Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine recently organised a workshop on innovation in digital money, entitled Everyday Digital Money. The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural,…
CNN reports on how Donald Norman wants designers to be more inclusive: The future of design could see the divide between able-bodied and disabled people vanish. Don Norman , design Professor at Northwestern University in Illinois, and the author of…
Interesting article by Hubert Guillaud of InternetActu.net on understanding non-users (my translation): The French Marsouin research lab just published an interesting study on people who do not use the internet. The study starts off with the various existing typologies to…
Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, states that ethnic minority groups are the prime early adopters in Europe, thereby confirming ethnographic user research at Swisscom. “Ethnic minority groups are at the forefront of digital communications in the UK, with high levels…
While hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on digital inclusion projects in Latin America, many of the programs start and end with the technology, writes CNET News (as part of its ongoing series exploring computing in Latin America).…
Ken Banks writes in PC World on the capacity of the mobile phone to bridge the digital divide. While developed markets get excited by the iPhone, N95, BlackBerry, 3G, WiMax and Android, in developing countries, most excitement centers around the…
MobileActive reports on two studies that explore how low-income people use mobile technology in Brazil and South Africa. This rise of mobile phone use by low-income and so-called ‘base-of-the-pyramid’ users raises a number of questions. Are low-income people using mobile…
The great people at the splendid French blog InternetActu have conducted an interview with the Japanese sociologist, Mito Akiyoshi. Since InternetActu is published in French, and I have been pushing them time and again to make the rich contents of…
Dawn Nafus, an Intel anthropologist and her team have created Intel’s “Technology Metabolism Index,” which shows how citizens of countries’ tech adoption exceeds or lags what one would expect given their levels of wealth. The map (hi-res pdf) shows fast…
The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is organising a four-part lecture series on “Digital Natives,” referring to the generation that has been raised with the computer as a natural part of their lives, especially the young…
The Danish programme for user-driven innovation (English summary) aims to strengthen the diffusion of methods for user-driven innovation, and to contribute to increased growth in the participating companies, and to increased user satisfaction and/or increased efficiency in participating public institutions.…
Last year, The Economist published an article about ethnographic user research at Swisscom. One of the findings it highlighted was that immigrant workers are the most advanced users of communications technology: “It is migrants, rather than geeks, who have emerged…
Microsoft UK is developing a “senior PC”, which will have a simple interface and be aimed at older users, writes Jane Wakefield on BBC News. The machine will come software that allows users to manage prescriptions as well as simplified…
The Times comments on a report on the significant digital divide in the UK, despite widepsread broadband and mobile coverage. One in five adult Britons is unable to open a word processing document on a computer, and just under 20…
The Washington Post reflects on what it means that there is now one cellphone for every two humans on Earth. “From essentially zero, we’ve passed a watershed of more than 3.3 billion active cellphones on a planet of some 6.6…
For some time now I have been following the French innovation blog Internet Actu, not realising that it was part of a bigger initiative called “Fing“. Fing stands for “Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération”, or the the next generation internet foundation,…
Half of all American adults are only occasional users of modern information gadgetry, while 8% are avid participants in all that digital life has to offer. The Pew Internet & American Life Project conducted a survey designed to classify Americans…
I just wrote on Core77 how French Internet service provider, Neuf Cegetel, has taken inspiration from the legendary Minitel to develop the Easyneuf computer based on a similar low-cost model, aimed at people who are unable or unwilling to buy…