No time to think
Nowadays, people can keep negative thoughts at bay with a frenzy of activity. Kate Murphy writes on the consequences in the Sunday Review section of the New York Times. “You can’t solve or let go of problems if you don’t…
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Category HCD / UXD
Qualitative self-tracking and the Qualified Self
Mark Carrigan, sociologist, academic technologist and research assistant at the Centre for Social Ontology, is intellectually drawn to the Quantified Self because “it’s a fascinating example of the intensification of reflexivity in contemporary society”. Most interesting in his reflective blog…
The touch-screen generation
Young children — even toddlers — are spending more and more time with digital technology. Hanna Rosin wonders what will it mean for their development? “As technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary…
Persona Power
Article by Shlomo Goltz on “integrating the hero’s journey as part of the user-centered design process”: “There are many prominent and outspoken members of the design community, such as Steve Portigal and Jason Fried, who feel that personas are unnecessary.…
Call to bring refugee-led innovation into humanitarian work
The humanitarian sector must lift barriers to user-led innovation by refugee communities if it is to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world, says a new report, Humanitarian Innovation: The State of the Art, published by the UN Office for…
Behaviour change presentations at Nudgestock event
On 6 June OgilvyChange, the specialist behavioural sciences practice of Ogilvy & Mather UK, hosted the second edition of Nudgestock, the “largest gathering of behavioural experts in the world”. The one day event on May 24 saw speakers from fields…
German psychologist aims to debunk behavioural economics (a.k.a. the “nudge” approach)
Daniel Kahneman, the ‘godfather’ of behavioural economics, has been challenged by rival psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Centre for Cognition and Adaptive Behaviour at the Max Planck institute in Berlin, who claims that Kahneman presents ‘an unfairly negative view…
When big data meets dataveillance: the hidden side of analytics
Among the numerous implications of digitalization, the debate about “big data” has gained momentum. The central idea capturing attention is that digital data represents the newest key asset organizations should use to gain a competitive edge. Data can be sold,…
Left to our own devices
Our well-being centers on the meaningfulness of our relationships: our intimate ties, our associations with a larger circle of people, and our sense of interconnectivity with a collective tribe. Technology has become deeply embedded in how we build these relationships…
World Economic Forum reports on personal data focus on trust, privacy and framework
The World Economic Forum has released three new reports on strengthening trust, transparency and privacy in personal data usage. Rethinking Personal Data: A New Lens for Strengthening Trust, prepared in collaboration with A.T. Kearney, looks at how to enhance transparency…
Aiming for open source technology that is gorgeous and provides great UX
Designer and social entrepreneur Aral Balkan believes it is time to build an alternate future where we own our own tools, services, and data. And to do this we must create a new category of design-led, experience-driven ‘technology’. That’s the…
Looking ahead in automotive UX with Mercedes
Steve Tengler recently sat down the user experience folks at Mercedes’ Research and Development Center in Sunnyvale, California, and interviewed Paolo Malabuyo (Vice President of Advanced UX Design), Vera Schmidt (Senior Manager of Advanced UX Design), and Viviane Eide (Manager…
My digital shadow
The surveillance program PRISM by the US secret service NSA has reminded us that all of our activities online may be monitored without giving us the chance to understand whether we really are targeted or what the purpose of this…
The Qualified Self and Affective Sensing
The people at frog design have been exploring sensing technologies and their impact on the human experience. Two interesting articles are the result: The Qualified Self: Going Beyond Quantification Just as stories yield data, data yield stories. And just as…
User experience is the new differentiator. How will that affect the internet?
The world of business is changing, as are the locations of the people who are driving that business. How companies reach new users and how they treat them once they do will be the defining business issue of the future.…
How Facebook uses UX research to personalize the way we see each other
Facebook recently made profiles more “contextual” on their iOS app, writes John Paul Titlow in Fast Company. That means that like Google searches or other personalized experiences, Facebook profiles will now appear differently based on who’s viewing. “We wanted to…
Ethnography in action at Wells Fargo
Only a few years ago, the corporate view of retirement planning at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank tended to focus on dollars and cents — how much an individual needed to invest, by when and for how many years,†write…
Tell me a story: augmented reality technology in museums
Museums around the world today face the challenge of increasing and maintaining visitor numbers, especially with younger audiences. A fall in visitors is seen by most as a negative outcome, both financially and in terms of wider social and educational…
[Book] A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences
A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton & Whitney Quesenbery Rosenfeld Media, 2013 288 pages In their new book, A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery make a case for…
Six ways to design humanity and localism into Smart Cities
A long post by Rick Robinson, Executive Architect at IBM specialising in emerging technologies and Smarter Cities, admonishes Smart Cities planners and designers not to overlook the social needs of cities and communities. After all, he says, the full purpose…