Originally published on Diginomica
Wipro’s Designit CEO Mikal Hallstrup tells me about acquiring the consulting firm of Visual Basic creator Alan Cooper, just as AI begins to shake up UX.
Designit, the global design consultancy acquired two years ago by Wipro, has just gained a San Francisco presence with the acquisition of Cooper, a small but influential software design and strategy consultancy. Co-founder Alan Cooper created the visual programming languagethat was the foundation of Microsoft’s influential Visual Basic software development tool, including the VBX interface for adding third-party components.
He became an early proponent of user-centric software design and pioneered the use of personas to represent the goals, motivations, and behaviors of a target user base. Founded 25 years ago to serve a mainly Silicon Valley client base, the Cooper consultancy specializes in user experience and interaction design and also provides professional training for UX designers.
Focus on user experience
I sat down with Designit CEO Mikal Hallstrup in San Francisco on Friday to find out more about the acquisition and discuss trends in user experience, especially the emergence of conversational computing, fueled by recent advances in AI. The Cooper team brings a lot of new skills, within a shared focus on user experience, he says.
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