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.

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

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.

Credits: Greg Schuler, Peter Duyan , Bo Ah Kwon , Suzy Thompson and Chris Noessel.

Related Reading

• Another design for social awkwardness The Drawing Board: Taking The Call
• More service design Economizer
• Another drawing board The Drawing Board: Feeding The Cats

Imagine the places you will go. The richness of your new experience, when the previously opaque meaning of foreign signs is now clear. You are no longer forced to wander the streets, wondering what kinds of shops you are passing. You can understand signs regarding public transportation, tourism and safety. You sit down at a restaurant and with the help of Word Lens you can read the menu. The waiter approaches and quickly utters something, and waits attentively for your response. You glance at your iPhone... nothing. You flash a pained smile back, mutely trying to communicate you don’t understand. Word Lens is lame because it’s only half of the solution. You’re dumb because you can’t speak and really communicate.

Don’t get me wrong, Word Lens is a great step forward. It will help with some of the anxieties of travel, in particular in using and navigating complex transportation systems. These kinds of tasks don’t really require two-way communication. Simply reading and understanding your options is a major win.

Trying to buy tickets for the Tokyo subway, would have been nice to have Word Lens.

But, you don’t need to read to understand what a particular storefront offers. You just look at what’s on the shelves.

Hong Kong street scene, no translation needed for understanding

You don’t really need translation help for safety related issues. These were solved a long time ago with universal picture language.

Where safety is concerned pictures have long sufficed, Parisian "walk" pictograph

The hardest part of travel isn’t understanding, it is being understood: Asking for directions, ordering food, asking for a receipt. It’s frustrating to struggle at expressing your needs.

Word Lens leaves you with a little more input, but a frustrating lack of output. Now you may understand, but you still can’t say a damn thing.

The speed and accuracy of the underlying technology is a breakthrough. The transparency and dead-simplicity of the interface is exactly how visual hand-held translator should work. As many people have commented Word Lens delivers on the promise of augmented reality. This technology shows great potential and will most certainly be adapted and built upon.

But, until we get a voice, a way to communicate back, Word Lens is little more than an amazing party trick.

Typing into Google translate lacks the elegance, speed and simplicity of the Word Lens interface, but it does get you to "speak up" for yourself. How could Word Lens improve upon this?

A couple of girls use Google Translate to order Indian food

Supporting people's usage contexts has always been an important component to good interaction design. With mobile devices, the diversity of these contexts has gone up, and thankfully many applications have become more responsive to changes in context. It turns out though, that all of this responsiveness has created a big gaping need for better capabilities for easily returning to previous contexts. I think I've got an idea that would help.

Imagine Carl, an iPhone owner. As someone who is directionally challenged he relies on his phone for directions to almost anywhere. In the morning he accepts an invite to dinner across the bay and uses his phone to map the route and figure out how much travel time to plan. During lunch he opens the Map application to find a local electronics store. If he wants to use the route to dinner this evening has two options. Abandon the route, do his search and later reenter the addresses for directions, or save the origin and destination addresses as bookmarks to use later.

He has also figured out that for short trips he can just take a screen shot, so long as the directions fit on one page. This allows him to save many routes that he uses on a regular basis, though he hates that he can't zoom in or scroll around, and they don't show live traffic. He wishes that screenshots would actually be more like saved states of an application, that when he opened them would allow him to interact in the usual way.

He'd like to save states for more than just maps. He gets travel itineraries emails that he needs to reference repeatedly over a week long trip. He does the screenshot trick when he can, but sometimes they are long and he can't screencap-scroll. If he could save the email screen state he could just return to that important email without scrolling or searching though his inbox.

He gets mobile boarding passes as links that open in Safari. The page tries to refresh when he opens the link from his email. If he could just save the screen state in Safari it wouldn't need to refresh the page, and he could scroll down to locate his seat number.

With the recent introduction of multitasking on the iPhone, there is the possibility of saving an app in an open state. Why not extend this functionality to allow for saving multiple states of an open app? Apple could provide an application which works similar to how the photo app works with screenshots. But instead of static images of the screen the application would allow Carl to open the saved state of the application. Instead of a static screen, the information could be manipulated as usual (scrolling, zooming, turing on and off options).

Simple things like scrolling (which is not available on screen shots) would make it easy to save and retrieve mobile boarding passes. Saved states of the map application would maintain the route and allow for live traffic updates. It would be easy to retrive a specific email, or return to a web page without refreshing the data. For Carl the best part would be that he can save many different states, so he can save every route, and return to many different emails.

The application could replace the screenshot function. When Carl wanted to grab a screen state he would press the "Home" button at the same time as the "Sleep" button. Visual and auditory feedback would confirm the action was successful. To return to the saved state Carl would simply open the Saved States application. He is greeted with a simple interface; icons of the saved state of the screen are displayed in a time sorted matrix across the screen, he can scroll down, and view older state captures. Since he captured the states he has some visual memory of the screen and icon helps him distinguish between different captures. The sorting by time serves as a secondary way for him identify captured states. Once the desired state is located Carl touches the icon to relaunch the application into the saved state. Once open he can manipulate the application like normal.

