Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
On 10-11 May, UNICEF New York organised the Design Days, where they invited designers and engineers who have worked with UNICEF to discuss the organisation, the (rapid prototyping) design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations. They have now produced…
In a three-part article series, Dina Mehta, founder and managing director of Mosoci India, argues that durability is losing its power as a consumer driver in some product categories in India. Somehow this is sad news. “For the most part,…
Indrani Medhi, an Associate Researcher at Microsoft Research India where she works in the Technology for Emerging Markets team, designed a text free user interface for illiterate populations. “A student of design, Medhi has developed text-free user interfaces (UIs) to…
Ethnographer Tricia Wang wrote an excellent and long comment on why Google is having troubles in China: While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current…
Western companies are struggling to bridge the growing gap created by the evolution of a cyberspace with Chinese characteristics. Kathrin Hille explains some of the cultural (and political) differences in today’s Financial Times. “[Chinese people] tend to roam the web…
Interesting Google Blog article on how user research dramatically improved driving directions on Google Maps India. The research was based on the fact that street names are not commonly known in India and the typical wayfinding strategy is to ask…
Microsoft’s Joe Fletcher contributed an intriguing article on software UX in India and China on the ever more interesting Johnny Holland site: “Over roughly the last 10 years, China and India have given way to a huge rise in technology…
In a two-part series, Korea’s JoongAng Daily newspaper looks at the rise of service design and the notion that modern product designers need to look well beyond the physical form of their projects. For years, the design field focused primarily…
Meena Kadri reports on how lunch and laundry delivery in Mumbai – known as the Dabbawalla and Dhobi Ghat services – use sophisticated coding systems to track items within their service chain, in order to ensure accurate delivery. “The Dabbawalla…
Nafid Imran Ahmed of the Bangladeshi newspaper The Daily Star was just at “The Way We Live Next 3.0” event in Helsinki and reports on the company’s vision of the future: “Nokia, the world leader in mobility, gave me an…
A number of articles illustrate the power of the mobile phone in emerging markets: What next after the Mobile revolution in Kenya? by John Karanja MPESA will be on its own a major driver of the economic expansion of the…
Nokia’s senior design specialists are touring India to discover how Indians use cellphones. Leslie D’Monte reports for New Delhi’s Business Standard. Jhanvi Madan (not her real name), who lives in Mumbai , has been talking on her cellphone. Unknown to…
The Singapore Design Festival, running November 20-30, now themed “Design 2050: Possibilities for Tomorrow,” , is also continuing its quest to improve people’s surroundings through good design for a better quality of life. As already written up on this blog…
Nokia Life Tools was designed to help improve the livelihood and lives of farmers, students and many people in more remote and rural areas in emerging market countries. It does this by offering easily accessible and up-to-date crop prices, education…
Last week, the IASDR 2009 conference (International Association of Societies of Design Research) took place in Seoul, South Korea, and all videos of the keynote speeches are already available. Donald A. Norman: Science and Design I start with three contradictory…
Nicolas Nova reports on the “networked objects†session at Lift Asia 09. Speakers were Rafi Haladjian (in transition from Violet to his new company called sen.se), Adrian David Cheok (from the Mixed Reality Lab in Singapore and Keio University) and…
Via Dina Mehta, founder and managing director of Mosoci India, I found out about Progress, a highly interesting new website set up by Nokia and Lonely Planet: “The Progress Project is the initiative set up by Nokia and Lonely Planet…
Dina Mehta, founder and managing director of Mosoci India, reports on how Nokia Life Tools actually gets used in India, and more in particular, how the how the Learn English program, a part of Nokia Life Tools, really works on…
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…
Nokia’s MeraNokia (Majha Nokia in Marathi) is actually a Nokia Life Tools (NLT) application coded into the 2300 and 2323 handsets being used in the pilot. Farmers and villagers pay around Rs 2 per day, every 10 days, for the…