Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
NESTA, the UK innovation organisation, has published a research report and policy briefing on how users are changing the rules of innovation. User-led innovation – where users play an active part in the development of new or improved products and…
New mapping technologies are fundamentally changing the way we experience the city. Urban planners Varnelis and Meisterlin explore the busy intersections of design and cartography in a long and excellent essay on Adobe’s Design Center Think Tank. “Today’s intelligent maps…
Andrew Grill, a UK telecoms senior executive, discusses the future of the Subscriber Identity Module, better known as the SIM card. “As a tool that securely manages a subscriber’s identity, the SIM is the only remaining element of the mobile…
Consumers have always used — or misused — products however they see fit. Adweek reports on why some companies now follow the lead of consumers who have their own ideas about product usage. “Consumers have always used — or misused…
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…
Yann Gourvennec, head of internet and digital media at Orange Business Services, wonders whether making users’ live easier is a sustainable marketing argument for the development of a business. The article’s premise intrigued me but it was a disappointing read.…
“Polite, pertinent and… pretty: designing for the new wave of personal informatics” was the title of a talk given by Matt Jones (Dopplr) and Tom Coates (Yahoo! Brickhouse) at the recent Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. Summarising their talk…
Neil Clavin has written the latest contribution in the ongoing series of emerging markets articles that are on a weekly basis being published Vodafone Receiver’s magazine. In his paper for receiver Clavin argues that for better design, we must first…
On Wednesday 2 July Nicolas Nova (LIFT lab) moderated a session at the World Congress of Architecture in Turin, Italy, entitled “From ubiquitous technology to human context – Technology applied to architecture and design: does it solve problems or create…
Today I attended the Frontiers of Interaction IV conference in Turin, Italy, which — with some kind input from Bruce Sterling — has now reached quite an international level. Speakers today were Jeffrey Schnapp (Stanford Humanities Lab – via video),…
Many presentations of Malmö University’s “From Business To Buttons” conference, held last week in Malmö, Sweden, are already available for download. They include talks by Alberto Knapp Bjerén (The Cocktail, Spain), David Cuartielles (K3, Malmo University, Sweden), Brendan Dawes (magneticNorth,…
The SAP Design Guild has published a long and quite critical report on the recent CHI conference by Gerd Waloszek, a user experience professional at the business software company SAP. The SAP Design Guild is a site maintained by SAP…
Adaptive Path has posted a couple of videos of user experience related presentations given at this year’s MX Conference. Matt Jones (Dopplr) – “Battle for the Planet of the Apes: A Perspective on Social Software and Social Networks” Matt Jones…
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…
The Google User Experience team aims to create designs that are useful, fast, simple, engaging, innovative, universal, profitable, beautiful, trustworthy, and personable. Achieving a harmonious balance of these ten principles is a constant challenge. A product that gets the balance…
Richard Anderson reports on a discussion session that Elizabeth Churchill and Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken participated in, held at the recent CHI conference in Florence, Italy, that dealt with the role of interactions magazine in bridging communities – “something essential…
Firms including Microsoft, Intel, Google and IBM have formed an Information Overload Research Group to help workers cope with the digital deluge and improve productivity. “Some of the biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and IBM, are banding together…
The New Scientist has published an interview with Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase: “Most of us take mobile phones for granted. Not so for Jan Chipchase, a design researcher for Nokia, who travels the globe exploring how people use their…
Nicholas Carr, the author of “The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google” and “Does IT Matter?” wrote an article for The Atlantic Monthly on what the internet is doing to our brains: it is chipping away our…