Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
How to design the user experience for professional options traders? This was the challenge faced by Gong Szeto, director of product design of OptionsHouse, an up and coming retail options brokerage, when he had to design their new options trading…
The Flemish Government (Flanders is one of Belgium’s regions) is choosing for participatory public diplomacy as a promising avenue for foreign policy development. The region, which has some foreign embassy staff but no foreign embassies, is in the process of…
Umpqua Bank has opened an Innovation Lab in Portland, Ore, showcasing emerging and existing technologies that foster community and redefine what consumers can expect from a banking experience. As a testing ground for new initiatives, the Lab will change regularly…
The website of the Microsoft Design Center looks like it is set up as a one-stop shop for everything related to design, usability and user experience that this huge company is involved with. Although somewhat shallow in substance and with…
Darren Sharp of the Smart Internet (Australia) contacted me about the new research ‘User-led Innovation: A New Framework for Co-creating Business and Social Value,’ that he co-authored with Mandy Salomon. Abstract The sources of innovation are shifting rapidly from the…
Marek Pawlowski of MEX thinks that Blyk, the advertising-funded MVNO, is really a user-generated media company: “Blyk is typically described in press reports as ‘an advertising-funded MVNO’, but after spending some time looking at the company’s model and talking to…
Jean-Marc Manach has written a long story on the school of the future — the School 2.0 — on my favourite French website InternetActu. Manach covers the international developments in this area (mainly USA and Germany) and gives an overview…
“Transformers – how local areas innovate to address changing social needs” is a new report by the UK National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) that explores why some places innovate more effectively than others. Taking a series…
A new study overturns the common assumption that the ‘Google Generation’ – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at…
Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase reports on just published research from Microsoft Research India‘s Jonathan Donner that explores the practice of beeping – making intentional missed calls. The paper draws on field research from Rwanda in 2004, categorising three different types…
Trendwatching.com’s latest report is devoted to the “expectation economy”: “The expectation economy is an economy inhabited by experienced, well-informed consumers from Canada to South Korea who have a long list of high expectations that they apply to each and every…
Demos, the UK think tank “for everyday democracy”, has published a new report on “self-directed public services”, entitled “Making It Personal“. Abstract his report advocates a simple yet transformational approach to public services – self-directed services – which allocate people…
Scott Weisbrod, director of insight & planning at Critical Mass, published a write-up on the four experience design trends he sees in online financial services: 1. Banks get serious about customer experience 2. Mobile banking still isn’t ready for prime…
IBM just released a white paper entitled “How immersive technology can revitalize the shopping experience”. “Truly immersive experiences—which connect with shoppers on an emotional level through personalized dialogues and give them greater control over the shopping experience—are the new frontier…
Steve Portigal is going after the hypocritical use of personas (“the Big Lie”) in the article he wrote for Interactions Magazine: “Personas are misused to maintain a “safe” distance from the people we design for, manifesting contempt over understanding, and…
Joe Nocera of The New York Times applauds Amazon’s Jeff Bezos tireless attention to the customer experience. Maybe, just maybe, taking care of customers is something worth doing when you are trying to create a lasting company. Maybe, in fact,…
“Integrative Thinking” is the theme of the current Rotman School of Management magazine. Three articles caught my attention: The second road of thought: how design offers strategy a new tool kit (page 46) In this essay Tony Golsby-Smith goes back…
Steven Bell of the blog Designing Better Libraries has authored an article for the January-February 2008 issue of American Libraries on how a design thinking approach can help librarians. “As a profession that mediates information from source to user—not unlike…
“The iPhone has pushed manufacturers to think again about usability”, says Jessica Sandin, the head of the mobile practice at Fathom Partners, a British strategic mobile consultancy in an International Herald Tribune article. “Many cellphone makers have lost their way…
Jon Kolko, an interaction design specialist, went from consulting (2000-2002) to academia (Savannah College of Art & Design, 2002-2007) and then back to consulting (frog design, 2007-). So what has he learned from these transitions? Well, not what you’d think.…