A Conversation with Alan Cooper: The Origin of Interaction Design

In the world of user-centered design thinking, Alan Cooper is responsible for many of the tenets used in interaction design practice today. Most notably, he introduced the use of personas to distill and make relevant information about a system´s users, information we subsequently use to drive interaction design. In this article, User Centric editor Jeff Patton interviews Alan Cooper. They discuss the birth of modern microcomputer software and the arrival of the interaction design discipline.