Cooper recently brought back the Friday Afternoon Social Hour! Everyone enjoyed Suzy's seriously strong sangria and tasty tapas, and the great conversations in this all around good time. If this sounds like how you'd like to wrap up the work week, join us! We are currently looking for a Business Development Manager.
*Download the sample .Sketch file from my Dribbble account.
Sketch 2.0 is a new Mac application designed to be what Adobe Fireworks has struggled to become: the defacto standard for interface design. With a toolset targeting the professional user interface and icon designer, Sketch seems to be headed down the right path.
Sketch is not without its issues and may not be mature enough to replace Photoshop or Fireworks as of the version 1 release; however it's an excellent start and well worth your time to checkout.
Several of us at Cooper are very excited by Sketch, so expect a more detailed review soon. In the meantime, checkout Sketch for yourself.
The Monoprice Graphics Tablet
*Video Monoprice Graphics Tablet line quality by Ray Frenden.
With a starting price of under $50 for a 10X6.25 inch graphic drawing tablet, the Monoprice tablet seems too good to be true. After reading Ray's review and a quick twitter search of other Monoprice tablet users, I've become a believer and am seriously considering replacing my Wacom Bamboo tablet.
Checkout the Monoprice tablets for yourself; it just might save you a couple hundred bucks.
Stay up-to-date with your favorite web service feeds
If you're a Basecamp, Github, Dropmark, or Dribbble user, you might find Feeds interesting. Feeds lives in your menu bar monitoring your favorite web services, notifying you when new content is posted.
Dialoggs enters private beta
Dialoggs is a new web service that just entered it's private beta phase. Dialoggs describes it's self as a combination of Twitter, Facebook's privacy controls, and Tumbler's multimedia features.
Dialoggs allows you to follow people and send public and private messages just like in Twitter. What separates Dialoggs from Twitter, and what I'm most excited about, is Dialoggs ability to have long form conversations. Not having to worry about how many characters I have left? Priceless!
If your interested in learning more about Dialoggs, checkout "Introducing Dialoggs."
Follow the creators on Twitter to win invite codes to Dialoggs: @drewwilson, @ammmir
With the rise of mobile devices, more and more I need to be able to move files from my desktop to my mobile devices. Apple, Google, and Microsoft, along with several other third parties, have developed solutions but nothing that delivers a truly seamless user experience. Interaction designer Ishac Betran, in his article "Watch This Ingenious UI Idea For Dragging Files From Your Phone To Computer" details an elegant seamless drag-n-drop solution.
iPad Keyboard Prototype
Another interesting concept is the "iPad Keyboard Prototype" created by Daniel Chase Hooper. The video demonstrates a simple, intuitive way for simplifying text editing on the iPad. Instead of tap-and-hold to edit text, the user can swipe the cursor around the text block to quickly edit the text.
App pick of the week: Track 8
Track 8 brings the Metro experience to your iPad in a slick music player, allowing you to browse your music in an immersive visual experience.
Defining and creating a memorable experience for your customers is no easy task. Product owners and development teams can easily rattle off ideas to designers about what features are necessary to stay competitive. But if you ask them to share their vision for the overall more subtle emotional aspects of the experience, they often get quiet or resort to the familiar old UI clichés of "simplicity, intuitiveness, etc." This means that you often start your design work with less insight than you need to drive visual and interaction design.
Enter the experience workshop - a collaborative meeting and setup where clients can really talk about what a great experience can feel like among a sea of inspirational images, digital interfaces, products, services, brands, cars, textures, and more. Companies that build digital products and services are engaging in a new level of competition; it's no longer good enough to deliver a usable product. Our designs must reach an aspirational vision that elevates the experience beyond mere usability, and a visual, collaborative workshop pushes people to explore and discuss the possibilities.
The workshop helps teams discuss what attributes are inherent in these other experiences that are meaningful to the experience they're defining. After a process of prioritization and discussion, the end result is often a huge cloud of ideas and words that sit on a spectrum from a poor experience to an ideal experience. The examples aren't what's important for our output. We collect insight from the discussion, the words, that help us define the ideal experience.
