At Cooper, we love to share what we learn in our consulting work. We've published and socialized techniques and tools for doing interaction design in our books, at conferences, and through Cooper U. Recently, Apple released the iBooks Author platform, and a few of us have been giving it a test run.

The platform itself has lots of potential. There is much to improve, but the possibilities are interesting and it's too early to critique it too strongly. There's been much talk already about the EULA and whether or not this will disrupt education. It's too early to make that call, though. Our initial impression? It's an accessible tool aimed at a user population that, up to this point, hasn't been equipped to produce engaging and usable interactive educational content.

In our trial run, we produced a look book with some of recent work, including slideshows, imagery and video. It's a little rough in some areas, but we'd love to see what you think. You can download it via the link below and share your thoughts in the comments section.

Download the Cooper iBook.

Last summer, Cooper partnered with TaskRabbit and Pivotal Labs to design their new iPhone app. The app works with their service to help people who need help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with "Rabbits," a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

The TaskRabbit iPhone app has been nominated for the 2011 Crunchies and the 2012 IxDA awards. This week, you can vote for the app in both awards and check out the other nominations.

• Vote for TaskRabbit in the Crunchies
• Vote for TaskRabbit in the IxDA Awards

The TaskRabbit project

Posting a Task is super easy

The TaskRabbit service is continuing to expand in new cities, including Austin, and we're excited to see their service evolve and grow. Congratulations to Leah Busque for her nomination as Founder of the Year in the Crunchies also.

Practice Fusion, the leading provider of health records software for medical professionals, has published a nice recap of their user conference, Connect11, where Alan Cooper spoke about the role of interaction design in health care. Among the questions answered - "what do you get when you cross a computer with a doctor's office?"

At the 13 minute mark, Stefan Klocek presents a prototype of Practice Fusion's new iPad app.

Kendra Shimmell, Tamara Wayland and I recently enjoyed some Spring weather in beautiful Rio de Janeiro while sharing methods for interaction design, collaboration, and communication in an agile environment with forty employees of Globo.com, the Internet branch for Latin America's largest media conglomerate.

The team knew that Rio would be warm this time of year, but what really amazed us was the warmth and hospitality of the people we met. Andrë Braz, Globo.com's User Experience Design Manager and Art Director, and his team were engaged and inquisitive, and really hungry for ways to take their already successful site to the next level of efficiency and innovation.

During the course we talked about how to effectively integrate user experience design into an agile environment, and shared techniques for collaboration and communication that are lightweight to create but provide big impact. The Cooper team showed Globo.com a blueprint for defining and designing digital products and services that centers on users, but within the context of business needs and implementation realities.

Here are a few snapshots from class:
Participants quickly grasped the value of focusing on goals and behavior patterns when developing personas.

A cross-functional team works together to storyboard the key contexts and moments in time that their primary persona will interact with the product they are designing.

A student sketches design concepts for the mobile experience.

The enthusiasm carried over into the final day of the week, during which we were joined by close to 80 Globo designers, developers, product managers, and executives. We can't wait to go back (and I am still dreaming of the feijoada we had on Friday afternoon).

Thank you Globo, and thank you Rio!

There's nothing we like more than seeing our design work come to life. Last week, Cooper Principal Designer, Stefan Klocek went on stage at Practice Fusion Connect 11 to present a prototype of the company's new iPad app to a room of 1200 physicians. Cooper designed and developed the EMR prototype in close collaboration with Practice Fusion over the last few months.

The iPad app represents a first look at a tool that extends Practice Fusion's free electronic health record platform to a format that is portable and easy for the doctor to use while seeing a patient. The goal of the design is to make it easy to document an encounter, while keeping the focus on the patient, rather than the computer. By leveraging smart defaults, templates, voice recognition, and streamlined workflows, doctors will be able to quickly capture salient facts, make diagnoses, and rapidly order medications, labs and specialist referrals. For the large percentage of patients with common ailments, the iPad will allow charting with little or no typing, and provide a structured guide for the exam which ensures nothing falls through the cracks.

With 25 million health records, Practice Fusion is by far the largest electronic health record system in the country. Adding an iPad app to their offering will help more doctors make the transition from traditional paper-based record-keeping to a digital, cloud-based system that's available from anywhere. An increasing number of doctors are opting for a fully digital office, giving them the efficiency benefits of information technology along with the promise of more accurate diagnosis and personalized treatments.

Stefan presents the iPad prototype on stage, accompanied by Edwin Miller, VP of product management, and Alan Cooper.

