software, Cooper has improved products and services for e-commerce, nuclear magnetic resonance imaging, satellite tracking, airline in-flight entertainment, long-term health care management, and cellular telephones, to name a few.

Alan has authored two books that describe the problems with the state of many products and applications, and offers solutions for how to fix them. In About Face: The Essential of User Interface Design (1995, ISBN 1-56884-322-4), Alan points out to programmers why development without design doesn't work, and shows them how to break bad habits that affect the customer experience. In The Inmates are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity (1999, ISBN 0-672-31649-8), Alan shows why it makes good business sense for a company to make customers happy through good interaction and by focusing on the customer's goals. Cooper bases their methodology - called Goal-Directed® design - on this notion of putting the customer's needs first.

"Designing from tasks instead of goals is one of the main causes of frustrating and ineffective interaction. Asking, `What are the user's goals?' lets us see through the confusion and create more appropriate and satisfying design."

Alan Cooper, The Inmates are Running the Asylum

Alan likes to use analogies to describe the importance of the customer experience while using a product. "If you go to a fine French restaurant," he says, "you park your car, go inside, and order food from a human being who brings the food to you. If you go to McDonald's, you park your car, go inside, and order food from a human being who brings the food to you.

"From a features perspective, both restaurants do the same thing. The dining experience, however, is vastly different." The quality of food, he says, also plays a factor. But even if both restaurants served the same fare, it is the overall experience that will ultimately satisfy customers and make the experience a pleasurable one. SAP, says Alan, realized that they were delivering better functionality than their competitors, but that actual users weren't satisfied.

SAP realized that although they were delivering better functionality than their competitors, actual users weren't satisfied.

 

What is Interaction Design?

The interaction design discipline deals with any product that requires a human to interact with technology. An ATM machine involves interaction. So does a cellular telephone, a web search engine, an e-commerce site, and the biggest ERP software program on the planet.

By designing the interaction of a product or service to meet customer needs before writing code, Cooper's clients get products and services to market faster; the design specifies the right solution, so valuable implementation time is spent on the final product, not endless prototypes.

 

Goal-Directed® Interaction Design Works

Some of Cooper's earlier design work for SAP has already been implemented in the new 4.6 R/3 release. For example, Cooper reduced R/3's complex Materials Management procurement process from several screens down to one, making it impossible for a purchasing agent to get lost while navigating through the interface screens. They did the same for the goods receipt and invoice verification modules.

Case study: SAP materials management

Cooper also did extensive design work in the organizational management sector of the HR module. The implementation of both the MM design and HR design won rave reviews from SAP customers at SAPPHIRE'99 in Nice.

Recently, Cooper has been active in design projects related to the recently announced MySap.com initiative. Cooper has contributed their web design and strategy expertise to the initiative as a whole, as well as focusing on specific web applications dealing with business-to-business transactions, internal service requests, and vehicle inventory tracking and locating for the automotive industry. The online business-to-business ("B-to-B") market is an exciting industry opportunity that SAP is embracing. Cooper recently designed a detailed B-to-B web application that lets buyers easily manage their inventory and complex network of vendors, customers, and orders.

Case study: SAP business-to-business

 

Power and Pleasure: Goal-Directed® Design and Strategy

Cooper's philosophy is simple: create product strategies, digital products, appliances, and services that meet the goals of the people who will use them. The process Cooper uses to do this is not so simple, but the steps are well-defined: Interview and observe customers who will use the application. Discover their goals. Create an archetypal user who embodies these goals. Design something that satisfies this archetypal user. Cooper calls the methodology Goal-Directed® design, and every Cooper project, large or small, rigorously follows it, resulting in products that more closely align with customer needs.

 

Investigate, Design, Refine


Goal-Directed® design means not guessing and not designing for the designer. To avoid this, the Cooper design team spends the beginning of every project performing a detailed investigation. The team interviews the product's vision keepers (such as key developers, marketers, executives, and project managers), and learns about the business domain and the client's goals for the project. Next, the team goes into the field to interview and observe customers or potential customers of the product. These vital ethnographic interviews focus less on the tasks that a customer performs during the day, and more on the goals each customer has. What makes a good day at the office? A bad day? What part of the job goes smoothly, and what requires workarounds? What wastes time? If the solution was magic, what would it do?

Answers to questions like these help the design team create personas, the unique cornerstone of Goal-Directed® design. A persona is an archetypal user of the product, based on the design team's investigation work. The team creates a cast of personas for each project. Each persona gets a biography, job description, photograph, and, most important, a list of goals. These goals are what drives the persona to succeed; if the goals are not met, the persona will not be happy. Each persona with unique needs is designated as a primary persona, and typically gets her own interface, which will be designed to meet her unique goals.

By designing for a specific person, Cooper avoids the pitfall of the elastic user. The elastic user is an inhuman conglomeration of all possible types of users; he is impossible to design for successfully. Some developers on the project may think of "the user" as a novice computer user, others may consider "the user" to be an expert, while other developers may think of "the user" as someone who only occasionally uses the software. More likely, each developer will feel compelled to create a product that satisfies all of these characteristics at once. The result is a complex, bloated interface that is not pleasing to any user. There is only one Bobby Watson, or Claudette Bezier, or Constance Flaherty; by designing for one of them, the design team can focus the feature list and make appropriate interaction decisions.

During the design phase, the team dedicates their work to creating a digital product, service, or appliance whose features and interactions satisfy the goals of the primary persona (and, of course, that is technically buildable by the development team). Once the design concepts and major interactions solidify, the team refines the design and makes sure that it stands up to real-world use scenarios, solves interaction and feature details, and smooths out the interface's visual design.

   Personas - an example

 

Cooper is a Customer Advocate

SAP has heard the message loud and clear from its customers: they appreciate the power of their solutions, but want the time they spend with their computer at work to be pleasurable, not painful.

"It's easy to fall into the trap of believing that because technology is the medium by which we deliver tools that help customers," says Cooper, "it is technology alone that will result in better products." The Enjoy initiative proves that SAP agrees with this philosophy as well. By championing the Enjoy initiative and by hiring a design firm whose mission is to champion the customer, SAP is clearly dedicated to making their products bring power and pleasure to the people who use them. As SAP moves rapidly to web-enable their applications and make them available to a wider consumer market, they are doing so not only with input from web design experts like Cooper, but with the input of the people who are the most important part of the whole process: the customers.

Cooper Interaction Design logo

For more information about Cooper Interaction Design, please visit their website at www.cooper.com.

Goal-Directed® design is a registered trademark of Cooper Interaction Design.

 

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