The workshop brings teams together to learn and collaborate on the experience. What I love most about this activity is the connections made from people across different teams that can relate on a personal level because of their shared experiences. It's not just a visioning exercise for the future; it's a team-building event.
Check out the above video to see a glimpse of the workshop in action. And if you want to learn more about how to conduct a workshop and integrate this new approach into your company, you can sign up for an upcoming Cooper U Visual Interface Design course. In fact, we have just a few spots left in next week's class (May 7-8), if this post left you inspired...
Telling visionary stories takes more than great tech, it takes imagination, warmth and a devotion to showing a world made better by your inventions.
News of Google's Project Glass lit up web chatter of the design and tech community. On the one hand it was a provocative leap forward, Google stepping boldly toward hardware that is category defining, and on the other showing a vision of the future that is largely uninspiring.
We'll need to work all this out, but let's talk about the Google's vision for this amazing tech. Watch the vision video and you see interactions that will all be familiar: Siri like natural language recognition and commands, location and time notifications, weather forecasting, real-time text and video chat, GPS mapping and location sharing, checking in, sharing photos to social networks, etc... There is a subtle shift in stance, from a more sovereign interaction to one that is more transient. With phones we have a more explicit intentional interaction, Glass is more of a dip-in-and-out of the digital experience. Instead pulling out your phone to read your twitter feed for the whole 20 minute commute home, Glass has been envisioned as more of a light technology augmentation to the real world.
But there's little that's emotionally resonant. It feels like a demonstration of how you'd do all the stuff you do on your iPhone today in your Glass tomorrow. The focus is on performing tasks that highlight features. It comes across like a technology searching for an application.
I don't mean to be down on the tech. When I first saw it I was really excited about the possibilities. This is groundbreaking technology making the screen fully portable and hands free, it's about liberating yourself from the effort required to interact with a phone. Of enhancing your interactions with the world around you. Google's got their engineers making really cool stuff, but when it comes to imagination or emotional resonance; telling a story that makes you connect with and desire what they are making, it's just not there.
Let's look at ways the storytelling could have changed more effectively invite us to imagine a future that's better with Glass.
Helpful insights beyond the moment
Pushing the local forecast into your eye every time you look out the window seems annoying and obnoxious. Technology is pushing it's way into your experience.
Apple shows the same need for insight into weather, but it's prompted by the user who asks about the weather in a city she's clearly packing to visit. The value of the information is greater to the traveller who can't just look out the window and get a pretty good idea about the local weather. By giving her a forecast for New York the phone is more helpful, it's giving her information at a moment where she can make the most use of it. We connect with the experience because we know how difficult it can be to arrive at a destination where we've packed the wrong clothes. It's worth noting that Apple doesn't even show you the results, they don't have to, you fill in the details yourself.
The warmth of connection
Next up Google shows your friend reaching out to see if you want to hang out. Sweet right? But no, it feels like you're forced to translate everything into text instead of simply using your voice to communicate. In the Glass interface chat's a silent activity with beeps and bleeps for feedback. What if instead you could simply chat, you know, with your voice, it could still be asynchronous, it doesn't need to be a phone call. Your voice can also be parsed into text, but giving you both allows for a richer deeper connection. You get the warmth and excitement in your friend's voice, not a text message you have to read.
Thinking a little bit ahead
As you head into the subway Google let's you know the subway's not running. Drat. You've already hoofed it here, now your only option is to walk.
How much more helpful if Glass knows that you usually catch the 6 and tells you that service has been suspended before leaving home. This gives you a chance to grab your bike instead.
Setting your hands free
Speaking of bikes, how did bike riding NOT make it into the video?
Walking is an activity slow enough to stop and pause to check directions. Biking is fast and to do it safely requires both hands. Glass frees your hands up.
Getting a little heads-up display action letting you know your speed and your distance covered would be a great augmentation to the ride.
Helping you remember the important things
Reminders are helpful, but hardly the stuff of great narrative. Google shows setting a reminder to buy tickets to a show. Meh. I mean sure it's something you'd want to remember, but as a story there's little to connect with.
