Alan Cooper

Alan Cooper (born June 3, 1952) is an American software designer and programmer.

Widely recognized as the "Father of Visual Basic", Cooper is also known for his books About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design and The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High-Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity.

As founder of Cooper, a leading interaction design consultancy, he created the Goal-Directed design methodology and pioneered the use of personas as practical interaction design tools to create high-tech products.

In 1975, soon after he left college and as the first microcomputers became available, Alan Cooper founded his first company, Structured Systems Group (SSG), in Oakland, California, which became one of the first microcomputer software companies.

SSG's software accounting product, General Ledger, was sold through ads in popular magazines such as Byte and Interface Age.

This software was, according to the historical account in Fire in the Valley (by Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine), “probably the first serious business software for microcomputers.

” It was both the start of Cooper's career as a software author and the beginning of the microcomputer software business.

Ultimately, Cooper developed a dozen original products at Structured Systems Group before he sold his interest in the company in 1980.

Early on, Cooper worked with Gordon Eubanks to develop, debug, document, and publish his business programming language, CBASIC, an early competitor to Bill Gates' and Paul Allen's Microsoft BASIC.

Eubanks wrote CBASIC’s precursor, BASIC-E as a student project while at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California with professor Gary Kildall.

When Eubanks left the Navy, he joined Kildall’s successful operating system company, Digital Research, Inc., in Monterey.

Soon thereafter, Eubanks and Kildall invited Cooper to join them at Digital Research as one of four founders of their research and development department.

After two-years at DRI, Cooper departed to develop desktop application software by himself.

During the 1980s, Alan Cooper authored several business applications including Microphone II for Windows and an early, critical-path project management program called SuperProject.

Cooper sold SuperProject to Computer Associates in 1984, where it achieved success in the business-to-business marketplace.

In 1988, Alan Cooper created a visual programming language (code-named “Ruby”) that allowed Windows users to build “Finder”-like shells.

He called it “a shell construction set." After he demonstrated Ruby to Bill Gates, Microsoft purchased it. At the time, Gates commented that the innovation would have a “profound effect” on their entire product line. Microsoft initially decided not to release the product as a shell for users, but rather to transform it into a professional development tool for their QuickBASIC programming language called Visual Basic, which was widely used for business application development for Windows computers.

Cooper's dynamically installable control facility, which became famous as the “VBX” interface, was a well-known component of "Ruby".

This innovation allowed any 3rd party developer to write a widget (control) as a DLL, put it in the Visual Basic directory, and Visual Basic would find it, communicate with it, and present it to the user as a seamless part of the program.

The widget would appear in the tool palette and appropriate menus, and users could incorporate it into their Visual Basic applications.

The invention of the “VBX” interface created an entire new marketplace for vendors of these “dynamically installable controls.” As a result of Cooper's work, many new software companies were able to deliver Windows software to market in the 1990s.

The first book ever written about Visual Basic, The Waite Group’s Visual Basic How-To by Mitchell Waite, is dedicated to Alan Cooper.

In his dedication, the author calls Cooper the “Father of Visual Basic.” This nickname has often served as Cooper's one-line resume.

In 1992, in response to a rapidly consolidating software industry, Cooper began consulting with other companies, helping them design their applications to be more user friendly.

Within a few years, Alan Cooper had begun to articulate some of his basic design principles.

With his clients, he championed a design methodology that puts the users’ needs first.

Cooper interviewed the users of his client's products and discovered the common threads that made these people happy.

Born of this practice was the use of personas as design tools.

Cooper preached his vision in two books.

His ideas helped to drive the user experience movement and define the craft that would come to be called “interaction design.”

In 1994, Bill Gates presented Cooper with the first Windows Pioneer Award for his contributions to the software industry.

During the presentation, Gates took particular note of Cooper's innovative work creating the VBX interface.

Cooper's best-selling first book, About Face: The Essentials of User Interface Design, was first published in 1995.

In it, Cooper introduces a comprehensive set of practical design principles, essentially a taxonomy for software design.

In 1998, the SVForum honored Cooper with its Visionary Award.

Early in his career, Cooper began to critically consider the accepted approach to software construction.

As he reports in his first book, he believed something important was missing—software authors were not asking, “How do users interact with this?” Cooper's early insights drove him to create a design process, focused not on what could be coded but on what could be designed to meet users’ needs.

On April 28, 2017, Alan was inducted into the Computer History Museum's Hall of Fellows "for his invention of the visual development environment in Visual BASIC, and for his pioneering work in establishing the field of interaction design and its fundamental tools."

Alan Cooper grew up in Marin County, California, United States, where he attended the College of Marin, studying architecture.

He learned programming and took on contract programming jobs to pay for college.