The app makes it easy for doctors to familiarize themselves with each patient's condition. Patients are organized by appointment time and a summary view presents the most relevant items from the patient's medical history. A simple swipe reveals more detailed information or tools for quickly updating each record.

When meeting patients, doctors would like to focus on their needs, not keyboard typing. The app includes tools to make text entry fast and accurate, such as dictation and template features.

Credits: Stefan Klocek, Andreas Braendhaugen, Jayson McCauliff, Jenea Hayes, Raphael Guilleminot, Nick Myers, Doug LeMoine

Platfora, a new startup in the Hadoop business intelligence space, is working with Cooper to design an elegant, intuitive interface to bring clarity to the chaos of big data.

After Platfora received 5.7 million in funding from Andreessen Horowitz; Cooper worked on a rapid, collaborative two-week timeline with a team of five designers to create their website, www.platfora.com. Platfora CEO Ben Werther said, "we wanted to convey the clarity and simplicity that we are striving for in our product experience — without showing actual screenshots. Cooper's design work on our website conveyed this message perfectly."

A clean sans-serif designed by Minneapolis type foundry Process combined with rich, vibrant visualizations designed by the Cooper team combine for a unique and beautiful site we're proud to have been linked to in the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch and New York Times.

Immediately after launch, the site received rave reviews on Twitter:

See the site at www.platfora.com.

Related Reading

• Cooper helps TaskRabbit design new iPhone app for help with chores
• The litl: a design miracle!
• Mental Models for product and service strategy
• Take the visual interface design class

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Golden Krishna, Peter Duyan, Jayson McCauliff, Suzy Thompson, Nick Myers

If you own a car in a city like San Francisco, you've probably experienced that particular mix of rage and despair as you drive around your block for the umpteenth time, looking for a parking space. Maybe you've even thought to yourself, "There has got to be a better way!" as you finally bumper car park along the curb blocks from home. Thanks to the folks at Streetline, there is a better way.

Streetline worked with Cooper to create Parker, an app for iPhone and Android that helps drivers easily locate and pay for available parking. When we began, Streetline was an early-stage start-up operating under intense pressure to deliver to market. We worked closely with their developers to bring predictability and order to a process that is wasteful (of resources and time) in addition to being stressful.

Big congratulations to the Parker team for shipping an amazing product &emdash; and securing an additional round of funding!

Get Parker in the App Store, and learn more about our work with Streetline in our case study. Speaking of parking, you can even auction off your spot with Parking Auction.

TaskRabbit’s service connects people who want help with simple tasks—anything from walking the dog, standing in line at the DMV, or moving furniture—with “Rabbits,” a network of background-checked and pre-approved individuals who have the skills and time available to complete tasks.

With a design ideal for mobile task posting, the app provides a simple, seamless process for securing extra help.

Cooper designers collaborated closely with developers at Pivotal and the TaskRabbit team to design a user experience specifically optimized for busy, on-the-go people, offering timely help for folks with unfinished errands or other tasks. With just a spin of the wheel and a few taps, the app enables a task to be posted on the TaskRabbit service network in a matter of seconds with minimal, if any, typing.

Credits: Faith Bolliger, Jim Dibble, Glen Davis, Tim McCoy and Nick Myers.

TaskRabbit, has more than 1,500 runners in San Francisco, Boston, Los Angeles, and Orange County fulfilling up to 3,000 tasks per month and they just opened the service in New York City.

Congratulations to the TaskRabbit team, as the new app release has been featured on Mashable, TechCrunch, and Forbes and has received great reviews.

Download TaskRabbit at the App Store and start getting stuff done!

Congratulations to the litl team for a great showing at the International Design Excellence Awards (IDEA), taking home awards in packaging, hardware and software, the latter of which we're proud to have contributed to. We're thrilled to have been part of such an amazing team and grateful for the recognition from the IDEA panel and litl.

Here's what the judges had to say about the litl user interface:

Designed to remove the barriers between you and web content, it is extremely simple to use and eliminates the clutter and distractions of traditional computer interfaces.

Credits from the litl blog:

Thank you and credit to John Chuang, Aaron Tang, Chris Bambacus, Chris Moody, Havoc Pennington, Eben Eliason and Ron Frank of litl; Daniel Kuo, David Fore, Jenea Hayes and Noah Guyot of Cooper; and Christian Marc Schmidt and Lisa Strausfeld of Pentagram.