Apple's not all that much better, the girl who's running asks Siri to remind her to call Chris when she gets home. Her speed clearly makes it harder for her to type a reminder, and with Siri she can save one without breaking her stride, but it's so generic we don't really connect. Why? Because saving a reminder with your voice is technologically difficult, and doing it well has taken some serious engineering. but really it's about as exciting as watching someone write a list. The magical experience of reminders is when they help you remember the thing you'd have otherwise forgotten, and maybe picking something that would be a real shame to miss.
Walking up to your front door and getting a reminder to call dad and wish him a happy birthday? Now that's something we can all connect to and see the value.
Making location awareness magic
Next up Google takes us to Strand bookstore. Glass makes sure you know arrived by pushing the location to your eye.
It's this kind of demonstration that seems like a gratuitous use of technology. Isn't the big red signage enough of a confirmation that you've arrived?
Duplicating the busy information density we experience in an urban environment isn't an experience you'd really want to sign up for. If you wanted to go seriously visionary why not propose a not-too-distant future where all the signs and advertisements screaming for your attention have been removed. The beauty and dignity of architecture is preserved as the signage is moved into our smart devices like Glass. Then pushing the bookstore name to me becomes helpful.
So next there's an opportunity to interact with with this guy.
But you don't take it. You ask your Glass eyepiece instead, it gives you directions for walking 20 feet. There's a rosy picture of the future. No more interactions with strangers, no basic self sufficiency.
There's a few ways Google could have taken this to make it more compelling.
Make the store unbelievably busy so that it would be a long wait till you could ask someone for the location of the music section, at least then you're not being anti-social you're just resourceful. But still, bookstores have some of the most dependable signage, finding the right section isn't really all that hard.
What if instead, you could walk into the supermarket and as you walk the isles Glass uses your location and shopping list to simply pop-up items for you to grab from the shelf? Now you're doing something you can't really do today. It's helpful, and kind of cool. There's no way you could ask the cashier to show you where all the items on your shopping list are located. With Glass shopping list assistance you're able to walk into a store you've never visited, grab everything on your shopping list which happens to have been updated by your partner just a moment ago, and leave, sure that you've got everything you need.
Continuing in the bookstore Google shows you checking to see if your friend has arrived at the bookstore yet. No you don't just walk out to the street or wait for him to come grab you, you use Glass to seek his location and it tells you he's half a block away.
Creepyness aside, it's not saving you from a lot of work or discomfort. You could have just stepped out to wait for your pal on the street. Just cause you can do it doesn't mean it's inspiring or visionary. Location awareness of other people is a hard thing to do right. Even with friends there's lots of privacy issues, and anyone who's seriously tried to make apps that leverage the power of tracking has ended up with low adoption or swift negative reactions.
Moving on you follow your buddy to a nearby coffee truck. Your first instinct is to check in. Seriously? OK, maybe Google needed to show it to compete with Foursquare, but come on, this isn't particularly engaging for us viewers.
Also, one day in the future you'll still need to manually check in? If checking in is your thing, can't it just be something background and automatic, or at least less of a process? In the Glass vision it would be the same amount of work to do it with your phone.
Improving connections
So you get a cup of joe and then part ways with Paul.
Sure there's a cut or two to edit out the stuff that's not showing off Glass, but this makes the story mostly about you using your friend Paul to find a good cup of coffee which is something you could have just messaged him about. The heavy focus on showing off the technology has robbed the story of its humanity. First you didn't chat with the bookstore clerk, then you only meet up with a pal to get insider info. You seem like a cold jerk.
Apple takes a totally different approach to telling the story with Facetime. The phone is used to bridge the gap, to overcome the barriers of physical space.
The phone frames the entire interaction but instead of getting in the way it falls to the background. You quickly find yourself transported into a deeply intimate moment, the story connects instantly, and you empathize with the people and appreciate how the technology makes this kind of emotional connection possible. The people here clearly care for one another and value spending this moment together.
After parting ways you come across a cool piece of street art. You want to share it and in a second can capture the image and upload it.
The process is simple, simpler and easier than pulling out a camera. It's effortless and really shows a sweet way to capture images. Here again the magic of the tech is clear, but the story fails. Street art is hip, but people are what matters, humans are innately drawn to faces.
