Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Jonathan Gosier, a software developer, writer and social entrepreneur in Kampala, Uganda, shares his ideas on what augmented reality could mean for Africa. “Already people are recording audio, video, and blogging to keep donors abreast of their work in the…
Paula Fortner, iHealthBeat senior staff writer, reports on how innovative mobile technologies are helping to fundamentally transform health care in many developing countries. “Last month, the Rockefeller Foundation announced a $100 million initiative to strengthen health systems in Africa…
Millions of Africans are using mobile phones to pay bills, move cash and buy basic everyday items. So why, asks the BBC, has a form of banking that has proved a dead duck in the West been such a hit…
Gunnar Camner and Emil Sjöblom recently spent three months in Tanzania for their master’s thesis in Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, to investigate mobile banking services from a user perspective. In which contexts…
Both the Guardian newspaper’s PDA blog and TED itself are posting regular updates from the current TEDGlobal conference in Oxford, UK. (TED stands for technology, entertainment and design, and it’s an exclusive conference that brings togethers thinkers and doers from…
In a country where people don’t have electricity, much less Internet access, the Grameen Foundation partners with Google to relay information through mobile phones. Dara Kerr reports from on the ground for CNet: “The research for this project began a…
Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya, and has been sharing some of her insights on the CGAP blog.…
Last week Google announced a suite of SMS services in Uganda. In a follow-up post on the main google blog, the company explains that it is the result of more than a year of true user-centred research and design. “We…
In a short essay on Core77, Robert Fabricant is not afraid to tackle some big questions: “What role did Design play in contributing to our current global crisis? What role should/will Designers play in leading us out of this mess?”…
Katrin Verclas of Mobile Active points out that the new Google/ MTN/ Grameen collaboration on mobile information services in Uganda is very expensive, and this is creating some problems: “This will, be definition, limit access of such services to the…
Malaysian newspaper The Star devotes plenty of space to user-centred design in three stories that feature the work of Genevieve Bell, Intel’s user experience director. “Marrying†anthropology and science “I still write and publish my work in academic journals. To…
Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more emerging markets following a successful pilot program in India, a company executive said Monday. “Nokia plans to roll out its Life Tools group of services to more…
Web 2.0 solutions offer people in rural areas a platform for networking and knowledge exchange. This brochure, published by GTZ, provides a systematic overview of Web 2.0 experiences made to date in Africa, Asia and Latin America. It serves as…
Navi Radjou argues on the HarvardBusiness.org Voices blog that R&D in emerging markets needs fewer engineers and more anthropologists. “To effectively identify and address the explicit and unmet needs of the broader consumer base in emerging markets, I believe multi-national…
The Future Tense programme on Australia’s ABC Radio features bottom-up, user-generated innovation in Africa: “In this program we’ll highlight several interesting initiatives, one in Africa and one in the South Asia region, initiatives which have had success largely because of…
Barclays 360 magazine, a quarterly thought leadership magazine for senior management within the Barclays Group, is devoted to simplicity in product and service design. Here are the feature articles (of which the last one, which is excellently written and directly…
The people of Microfinance Podcast have just posted a short video interview with Nick Hughes, Head of International Mobile Payment Solutions at the Vodafone Group, who has been instrumental in getting M-PESA up and running. Watch video (via CGAP)
This week the Institute for Money, Technology & Financial Inclusion hosted a conference about the “Bottom of the Pyramid” and Elizabeth Losh, author of Virtualpolitik and writing director of the Humanities Core Course at the University of California, Irvine, has…
After Patrick Meier, a doctoral research fellow at Harvard University, a PhD candidate at The Fletcher School, and an active contributor at Ushahidi, participated in a high-level mobile banking (mBanking) conference in Nairobi, he reflected on the issue of trust…
The Financial Times has published a special report on connectivity, analysing the implications of a connected planet. My preferred pieces: Skills: Business must learn from the new tribe So-called ‘digital natives’ are bringing down the barriers to collaborative working, finds…