With Saved States Carl can quickly capture a screen he will want to return to. When he revisits the saved screen state he has all the functionality he expects, but starts off with the application loaded with the data he wants, rather than starting out from the beginning every time.

Everyone knows that the iPhone is pretty great. The vast majority of my clients offer it up as their first example when I ask them, "What products on the market that represent the kind of experience you want to deliver?"

I mostly really like mine. But I've got to say there are a couple things about it that really bug me. Right up there after the fact there's no one-gesture way of switching between different email inboxes is the way the little red notifications circles work with the phone.

It's a bit confusing, plus requires unnecessary work

Whenever someone calls me, I don't answer, and the caller leaves a voicemail, a "2" is displayed in the little red circle over the Phone icon on the Home screen like this:

Maybe I'm kind of a simpleton, but doesn't that kind of make it seem like I've missed two calls? Or that I've got two voicemails?

And that isn't the worst of it. As confusing as that is, after using it for a while, I now mostly remember how it works (and even if I don't, it doesn't really cause me any real inconvenience.)

The really irritating part is when I go to the phone application, there are now two new red dots — one over Recent and one over Voicemail, like this:

Every single time, after I go listen to the voicemail, I have to click over to Recent to make that red dot with the number in it go away. Of course I know I missed the call, I've already listened to the voicemail. Why do I have to actively get rid of this extra dot?

You might be thinking "Relax, idiot. This isn't Ms. Pac Man. You don't have eat all the red dots." But I kind of do, don't I? Otherwise, the red dot starts to become useless. This might be fine with all your customers who bought an iPhone to replace their Razr, and those who don't have expectations of their phone as a productivity tool. But my mobile is actually a pretty important part of the way I manage my work and more importantly, my attention.

What if we changed things around just a bit?

The easiest fix is to just change the logic so that for any missed call, you only display one circle. If they leave a message, it's over Voicemail; if they don't, it's over Recent. (Which works for the transition between when it's just a missed call, and when they've left a message. The number just switches from Recent to Voicemail when a message is left.)

But it still kind of bugs me that a given phone call can be represented in two different places. It seems a lot simpler to have a single list of calls to scan through when I pick up my phone after a meeting. Maybe it could look something like this:

It would work like a combination of Recent and Voicemail...

When we saw the topic of this year's I.D. Magazine Annual Design Review concept category, we thought it would be fun to put together an entry. As frequent travelers, we were particularly inspired by the brief: design a graphic, object, or environment that would improve the experience of air travel.

We thought our approach was a good mix of practicality and inspiration; a premium loyalty service enabled by helpful bits of technology that would ease the pain and smooth the turbulence of business travel. Did we expect to win? Absolutely. Even though the judges didn’t share our enthusiasm, we’re happy with what we came up with, and we wanted to share it with you.

We present Stratus Air.

(To view at full screen HD, click the little icon with 4 diagonal arrows next to the Vimeo logo.)

I'm a Facebook user. I'm also an iPhone user. I'm also a bit lazy about updates. So having the Facebook app on the iPhone seems like a good idea. But there's one interface element in the application that frustrates me and makes me prone to not want to use it at all.

If you use your iPhone to email, you're used to sending it using the SEND control in the upper right hand corner of a message. It's a good place to be for right-handed people, as it's easy for your right thumb to jump right there. I send emails all the time from my phone, so I'm really used to this behavior.

There comes a time in any parent’s life when she has the face the inevitable: Her child’s first cell phone. That time has come at last for me, and I confess I have been dreading it. What if she buys 50 ring tones? What if she calls China? What if she sends a prank photo to a friend and ends up going to jail and having to register as a sex offender for life? (That’s right, I’m a parent: I can go from “my kid might overspend my money” to “my kid might go to jail” in ten seconds flat.)

It was with utter delight, therefore, that I stumbled across kajeet, a cell phone service for ‘tweens and their parents. What sets kajeet apart is not their phones (they don’t make any), or their network (they’re essentially a Sprint reseller), but the service. With kajeet, parents can fine-tune what their kids can and can’t do, and who pays for what. You can set up separate wallets for the parents and the kid, such that the parents can pay for phone calls to Mom and Dad, but the kid has to pay for calls to friends or goodies like ringtones and wallpaper. You can set up times of day for certain activities, like only emergency phone calls during school hours. You can even track the location of your kid’s phone using its built-in GPS and online tracking tools.

When I discovered kajeet, I was in parental heaven. The service was so exquisitely tuned to my needs that I started to get professionally curious. What was the process that had led to this product?

The kajeet origin story goes something like this: Three dads saw a need, and created a company. Now, that’s a great start, but there had to be more to that story. They must have done their homework. So to learn more I spoke with kajeet’s SVP of Corporate and Business Development, Carol Politi.