Alan Cooper interviewed about Designers and Programmers

Alan Cooper was interviewed at Agile2008 where he, as a fomer programmer and a founding father of the interaction design profession, was a a speaker. In the video he speaks about how Agile allows Interaction Designers to step into the teams and take ownership of the behavior of the products being built. This time as a part of the team instead of as a “hostile” team outside of the developers telling the developers what to do.

He speaks about the different competences brought into the process by interaction designers:

The same way Agile programmers want to know what done looks like, interaction designers want to know what success looks like. And those two work together to create a successful product and that is the missing piece.

According to him interaction designers and Agile programmers have a shared goal and it is more effective to work with developers directly instead of handing a design over to management:

So I very much see a shift from our design organization delivering solutions to management which are worshiped but not followed to feeding directly into the Agile cycle because the thing that motivates good designers is the same thing that motivates good programmers which is seeing their products get built and having them satisfy the users.