What about grabbing a few photos of your buddy while hanging out?
And how cool would it be if it auto recognized your friend and added the pictures to his image stream too?
The last scene is easily the most enchanting. It feels a bit contrived, but we're willing to overlook it because it actually shows how this technology might bring us closer together.
It's one way video chat at first, and because there's no camera looking at your face your friend can't see you. What's the next best thing? Sharing your view.
It's a delightful ending for an otherwise uninspiring story. But it didn't need to be that way. When we tell stories, especially around a future shaped by new technology it's important to keep the focus on people. Our gadgets and tools aren't the point, they are means, not the ends. Every twist and turn in the story should help us see a world that is made better, not just different. When you present a vision, strive to deliver a story with deep emotional resonance. We don't need the technology to be perfect, or the applications mindblowing, but we do need to see through it to the deeper more essential need, that is our desire to be connected, to have meaning and share life with one another.
Delivering enchanting experiences
A final thought. An Apple commercial for Siri shows a girl on a roadtrip gazing up into the night sky and wondering what the Orion constellation looks like.
Siri delivers a nifty image.
Google, Glass was made to best this! Looking into bright glowing phone to try to match it against the night sky would be a terrible experience.
With Glass you simply look skyward. Glass can magically connect the stars for you.
"Build a design that empowers ordinary people to do the extraordinary.""Learn better ways to promote design concepts to partners.""Challenge my process and how I work." "Nurture my creative side." "Learn techniques to better understand end-users." "Build friendships and connections.""Learn ways to collaborate with coworkers." "Practice, practice, practice."
These are just a few of the reasons that 26 designers, engineers, and product managers joined forces in Columbus, Ohio last week for our inaugural UX Bootcamp competition. Their mission was to learn user experience design and use their new skills for social good. Over four intensely-packed days, they crammed their brains with Cooper's design methodology, broke into three self-selected teams, and put those learnings into practice to solve a real-world challenge for the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus. Each team pitched a concept for a mobile application that would empower and inspire members of ClubRED (a young professional's volunteer group within the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus). Cooper donated $1000 to the nonprofit in the name of the winning team, ClubRED Connect.
The winning team (ClubRED Connect), our friends from the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus, and one oversized check.
Inside UX Bootcamp
It's called bootcamp for a reason. We asked our students to perform within a tight timeline, and they took on our challenge like champs. We were mighty impressed when teams showed up an hour before the workshop one morning to get a head start on their designs (can you say, "extra credit?"). Although it was an intensive course, the teams kept great attitudes throughout. In fact, at one point, all the groups decided to set aside competition to work together to gather and share research data, knowing everyone's work would be better as a result. And they bravely stood up in front of a panel of tough, Dancing-with-the-Stars-esque judges to pitch their concepts at the end of the four days. We heard things like, "My brain muscle got quite a workout!", "You took me on a scary journey, but I came out smiling," and "The transformation was unanimous."
The judges scored teams in four categories: how well their concept addressed user and business needs; perceived impact; "wow" factor; and presentation skills. (Photo: Paul J Hart)
UX Bootcamp In Pictures
Get a taste of what it was like to be immersed in our crazy UX Bootcamp world by checking our our photo set on Flickr, or this nifty video montage:
The Final Pitches: What Teams Designed In Four Jam-Packed Days
Winning Team: ClubRED Connect
Concept:
ClubRED Connect gives volunteers the ability to turn existing social experiences into fundraising micro-events for the American Red Cross...with very little effort. Here's how it works: designate a location for friends to gather (Let's meet for happy hour!), take photos of interesting moments, share them with your friends via the app, and make a correlated donation to the nonprofit on the spot. Your friends are challenged to one-up your donation by sharing a "Red Cross Moment" of their own and making a contribution themselves. In this way, your small contribution is amplified by your friends, your friends' friends and more.
I+CBUS removes barriers to volunteerism by offering lightweight ways to get involved in your local Red Cross chapter. Participation can be as simple as pushing a button to donate, scheduling a time to donate blood, pass crisis information on to your social network, sign up to attend social events, or learn about other simple ways you can pitch in. The tool gives the American Red Cross an easy way to push needs, alerts and calls-to-action to the public, while giving volunteers a simple way to amplify their participation and have greater impact.
