| Developer ToolsAt the beginning of our work for Immersion, we interviewed a dozen web developers, and a few game developers who implemented their force-feedback technology. We researched their tools and workflows in order to understand how these developers decided to implement technologies, and what tools they used to implement them.
Immersion develops and licenses force-feedback technology. When they hired us, they asked us to come up with ideas for getting their technology more fully adopted by a new market segment, the web development community. Generating interaction ideas to drive new technologies into wider market spaces is a tall order, but it is something we often encounter at Cooper. In this case, Immersion sought to get beyond the cutting-edge gaming market that it already owned, and into more general consumer spaces where it could spawn the development of more and more products that supported it.
In a tactical sense, Immersion wanted to know how to spend their development budget. Should they keep developing one overarching application for web development, or should they build plug-ins for applications like Dreamweaver? Our research indicated that they needed to take a third path; they needed to serve developers with a tool that allowed them to easily access the cool aspects of force-feedback, but they did not need to replicate functionality that is already fully realized in Dreamweaver and other editing tools.
Every Cooper project is a collaborative effort. To learn more, about Cooper projects and design methodology, check out “How Cooper works.” On this particular project, I collaborated on the gathering, synthesizing, and writing of this research document with John Dunning, a Cooper colleague.
