Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Rebekah Rousi, a researcher of user psychology and PhD candidate of Cognitive Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, describes on EthnographyMatters how the combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection was fruitful in her analysis of elevator usage. “A…
As we move towards a quantified society, one shaped by data, we start to dismiss things that are unquantified, writes Om Malik of GigaOm. Empathy, emotion and storytelling — these are as much a part of business as they are…
Data and data sets are not objective, writes Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, in the Harvard Business Review. They are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through…
In the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg explains how habits are formed and what it takes to break an ingrained habit. The book references a 2006 study from Duke University that found that 40% of the actions…
Dr Anne Galloway (@annegalloway) is Senior Lecturer, School of Design and Principal Investigator, Design Culture Lab, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Trained in sociology and anthropology, Anne teaches courses in design and culture, and researches relations amongst people, places,…
Consumers insist that they treasure their online privacy. But their mouse clicks tell a far different tale, as the experiments of a behavioral economist show. In a series of provocative experiments, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University…
The people behind the upcoming Interaction14 conference invite you to attend a panel discussion in Milan on the “Long View of Interaction Design”. On Monday 8 April at 6pm (on the eve of the Salone del Mobile), Claudio Moderini, Fabio…
As gadgets get more complicated, UI’s must be able to teach their users over time. Philip Battin shows how flow can be used to improve the user experience in interactive electronic consumer products in an article for FastCo.Design. “More and…
In an insightful blog post, Reboot principal Panthea Lee asks if open government initiatives make citizens more informed and engaged, and make governments more accountable to their people? What impact have open government initiatives had so far? Reboot is a…
Open government initiatives offer new, often technologically enabled avenues for civic participation. But which populations have the access and motivation to use these channels? Frequently, programs and platforms privilege certain groups over others. An ethnographic study of participatory budgeting in…
How do we help or support people that live in situations that do not fit into a system’s categories, e.g. by transforming perceptions of what a system can be? This question is constantly reoccurring in the development of our public…
In a broader article on Big Data and privacy, the New York Times writes about the work of Alex Pentland, a computational social scientist, director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the M.I.T., and academic adviser to the World Economic…
Apple has a vision of a future in which the disembodied voice of Siri is your constant companion. It goes something like this: You arrive home at the end of a long day and plop down on the couch. A…
It’s time to start thinking strategically about designing user experiences for interconnected ecosystems like health care, argues frog’s Fabio Sergio. “Within [massive inter-connected service ecosystems such as education, finance, or health care] the aim to shape an “experience” out of…
A Unilever sponsored sustainability supplement to The Guardian contains a short articles by Dan Lockton that is worth exploring. Design for sustainability: making green behaviour easy describes how design can enable sustainable behaviour by understanding everyday needs rather than treating…
A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook W. W. Norton & Company 2013 – 480 pages [Amazon link] The new book A History of Future Cities looks at the attempts of places like Dubai, Shanghai, and Mumbai to create…
Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer at PARC, spoke on January 28 at TEDx Broadway about the power of ethnography and how it might be useful in inspiring the future of Broadway. As per usual with…
The hyper-connected smart home of the future promises to change the way we live. More efficient energy usage, Internet-connected appliances that communicate with one another and cloud-enhanced home security are just some of the conveniences we’ll enjoy. It’s going to…
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Current Hardcover March 2013, 216 pages [Amazon] Abstract This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in…
The UK Government Service Design Manual provides a (draft) digital by default service standard, as well as guidance and tools for building world-class digital services. The Government Digital Strategy set an ambitious target for teams building services: services so good…