interview
User Design and Language Design
ALAN COOPER
Best-selling author of About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, Alan
Cooper also had a large hand in designing what can be touted as the language with
the most concern for user interface design, Visual Basic. For him, it all comes down
to a vision for humanizing technology.SOME INFORMATION ON THE BASICS
How did you get started in all of this? I’m a high
school dropout with an associate degree in program-
ming from a California community college. My first job
was as a programmer for American President Lines
(one of the United States’ oldest ocean transportation
companies) in San Francisco. Except for a few months
here and there, I’ve remained self-employed.
What is your current job? Founder and chairman
of Cooper, the company that humanizes technology
(www.cooper.com).
What is or was your favorite job? Interaction
design consultant.
You are very well known in the fields of lan-
guage design and user interface design. Any
thoughts on designing languages versus design-
ing software, versus designing anything else? It’s
pretty much the same in the world of software: Know
your user.
ABOUT THAT EARLY WINDOWS RELEASE
In the 1980s, you started using Windows and
have talked about being lured by its plusses: the
graphical user interface support and the dynami-
cally linked library that let you create tools that
configured themselves. What about the parts of
Windows that you eventually helped shape? I was
very impressed by Microsoft’s inclusion of support
for practical multitasking in Windows. This included
dynamic relocation and interprocess communications.
MSDOS.exe was the shell program for the first few
releases of Windows. It was a terrible program, and I
believed that it could be improved dramatically, and I
was the guy to do it. In my spare time, I immediately
began to write a better shell program than the one
Windows came with. I called it Tripod. Microsoft’s
original shell, MSDOS.exe, was one of the main stum-
bling blocks to the initial success of Windows. Tripod
attempted to solve the problem by being easier to use
and to configure.
When was that “Aha!” moment? It wasn’t until
late in 1987, when I was interviewing a corporate cli-
ent, that the key design strategy for Tripod popped into
my head. As the IS manager explained to me his need
to create and publish a wide range of shell solutions
to his disparate user base, I realized the conundrum
that there is no such thing as an ideal shell. Every user
would need their own personal shell, configured to their
own needs and skill levels. In an instant, I perceived the
solution to the shell design problem: It would be a shell
construction set; a tool where each user would be able
to construct exactly the shell that he or she needed for
a unique mix of applications and training.
What is so compelling about the idea of a shell
that can be individualized? Instead of me telling
the users what the ideal shell was, they could design
their own, personalized ideal shell. With a customiz-
able shell, a programmer would create a shell that was
powerful and wide ranging but also somewhat danger-
ous, whereas an IT manager would create a shell that
could be given to a desk clerk that exposed only those
few application-specific tools that the clerk used.66