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.

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!

When the New York Times activated its highly anticipated metering system this week, there was no shortage of opinions on the matter. As opinionated people, the designers here at Cooper started to feel a little left out, so we put our thoughts together on the user experience of the new service. Enjoy, and chime in with your own thoughts and opinions below.

Suzy Thompson

Overall, I think they've done several things right, like the fact that home subscribers (even those like me who now only get the Sunday edition) get an all-access pass to the online content. Also, they're not throwing up a paywall over all of their content — folks can access up to a certain amount of content a month before you're asked to become an online subscriber. And they've thought about how to ensure that folks can read articles that someone has shared via email, FB, etc. We'll see how it goes, but I think that the iTunes store has pretty effectively proven that if you make it easy to do so and provide demonstrable value, people are more than happy to pay - even for something they could get for free elsewhere.

I do worry, though. Because the NYTimes isn't just a business. Their journalism is a public service that everyone benefits from. And unlike a burger or a pair of jeans, where some folks are willing and able to pay for higher quality and some aren't, and the provider can scale back production to match demand, journalism can't be scaled back and still maintain its quality. The fact that I view it as a public service is part of why it's so important to me to contribute financially — just like giving $$ to PBS. Sure, there are some who use it and don't pay for it, and I probably don't use it enough to justify what I pay for it, but I want it to be there and available to everyone. That, above all else, is what worries me about the paid subscription model. Because the prospect of a world in which only Fox News or USA Today can profitably succeed in the news business terrifies me.

Jim Dibble

I understand why the NYTimes is putting this policy into place. They are my go-to place for US and international reporting. We only recently canceled our NYTimes paper delivery — since I no longer work in Pleasanton, I don't have the long BART commute to read the paper. (Thank you, Cooper!). And it just felt like a waste of resources (trees, ink, and gasoline) to deliver a paper that we typically recycled without reading.

However, I'm utterly confused why readers have to pay more to view content on multiple platforms. In the morning and on BART, I read the NYTimes on my iPhone. At work and at home at night, I read the paper on my laptop. I'm not sure why I need to pay twice as much just because I'm using two platforms. I'm surprised that they didn't follow the kindle sales model, where you purchase a book and own it in the cloud, regardless of which platform you use to access it.

It would be great if they provided a way to ask for articles of interest to you. For example, if I'm interested in reporting on the Middle East, it would be great to be able to have a special category for those articles. It would also be great to have articles that assume that I'm well-versed in a particular region. For example, if I'm familiar with what has already happened in Libya, many of the new articles will review the recent history of what has occurred, so that I have to wade through information that I already know, in order to find out about the most recent developments.

Peter Duyan

So, after reading the “letter to readers” and looking at the subscription breakdown, I feel a little deflated. Initially, I was actually excited to pay the NYTimes for their digital media, and to help support them as they find a way to continue doing what they do best. However, I don’t like their subscription models at all for a very specific reason. I only read (almost only) the NYTimes on my smartphone, and I feel like I should have the option to pay for mobile-only content. If and when I buy an iPad, I’m pretty sure I would be interested in smartphone and tablet use, but still have little or no interest in the “online” content. Basically, I want to be a mobile-only user and that option isn’t open. From my perspective, they are missing the point if they don’t let their users pay for content on whatever device they choose.

Doug LeMoine

I think journalists should get paid, and I think publishers should figure out a way to make digital journalism pay. I don’t understand people who talk about metering like it’s some violation of their civil rights, and yet I’m also a nerd, so I must admit that I did Google “nytimes metering hack” yesterday (out of curiosity, really), and I found some very interesting CSS (that I did not install).

Still, I do have a problem with the metering service as the NYTimes has implemented it: It seems both too complicated and too stupid at the same time. Why are there so many different options? Why are there different prices for iPads and iPhones? Why is the digital thrown in for free with print? Why is the NYTimes.com version a required baseline for all plans? And why the heck is the Dealbook blog exempted from metering? The investment bankers have been bailed out by the middle class yet again, it seems.

I would bet that these “tiers,” if you can call them tiers, were an effort to try to create “choices.” But the way they’re broken out makes me think that they’re simply the configurations of devices and content that were easier to track on the back end. I would argue that it gives the impression of "choice," without really making sense as a set of choices.

I'll go one step easier with a user-friendly model: How about one price for print + digital, and another for just digital? And how about charging the investment bankers double for Dealbook? That would help the NYTimes recover some of the $40M they supposedly spent installing the metering system.

Golden Krishna

Adding a paywall is like moving newspapers from the online street corner to the concert hall. Journalists shift from being free street entertainment to performers in a luxury experience that viewers will likely expect to work smoothly and look beautiful. I fear that paywalls will shut the doors on the common, limit access to the kind of information that should be freely available to all, but I am eager to see the good design that results as papers compete for online eyeballs that are willing to pay for their services.

The recently launched MSNBC redesign really grabbed our attention yesterday. While we don't universally love everything about it, we found ourselves playing around with it a bit longer than we would have expected to. Here's a sampling of some of the comments heard around the studio.

Doug LeMoine:
This is a pretty impressive effort toward designing an interaction framework for a massive media conglomerate with a dozen sub-brands, content licensing deals with who knows how many third-parties, and an absolute clustercuss of a styleguide. I’d say that the designers performed capably under this duress, delivering strong mechanisms for staying upright and pointed downhill amidst the avalanche. I like the nifty “upscroll” that reveals an info-rich header (but crikey this particular header has a heckuva lot going on). The “annotated scrollbar” holds the experience together, providing a modicum of navigational predictability across the various content sets. I have a variety of visual critiques, large and small, but overall I’ll high-five MSNBC for not being afraid to spook loyal readers with new ways of interacting with content.

Imon Deshmukh:
Of course it feels strange at first, and I’m not sure if I would have noticed the option to scroll up to uncover content, had nobody mentioned it. My reaction is similar to how I felt when I first saw the new Cooper site [Editors' note: stay tuned for this!]: I’m not sure if it’ll really work, but it’s something I haven’t seen before and it feels more than an attempt to be different just for the sake of it. Even if it doesn’t work out, trying something new and different when everyone is watching is something I can appreciate and admire.

Tim McCoy:
Kudos to MSNBC for abandoning the cluttered, segmented, ad-saturated layouts typical of news websites for a truly content-forward experience. It’s a lot of change to encounter all at once, so the experience is a bit foreign, but I think that will pass with time as readers learn new idioms and the design adjusts to the strains of use. It is an odd hybrid of the information density of a sovereign desktop/iPad app and the long-page scrolling breadth of a web page. And it speaks volumes about how interconnected our content has become that the editors expect to provide every story with some combination of images, videos, interactives, and related articles.

Dave Cronin:
I really appreciate the fact that the MSNBC team tried some daring stuff with their redesign. As with any such effort, some of these innovations will probably turn out to not-so-good, others will turn out to need some tweaking, and if we’re lucky a couple of these ideas will help us all move forward with how we deal with all kinds of information coming from every different direction. I’m really digging the use of the upscroll to access headlines (in a similar vein to where search lives on the iPhone), and I like how far the vertical scroll has been pushed even further as a primary navigation element, as well as the nifty little jump buttons along the scrollbar. The site is certainly not perfect, though. While I can tell there is an underlying grid, it could certainly be stronger—it looks like every vertical layer is on a different horizontal rhythm. And while I know it’s tough to do anything graceful with big display ads, these feel particularly clunky, especially the way they stick with you as you scroll, breaking the vertical orientation of the page a bit.