Africa
We are an international experience design consultancy helping companies and organisations to innovate their products, services and processes by putting people and their experiences first.
Vaccine hesitancy is a top10 global health threat. Dealing with it successfully requires understanding it as a behaviour and generating a holistic view of people’s perspectives & ecosystems. This way we can identify the best opportunities for intervention. Here is Experientia’s position on vaccine hesitancy and our tailor-made support for the vaccine industry.
100&Change is a MacArthur Foundation competition for a $100 million grant to fund a single proposal that will make measurable progress toward solving a significant problem. 100&Change will select a bold proposal that promises real progress toward solving a critical problem of our time. And it will award a $100 million grant to help make […]
Then we are interested in hearing from you. We have several positions available for talented UX/UI and service designers who are passionate about creating world-class user experiences. Please see the job descriptions on our website for more information, and send us your CV with a cover letter statement about yourself, your experience, and what UX […]
Experientia is proud to have been a key participant at the Roche Innovation Summit, held at Roche headquarters in Basel Switzerland on 19 June 2018. Themed “Transforming the Healthcare Experience Together”, the summit aimed to galvanize the Roche community around the future transformation of healthcare and diagnostics. With 800 attendees from Roche and Genentech global […]
Hai una startup? Hai mai pensato ai benefici che potrebbe trarre dal Design Thinking? Questa è l’opportunità per scoprirlo! DesAlps Workshop #2: Il Design Thinking per la tua startup! Giovedì 28 giugno 2018 – dalle 9:30 alle 17:00 @ I3P | Corso Castelfidardo 30/a, Torino —– Nell’ambito del progetto europeo DesAlps, un team di esperti […]
New Human Centred Design toolkit launched for African context
Future by Design, a Human Centred Design (HCD) and customer-centricity consultancy focused on the African continent, has produced an HCD Toolkit (download link) that’s especially appropriate for an African context, and intended for application where rapid results are needed. Drawing on local narrative, symbolism, social norms and visual cues, they have packaged the process in […]
Understanding human behaviour to improve mobile research design
Shirley Eadie, founding member and CEO of Pondering Panda, explored some of the idiosyncrasies of the human condition at last month’s MRMW Africa conference [Market Research in the Mobile World], in order to help attendees understand the impact of those idiosyncrasies on research design, to lead to quick wins for better, more accurate mobile research. […]
How teachers in Africa are failed by mobile learning
Only projects that work with existing education systems will improve learning and cut poverty, says Niall Winters of the London Knowledge Lab at the University of London, and he argues for a user-centred approach (rather than a technology-centric one) that is focused on understanding teachers’ practice, co-designing interventions with them and providing them with training […]
User-centred mobile app development in Kenya
The success of a mobile app – its high adoption rate and actual use – largely depends on the degree of involvement of the end user during the development stage. Mark Kamau, Kenyan web solution expert at the iHub UX Lab in Nairobi, believes a user-centric approach to mobile app development is critical to building […]
Social networks of mobile money in Kenya
Social networks of mobile money in Kenya Sibel Kusimba, Harpieth Chaggar, Elizabeth Gross, & Gabriel Kunyu Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion University of California, Irvine With mobile money technologies, people use mobile phones to send money to friends and relatives, connect to bank accounts, and make payments. This research examines the role of […]
Tweeting Minarets: joining quantitative and qualitative research methodologies
In the last post of the EthnographyMatters Ethnomining edition (edited by Nicolas Nova), David Ayman Shamma @ayman gives a personal perspective on mixed methods. Based on the example of data produced by people of Egypt who stood up against then Egyptian president and his party in 2011, he advocates for a comprehensive approach for data […]
Write-up on Michele Visciola’s talk at iHub, Kenya
Michele Visciola, President and Founding Partner of Experientia, gave a talk at iHub in Nairobi, Kenya, last week (see also this earlier post). The aim of the talk was to demonstrate with actual examples how user experience principles are applicable for large and small projects in tech and other spheres, and to show how insights […]
iHub Nairobi welcomes Michele Visciola
Michele Visciola, Experientia’s president and user research director, will speak at Kenya’s iHub this week, on Friday 19th April. Michele is currently in Nairobi preparing research, and has been invited to be a guest speaker at iHub, Nairobi’s Innovation Hub for the technology community. Michele will talk about “User-centred innovation: fostering culture evolution and behavioural […]
