Seeing other people
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives, but how much say will users have in what they do with social networking and what it looks like? This is the central question in an article by Jesse Ashlock…
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Experientia
IBM research on the use of social software in the workplace
Both Penny Edwards (Headshift) and Bill Ives (Fast Forward) report on recent IBM research on social software in the marketplace: To what extent does your company facilitate social networking between employees split by geographical or organisational distance, or with (existing…
Don’t trust anyone under 30?
I find articles with titles like this difficult to digest. What if you are under 30? And especially if the article is filled with banalities – partly put in the mouth of the “authority” of professor Mark Bauerlein –…
Book: Elsewhere, U.S.A.
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley Pantheon, Hardcover January 2009 Abstract Over the past three decades, our daily lives…
10 most common misconceptions about user experience design
Whitney Hess, an independent user experience designer, writer and consultant, asked some of the most influential and widely respected [USA] practitioners in UX (including Steve Baty, Mario Bourque, Dan Brown, Liz Danzico, Bill DeRouchey, Will Evans, Chris Fahey, Kaleem Khan,…
Smart homes haven’t caught on
New York Times technology reporter Steve Lohr reports on the “dream” of the smart home. “Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been…
Nokia’s IdeasProject
Nearly by accident I discovered Nokia’s recently launched IdeasProject, an effort “to surface Big Ideas about the future of communications — and to show the many ways that these ideas are connected”. It is definitely a site rich with content.…
On futures and design
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, has posted a thoughtful essay on his blog about how trends in computing and design might affect the way that futurists work: how they could be used to sharpen…
People-centred design in times of frugality
What are the profound socio-cultural changes currently taking place and are people-centred designers well equipped to help companies and institutions address this new context? The current economic recession is turning out to be very severe (The Guardian evokes the spectre…
Where to post?
Lately posting has become a lot more complicated. Putting People First (PPF) started out some years ago as a dumping ground for all kinds of articles and readings that I found interesting and worthwhile sharing. It gradually became a much…
M-banking and economic development
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India and Camilo Andres Tellez of the London School of Economics and Political Science have together written a paper on mobile banking and economic development that just got published in the December issue of the…
“Transformation” a better concept than “innovation” to guide us forward
At the beginning of last year, we at Experientia worked with a Belgian regional authority on developing the concept for a new design centre, called the Transformation Factory (read more about it in this paper). Now also Business Week’s Bruce…
Why products fail
Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan argues that most gadget and software makers don’t understand what users want most: control. Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability.…
Focus on what we should be doing, not just what we can
John Maeda, the new president of RISD, wrote some smart words in Esquire (where he was profiled as one of 75 most influential people): “Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of “I can” than “I should,”…
interactions magazine: time for some change
The January-February 2009 issue of Interactions Magazine has just been launched, which in itself is a celebration of the fantastic transformation of the magazine under the careful stewardship of Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson, now one year ago. This transformation…
Focussing on consumer needs is now more crucial than ever
Tuning up your focus on customer needs is more crucial than ever, writes business and innovation strategist Idris Mootee. Customers always have problems to solve, even more so in a downturn. This downturn itself is creating a permanent impact on…
Watch the video – Mobile Banking for Poor People: Pioneer Perspectives
Last week, the World Bank’s CGAP hosted a roundtable and webinar on the important topic of how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better (see also this blog…
The dark side of “The Cloud”
Increasingly our personal records and social lives are being privatised, with normal people having very little recourse when these private services are being cancelled or the companies themselves disappear (as most companies eventually do). Currently the country where I live…
European usability and design conference presentations online
The first European conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), which was dedicated to Usability and Design, is more than a week away but the high quality of the event still lingers. The conference, which took place in Turin, Italy,…
The 168-hour work week
A Pew/Internet survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture…