Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The World Bank in partnership with mobile handset maker Nokia is set to fund the establishment of mobile applications laboratories in Africa in a move to boost innovation in the field. “The mobile laboratories will help assist mobile applications entrepreneurs…
Africa Calling: Can Mobile Phones Make a Miracle? is the title of a long article by Jenny C. Aker (Assistant Professor, The Fletcher School) and Isaac M. Mbiti (Assistant Professor, SMU), published in the March/April 2010 edition of the Boston…
Sir George Cox was the closing speaker at The Big Rethink, a ‘Redesigning Business Summit’ organised by The Economist, in association with the Design Council, that aims to develop some fresh ideas on how design thinking can be used to…
Twenty years after the emergence of the world wide web, Rory Cellan-Jones of the BBC World Service’s Discovery series looks at the science driving its third decade. Web 3.0 promises a world where people and objects are seamlessly connected through…
Among cell-phone users in developed countries, IBM is betting the market with the biggest growth potential is…people over the age of 65. Fast Company reports. IBM’s two-year research program, which also involves the National Institute of Design of India and…
Indrani Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India where she works in the Technology for Emerging Markets team, designed a text free user interface for illiterate populations. “A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to…
Women & Mobile: A Global Opportunity is a study on the mobile phone gender gap in low and middle-income countries. Mobile phone ownership in low and middle-income countries has skyrocketed in the past several years. But a woman is still…
Cellphone-based money transfer is transforming the prospects of people who live without bank accounts or ATMs – and they don’t need a smartphone. The New Scientist reports. “It works like this: you pay cash to your local agent – often…
The BBC reports on Janala, a service that is revolutionising the teaching of English in Bangladesh using simple mobile technology. “Janala – it means Window – is a service run by the BBC World Service Trust and funded by the…
The growing use of branchless banking channels over the coming years is inevitable in most countries. But it’s far less certain whether large numbers of the unbanked poor will use these alternative channels for financial services beyond payments, such as…
The Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (IMTFI) at the University of California, Irvine, headed by Bill Maurer, Professor of Anthropology, aims to foster a community of inquiry and practice on new forms of money and financial technology among…
Ethnographer Tricia Wang wrote an excellent and long comment on why Google is having troubles in China: While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current…
The World Economic Forum today released its study on Scaling Opportunity: Information and Communications Technology for Social Inclusion, an analysis of how ICT is evolving to address the social and economic needs of the poor. The study notes that, as…
Whether it’s checking market prices of crops, transferring money or simply making a call, mobile phones are transforming Africa. But, asks The Guardian, could this new technology end up bypassing the poorest? The problem apparently lies in the taxes levied…
Katrin Verclas of MobileActive.org has published a whitepaper entitled “Scaling Mobile Services for Development: What Will It Take?”. The paper, originially commissioned for the World Economic Forum, discusses the opportunities and critical success factors for scaling m-services – services and…
Microsoft’s Joe Fletcher contributed an intriguing article on software UX in India and China on the ever more interesting Johnny Holland site: “Over roughly the last 10 years, China and India have given way to a huge rise in technology…
Publishing Perspectives reports on a recent panel discussion on the African publishing industry at this year’s African Literature Week (16 – 21 November) in Oslo, Norway. [Muhtar] Bakare launched Kachifo [an independent literary publishing house in Lagos, Nigeria] in 2004,…
The latest issue of Interfaces Magazine, a quarterly magazine published by Interaction, the specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS), contains a lengthy article on an emerging market research project Experientia conducted for Vodafone Global. Many, many thanks…
Since cellphones became widely used in Kenya five years ago, they’ve become the bank card du jour. The Christian Science Monitor reports. “[In Kenya] with a mobile phone, one can pay electricity and water bills, pay for goods at the…
The Design & Society group within the UK’s Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) has published a pamphlet by Scott Burnham, entitled “Finding the truth in systems: in praise of design-hacking”. In this pamphlet, writer…