McKinsey’s iConsumer Global Research Initiative
Recent reports from McKinsey’s iConsumer Global Research Initiative: Moving from “mobile first” to “touch first” December 2012 (published on the EconomistGroup site) Already, more than a third of the time people spend web browsing, using social networking sites, and using e-mail/messaging software is on mobile devices. In a couple of years, we expect it to […]
How the Kenyan Base of the Pyramid uses their mobile phone
In order to understand mobile phone usage at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in Kenya, iHub Research and Research Solutions Africa conducted a 6-month study, funded by infoDev (World Bank). A total of 796 face-to-face interviews were conducted along with 178 diaries, 9 interviews with Kenyan developers, 12 focus group discussions (FGDs), and 10 […]
Creating behaviour change in people using mobile technology
Rajeev Suri posted a short interview with Gustav Praekelt of Praekelt Consulting and the Praekelt Foundation, who focuses on creating behaviour change in people – particularly in emerging markets – using mobile technology. In the interview he explains the notions of Computational Social Science, Influence and Susceptibility of an individual in a network, building on […]
Making mobile phones work for the poor
In this BBC article, David Edelstein, a leader in the mobile for development space, argues that human networks are the essential ingredient for mobile phones to improve the lives of the poorest. “Focusing on the technology betrays a truth that must be understood if we are to get beyond this hype and harness the true […]
Africa embracing m-commerce
In a new report from its ConsumerLab, Ericsson maps out the potential of transformation within m-commerce across the region of sub-Saharan Africa. Based on in-depth, extensive interviews with mobile phone users in Ghana, South Africa, and Tanzania, the report has four key findings: that consumers are constantly looking for new ways to improve their personal […]
Ethnographic research in a world of big data
Reacting to the Wired Magazine article that suggests that “the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete,” Jenna Burrell, sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, lists some questions that she (and maybe other ‘small data’ people) have about the big data / data analytics trend: What do researchers consider the […]
From banker to service designer
Olga Morawczysnki, project Manager of Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money Incubator (a CGAP-sponsored new initiative that develops mobile financial products for the poor) and Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights at frog, argue that large scale adoption of (mobile) financial services by the poor will only happen if providers in this sector approach the […]
An update on the use of e-readers in Africa
What does it take to introduce e-books and e-readers into communities in low income countries — and is this a good idea, asks Michael Trucano on EduTech, a World Bank blog on ICT in education. “Judging by the increasing number of inquiries we receive here at the World Bank on this topic, we are not […]
Exploring mobile-only Internet use (South Africa)
Exploring mobile-only Internet use: results of a training study in urban South Africa Using an ethnographic action research approach, the study by Jonathan Donner (Microsoft Research India) and Shikoh Gitau and Gary Marsden (University of Cape Town) explores the challenges, practices, and emergent framings of mobile-only Internet use in a resource-constrained setting. “We trained eight […]
UNDP Mobile Technologies and Empowerment report
A report, recently published by UNDP, on mobile technologies and human development, “Mobile Technologies and Empowerment: Enhancing Human Development through Participation and Innovation”, does a good job of summarizing the many ways in which mobile technologies are being used successfully as tools for stimulating development. It’s intended to provide information and ideas for development practitioners […]
Striving and Surviving: exploring the lives of women at the Base of the Pyramid
On International Women’s Day, the GSMA mWomen Programme released a study called “Striving and Surviving – Exploring the Lives of Women at the Base of the Pyramid,” reports MobileActive.org. Drawn from 2,500 interviews with women (aged 16-64 in both rural and urban areas) living on less that $2 a day in Egypt, India, Papua New […]
Do m-health tools really work? Testing the impact of mobile technology on maternal and child healthcare
MobileActive has posted an in-depth new case study that focuses on evaluating mobile health interventions. Written by Kate Otto, the case study looks at testing the efficacy of using mobile phones in health care in Ethiopia. A team of researchers from The World Bank and Addis Ababa University developed a mobile tool that enables rural […]