Snapshots of the design process:
Brainstorming (Photo: Paul J Hart)
Branding explorations
Concept illustrations (alert and user flow)
Team: Save the Day
Concept:
Recognizing that we are all motivated differently, the Save the Day app gives people the ability to help at times of crisis in a way that makes sense for their lifestyle, personality, and skills. Some people prefer to assist at the scene with blankets and food. Others feel most effective and valuable by rallying their friends to fundraise. Some are best at getting the word out to their networks. The Save the Day app maximizes participation by acknowledging that it takes all types of contributions to get through crisis, and lets individuals respond to events in their way.
Snapshots of the design process:
Brainstorming session (Photo: Paul J Hart)
Scenario exploration and app design
What's Next for UX Bootcamp
Creating a space for so many diverse, talented people to engage with one another, learn new skills, and apply them to a meaningful challenge was incredibly gratifying. As you can imagine, it just fueled our already passionate-desire to take the bootcamp to other places. We're solidifying the spot and nonprofit partner for the next UX Bootcamp adventure - stay tuned! (If you want to be notified directly of where we'll set up shop next, shoot us an email at CooperU@Cooper.com.
A special thanks to Kendra Shimmell for envisioning the UX Bootcamp and leading the curriculum development effort. We also want to acknowledge Constanza Miranda and Teresa Brazen for bringing their unique content ideas to the coursework. Kendra did a stellar job leading the workshop, with the support of co-instructors Teresa Brazen and Brian Stone. A special thanks to Brian for connecting us with our fantastic, engaged nonprofit partner. Speaking of which, we appreciate all the support the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus provided throughout, like having staff onsite throughout for questions and critique, and bringing in ClubRED volunteers for research interviews. And, last but not least, thanks to Sparkspace for providing a truly inspiring place to learn, teach, and play.
Where do you start when you're approaching a complex software design problem? If you work on a large development team, you know that software engineers and UX designers will often approach the same design problem from radically different perspectives. The term "software design" itself can mean very different things to software architects, system programmers, and user experience designers. Software engineers typically focus on the architectural patterns and programmatic algorithms required to get the system working, while UX designers often start from the goals and needs of the users.
In the spring of 2009, I participated in a research study that looked at the ways in which professional software designers approach complex design problems. The research study, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, was led by researchers from the Department of Infomatics at the University of California, Irvine. The researchers traveled to multiple software companies, trying to better understand how professional software designers collaborate on complex problems. At each company, they asked to observe two software designers in a design session. At my company, AmberPoint, where I worked at the time as an interaction designer, I was paired with my colleague Ania Dilmaghani, the programming lead of the UI development team. In a conference room with a whiteboard, the researchers set up a video camera, and handed us a design prompt describing the requirements for a traffic control simulation system for undergraduate civil engineering students. We were allotted two hours to design both the user interaction and the code structure for the system.
Jim Dibble and Ania Dilmaghani at the whiteboard in their research design session
The World Series is barely over, which means most of my thoughts this time of year get colored by baseball. Events in game five got me thinking about design exploration, of all things. I'll try not stretch the metaphor too much.
I work throughout the year with product managers, technologists, and executives at companies ranging from small startups to Fortune 100 megaliths. Many of these companies have a vision for creating a game-changing product within their industry, “the iPhone of the xyz market.” They mean it, too. But as conversations progress and a project plan begins to take shape, many of the project owners start piling on technology constraints before any design work has even begun.
“We need to use these off-the-shelf components.”
“Don't explore any solutions that won't let us use our current technology platform.”
“Actually, what we really need is just a facelift of the presentation layer.”
Not exactly the words I imagine Steve Jobs used to drive the creation of the iPod and iPhone.
Sometimes this slow degradation of vision is a result of poor or conflicting communication...which brings me back to last night's baseball game. St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, already a two-time World Series winner and owner of the most wins by an active manager, had a vision for which pitchers he wanted to be warmed up in the late innings of a tight ballgame. He called the bullpen coach (using a land-line telephone in the dugout), and, amazingly, not once but twice, the bullpen coach misheard LaRussa's instructions and warmed up the wrong pitcher.
