24 Facts About Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper was born on June 3,1952 and is an American software designer and programmer.

Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California, United States where he attended the College of Marin, studying architecture.

Alan Cooper learned programming and took on contract programming jobs to pay for college.

In 1975, soon after he left college and as the first microcomputers became available, Alan Cooper founded his first company, Structured Systems Group, in Oakland, California, which became one of the first microcomputer software companies.

Ultimately, Alan Cooper developed a dozen original products at Structured Systems Group before he sold his interest in the company in 1980.

Early on, Alan Cooper worked with Gordon Eubanks to develop, debug, document, and publish his business programming language, CBASIC, an early competitor to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's Microsoft BASIC.

Soon thereafter, Eubanks and Kildall invited Alan Cooper to join them at Digital Research as one of four founders of their research and development department.

Alan Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates in 1984, where it achieved success in the business-to-business marketplace.

Early in his career, Alan Cooper began to critically consider the accepted approach to software construction.

In 1992, in response to a rapidly consolidating software industry, Alan Cooper began consulting with other companies, helping them design their applications to be more user friendly.

Alan Cooper interviewed the users of his client's products and discovered the common threads that made these people happy.

Alan Cooper's best-selling first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, was first published in 1995.

Alan Cooper introduced the ideas of software application posture such as a "sovereign posture" where an application uses most of the space and waits for user input or a "transient posture" for software that does not run or engage with the user all the time.

Alan Cooper directs the message of his second book to the businessperson: know your users' goals and how to satisfy them.

Alan Cooper's current focus is on how to effectively integrate the advances of interaction design with the effectiveness of agile software development methods.

Alan Cooper regularly speaks and blogs about this on his company's website.

Alan Cooper has a user experience design and strategy consulting firm headquartered in San Francisco with an office in New York.

Alan Cooper is credited with inventing several widely used design concepts, including goal-directed design, personas, and pair design.

Alan Cooper was the first consulting firm dedicated solely to interaction design.

In 2002, Alan Cooper began offering training classes to the public including topic as interaction design, service design, visual design, and design leadership.

Alan Cooper has served as the President of Alan Cooper, a user experience and interaction design consultancy in San Francisco, California since its founding in 1992.

Alan Cooper helps their customers with interaction design challenges and offers training courses in software design and development topics, including their Goal-Directed design.

In 2017, Alan Cooper became part of Designit, a strategic design arm of Wipro Digital.