Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Matthew Neal contacted me today about a design challenge Toyota recently gave to students at the Royal College of Art London to create a household item that represents intelligent urban living. “We recently conducted interviews with the finalists of the…
Peter Merholz, President of Adaptive Path, has published the first part of an interview with Margret Schmidt, VP of User Experience Design and Research at TiVo. “Margret Schmidt’s extensive experience heading up design at TiVo has given her a deep…
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives, but how much say will users have in what they do with social networking and what it looks like? This is the central question in an article by Jesse Ashlock…
Both Penny Edwards (Headshift) and Bill Ives (Fast Forward) report on recent IBM research on social software in the marketplace: To what extent does your company facilitate social networking between employees split by geographical or organisational distance, or with (existing…
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley Pantheon, Hardcover January 2009 Abstract Over the past three decades, our daily lives…
Whitney Hess, an independent user experience designer, writer and consultant, asked some of the most influential and widely respected [USA] practitioners in UX (including Steve Baty, Mario Bourque, Dan Brown, Liz Danzico, Bill DeRouchey, Will Evans, Chris Fahey, Kaleem Khan,…
New York Times technology reporter Steve Lohr reports on the “dream” of the smart home. “Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been…
Nearly by accident I discovered Nokia’s recently launched IdeasProject, an effort “to surface Big Ideas about the future of communications — and to show the many ways that these ideas are connected”. It is definitely a site rich with content.…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, has posted a thoughtful essay on his blog about how trends in computing and design might affect the way that futurists work: how they could be used to sharpen…
What are the profound socio-cultural changes currently taking place and are people-centred designers well equipped to help companies and institutions address this new context? The current economic recession is turning out to be very severe (The Guardian evokes the spectre…
Lately posting has become a lot more complicated. Putting People First (PPF) started out some years ago as a dumping ground for all kinds of articles and readings that I found interesting and worthwhile sharing. It gradually became a much…
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India and Camilo Andres Tellez of the London School of Economics and Political Science have together written a paper on mobile banking and economic development that just got published in the December issue of the…
At the beginning of last year, we at Experientia worked with a Belgian regional authority on developing the concept for a new design centre, called the Transformation Factory (read more about it in this paper). Now also Business Week’s Bruce…
Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan argues that most gadget and software makers don’t understand what users want most: control. Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability.…
John Maeda, the new president of RISD, wrote some smart words in Esquire (where he was profiled as one of 75 most influential people): “Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of “I can” than “I should,”…
The January-February 2009 issue of Interactions Magazine has just been launched, which in itself is a celebration of the fantastic transformation of the magazine under the careful stewardship of Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson, now one year ago. This transformation…
Tuning up your focus on customer needs is more crucial than ever, writes business and innovation strategist Idris Mootee. Customers always have problems to solve, even more so in a downturn. This downturn itself is creating a permanent impact on…
Last week, the World Bank’s CGAP hosted a roundtable and webinar on the important topic of how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better (see also this blog…
Increasingly our personal records and social lives are being privatised, with normal people having very little recourse when these private services are being cancelled or the companies themselves disappear (as most companies eventually do). Currently the country where I live…
The first European conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), which was dedicated to Usability and Design, is more than a week away but the high quality of the event still lingers. The conference, which took place in Turin, Italy,…