I don't know if that's happened before in a World Series game, but in the corporate world, we see the wrong product get sent into the game all the time. Executives have a vision for the future, but don't clearly articulate it to the product owners (other than specifying a deadline which is often arbitrary and not tied to actual work milestones), so what gets built isn't visionary at all but driven by the calendar...which means introducing lots of constraints from the beginning. The result may be an incrementally better product, but not a game changer.
We like the saying “reality bats last,” one of Alan Cooper's original design principles. For us that means for any design we create to actually be a solution, it needs to be buildable by our client. It has to live within their unique technology, price, deadline, and resource constraints. However, we have been pushing more and more for the opportunity with our clients to do at least some unfettered, unconstrained design exploration on every project, even ones that have a narrow scope. We don't completely ignore constraints (especially things like regulations which are out of our client's control), and we won't explore designs that rely on telekinesis or nuclear fission, of course. That said, we will definitely push the envelope on what's possible—for a few days or even up to a week—so we can begin with the mindset of the absolute best experience for the user. Over the course of the project we'll push to achieve as much of this game-changing vision as we can.
Allow some your design team to let their imaginations run wild before they get saddled with constraints. (photo by Peter Duyan)
Typically, the output of this design exploration is a collection of hand-drawn sketches that target key plot points in the most important scenarios, and signature interactions (parts of the system fundamental to the experience). The sketches often explore a range of ideas, some that can be implemented within all known constraints, but also others which may bend (or break) constraints. After that, it's really a business decision our clients need to make about how to proceed. Sometimes it makes sense to restructure deadlines, add resource, buy a technology, or abandon a legacy infrastructure to get that “killer app.” Other times it doesn't make sense...but as designers it's our job to imagine the future and enable business decision makers to make the most informed decision they can.
Which brings me back to baseball. You are the manager of your company: what's your strategy? Reality is a heavy hitter, but it shouldn't bat in every slot in your lineup. Can you really afford to play it safe every game? Even if your competition is miles behind, spending time to imagine a better future for your product will position your company to more nimbly take your offering to the next level when constraints go away.
And while you are at it, I would recommend upgrading those bullpen phones.
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."
Credits: Jim Dibble, Golden Krishna, Martina Maleike, Doug LeMoine, Nick Myers
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:
Like it or not, the digital world has changed at a wicked pace, and more and more interactions between companies and their customers now happen via an interface. Software serves us everywhere, and the user experience now shapes these interactions every day. At the center of all this change sits the brand. TV and print advertising now regularly feature digital experiences from the likes of Apple, Google, Toyota, GE, and Amazon. The visual interface has become the new face of your brand. This means that the role of Chief Marketing Officers (CMOs) is now harder, and their influence must reach further into the organization than ever before.
More customer interactions are now digital, and the brand sits at the center
Expectations are now much higher. My wife, for example, has lost all patience with technology. She hates how TiVo doesn't record her programs on time; her Dell laptop seems to break frequently; her iPhone is too slow. It's not just my wife, though. I see it frequently in healthcare and financial services. Even employees in larger enterprises have lost patience and expect better.
At Cooper, I see clients struggle with traditional marketing practices to deliver software that lacks the deeper level of engagement that customers are looking for. Some of our clients have changed their approach to marketing and product design and are reaping the rewards with a place on Forbes' Most Innovative Companies list.
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!
Here at Cooper, we find that looking at the world from the perspective of people and their goals causes us to notice a lot of bad interactions in our daily lives. We can’t help but pick up a whiteboard marker to scribble out a better idea. We put together "The Drawing Board", a series of narrated sideshows, to showcase some of this thinking.
Almost everyone enjoys a great meal out with friends, but splitting the bill can be unnecessarily complicated. In this Drawing Board, Cooper designers turn their attentions to the way groups of people pay the check while dining out.
The winning team (ClubRED Connect), our friends from the American Red Cross of Greater Columbus, and one oversized check.
