Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The session devoted to Design Thinking was my personal favourite of the entire 2009 LIFT conference. Beyond the engineers and business’ discourse about the future, what is it designers can propose? What sort of alternatives are they envisioning? What’s the…
More and more content of Interactions Magazine is becoming available online. The latest March-April issue is devoted to trust and “explores the idea of assurance and the feelings of ease or unease related to relationships of confidence or skepticism”. Here…
Get an overview of the thought process and common strategies for generating prototypes from Dave Cronin, Director of Interaction Design at Cooper. Although applied to Fireworks, Cronin’s discourse is general, especially when he talks about his four reasons for creating…
Microsoft has created a virtual personal assistant that can build a relationship with its user. “Meet Laura, the virtual personal assistant for those of us who cannot afford a human one. Built by researchers at Microsoft, Laura appears as a…
In an interview with Nokia’s IdeasProject, social media innovator Laura Fitton talks about the most basic of human connections: our immediate physical community. This is the kind of intimacy that is built up over numerous ‘unimportant,’ low-level interactions…with the neighbours…
One of the best sessions of the entire LIFT conference took place on Thursday afternoon. As half of the world is now living in cities, it’s undeniable that the recombination of our physical environment through technological advancements will lead to…
The entire morning of the first day of the LIFT conference was devoted to change. I selected a few presentations here that I found personally most stimulating. Note: this post contains embedded video which might now not show up in…
The other Experientia workshop at LIFT was Lifestream – Visualizing my data. The workshop, which was completely packed, was run by Willem Boijens, Vodafone, and my business partner Jan-Christoph Zoels, Experientia, and set out to explore large quantity information visualization.…
Fortune Magazine profiles Dr Genevieve Bell, an Australian-born anthropologist and ethnographer, and the Director of User Experience in Intel Corporation’s Digital Home Group. Part of Bell’s job is to help the company understand quirks of human behavior that could determine…
Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s head of design direction for service and user-interface design, is frequently featured on Putting People First as his thinking is close to our own interests. According to his Twitter feed, he is not entirely happy in Finland,…
The Financial Times has posted a very long analysis on Twitter as a social phenomenon: “In its deceptively simple way, Twitter has stumbled on a formula that a whole generation of recent web start-ups has been searching for: a way…
Cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito has posted a rough transcript of her (quite long) keynote address at the 51st NFAIS Annual Conference. “If I were to pick one thing that is profoundly different, it is the fact that making and sharing…
A new video from Microsoft shows in an elegant, if utopian way, what it might look like if all of those gadgets came together several years hence. Ina Fried of CNet News wasn’t entirely impressed: “The hardest thing for me…
With the help of a proprietary “ageing suit” that mimics the mobility and faculties of an elderly driver, interaction designers at Nissan Design Center were able to create a unique interior-concept prototype. “It is almost painful to watch Nissan designer…
IRealize Turin, Italy 9-10 June 2009 It’s still early days for this conference that presents itself as “two days aimed at identifying unsolved problems, suggesting possible (technological?) solutions and stimulating the creation of new disruptive start-ups”. The website needs some…
Programmer Michael Nygard thinks that the quality about some software that inspires love in their users, is totally devoid in enterprise software. “The best you can ever say about enterprise software is when it doesn’t get in the way of…
Ken Anderson, a senior researcher and anthropologist at Intel, wrote a short article for the Harvard Business Review on the importance of corporate ethnography: “Corporate ethnography isn’t just for innovation anymore. It’s central to gaining a full understanding of your…
After coming home from the Mobile World Congress, Mark Pickens, a microfinance analyst with CGAP’s Technology Program, asks why, when he can load any software he want onto his PC, he can’t do the same with his phone. Better yet,…
Christian Lindholm, a partner and director at Fjord, argues that there are three layers in handhelds user experience: “The highest level I call Bling (this is because, it caters to the visual senses) it contains the visuals, colours, content density…
The Nokia Siemens Network website and its forum site “Unite” contain a wealth of valuable articles and background papers: A huge amount of articles and whitepapers on basic internet access for the ‘next billion’ customers (see also here). An entire…