Ageing with smartphones
Ageing with Smartphones in Ireland, Urban Italy, Urban Brazil, Urban Chile, Urban China and Uganda: six free open access books as part of the five year "Anthropology of Smartphones and Smart Ageing" project.
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Category Americas
VA creates US Government’s first-ever employee experience journey map
The employee experience (EX) journey map of the US Government’s Department of Veteran Affairs (VA) identifies the moments that matter during a VA employee’s career using the same human-centered design process that VA’s Veterans Experience Office (VEO) has applied in the development…
Boston’s human-centered research to design middle-income housing
In Boston, the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics is conducting ethnographic, human-centered research to design middle-income housing that reflects people’s lived experiences, reports the Stanford Social Innovation Review. This includes intensive planning sessions in which residents, designers, and policy…
[Report] How US youth navigate the news landscape
Yesterday, the New York research institute Data & Society released the report How Youth Navigate the News Landscape (download) that explores how young people use mobile devices, messaging apps, and social media to consume breaking news. Co-authors Mary Madden, Amanda…
Modernizing the US immigration system with user-centered design
Vivian Graubard describes on WhiteHouse.gov how the U.S. Digital Service is working on modernizing the USA’s still largely paper based immigration service, pairing a better technical base with user-centered design. We traveled to USCIS (United States Citizenship and Immigration Service)…
Research on being “good with money” in Silicon Valley
FAIR Money, a small research collective consisting of anthropologists and design researchers based in the San Francisco Bay Area, has just published its first report, Good with Money: Getting by in Silicon Valley. The report, which is based on interviews…
EPIC conference calls for papers and tutorials
EPIC, the premier international gathering on the current and future practice of ethnography and design in the business world, will take place in Sao Paulo, Brazil this year. The EPIC 2015 program committee is now calling for submissions of Paper…
Reflections on Capital One’s acquisition of Adaptive Path
This week Toronto-based UX strategist Rami Tabbah and I discussed Capital One’s acquisition of Adaptive Path. We were both a bit surprised by the lack of real reflection on the pros and cons of this development (with a few exceptions),…
Data and design in innovative citizen experiences
The past decade has brought enormous and growing benefits to ordinary citizens through applications built on public data. Any release of data offers advantages to experts, such as developers and journalists, but there is a crucial common factor in the…
How Obama used ‘Ethnography Project’ to defeat Mitt Romney in 2012
Ken Walsh reports on how Team Obama made an unprecedented effort to understand the voters and speak their language, slicing and dicing the electorate with a sophistication and savvy that the Republicans couldn’t match and are still scrambling to replicate.…
Videos of breakout sessions at the recent Interaction13 conference in Toronto
The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the breakout talks that took place (grouped thematically). AGILE / LEAN Josh Seiden: A designer’s introduction to lean…
Videos of keynotes and panel discussions at the recent Interaction13 conference in Toronto
The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the keynotes and panel discussions that took place. KEYNOTES Albert Shum: Connecting – emerging themes for interactions [36:59] This…
How technology has restored the soul of politics
Longtime political operative Joe Trippi advocates a bottom-up, people-centered politics, and cheers the innovations of Obama 2012, saying they restored the primacy of the individual voter. “New technologies can manipulate, empower, or do both. There will be plenty of actors…
The man looking to turn Samsung into a Silicon Valley trendsetter
Samsung is doubling down on technology investments in Apple’s backyard, including two new R&D buildings in Silicon Valley that will house 2,000 staff and a recently announced startup accelerator. Leading this effort is Young Sohn, who started at Samsung in…
Research on Android tablet use in 5th grade classrooms
The series of research projects on tablet use in schools (see here, here and here) now also has an Android study. A small research project by Marie Bjerede and Tzaddi Bondi, equipped a 5th grade class of 27 students in…
How teens do research in the digital world
According to Pew Internet research, the teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students’ research habits and the impact of technology on their studies. More in particular, they say that students’ digital literacy…
Want proof that market fit is everything? Test your app in the slums of Sao Paulo
For the Stanford-educated founders of Emprego Ligado, creating a successful app in Brazil required dismantling every assumption about the target audience. Emprego Ligado, which translates to “connected job,” launched in Sao Paulo this summer with the aim of connecting unskilled…
What marketing executives should know about user experience
“What marketing executives should know about user experience” is the title of a short and introductory piece, mainly aimed at marketing people, by Nick Myers, managing director of visual design & branding at Cooper (a design and strategy firm in…
Forget B-School, D-School is hot
The Wall Street Journal published the umpteenth article on design thinking education. What I keep on missing in these pieces is some reflection on what understanding people actually means: ethnographic and anthropological observation and fast prototyping, combined with some creativity,…
US Veterans Administration launches iPad patient study on tablet use
The US Veterans Administration has announced it has created an initiative aimed at studying the benefits associated with the use of mhealth apps and tablet devices to improve and coordinate care between physicians, veterans and their families To that end,…