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“Define what the product will do before you design how the product will do it.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Usability’s strength is in identifying problems, while design’s strength is in identifying solutions.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Interaction design isn’t merely a matter of aesthetic choice; rather, it is based on an understanding of users and cognitive principles.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Computer literacy, however, is really a euphemism for forcing human beings to stretch their thinking to understand the inner workings of application logic, rather than having software-enabled products stretch to meet people’s usual ways of thinking.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Infinite scrolling should never be employed for interfaces in which users need to get to the end of the list quickly, or need to return to a particular list item after navigating elsewhere.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Public kiosks run an unfortunate risk of being a disease vector, so your first pass should try for noncontact inputs like voice, proximity switches, or non-contact gestural inputs. If”
― Alan Cooper, About Face: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Goals are not the same as tasks or activities. A goal is an expectation of an end condition,
whereas both activities and tasks are intermediate steps (at different levels of organization)
that help someone to reach a goal or set of goals.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Many developers and usability professionals still
approach interface design by asking what the tasks are. Although this may get the job
done, it won’t produce much more than an incremental improvement: It won’t provide
a solution that differentiates your product in the market, and very often it won’t really
satisfy the user.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“People don’t need to know all the details of how a complex mechanism actually works in order to use it, so they create a cognitive shorthand for explaining it. This explanation is powerful enough to cover their interactions with it but doesn’t necessarily reflect its actual inner mechanics.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design

“Interaction design is not guesswork.”
― Alan Cooper, About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design