Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
(After two posts about car companies, this is refreshing) Hundreds of towns and cities across Europe begin a week of events designed to persuade people to choose forms of transport other than cars. More than 900 towns and cities in…
Imagine how many problems around the world we can begin to solve if we use our insight into human needs, combine it with all our available knowledge and technology, and make use of our creativity… The INDEX: Views Summit, which…
Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for “real time†coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens “text†to each other day and night. The…
Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you…
A “social” web browser has been created to meet the needs of a new generation of web users who want to edit, comment on and share web content, rather than just peruse it. With the underlying capabilities of a basic…
When Lego executives recently discovered that adult fans of the iconic plastic bricks had hacked one of the company’s new development tools for digital designers, they did a surprising thing: they cheered. Unlike executives at so many corporations, who would…
How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically…
John Maeda, professor at MIT Media Lab, argues in this short article that good design gives users just enough, but not too much, information — once knowledge is gleaned, attention moves easily on to a larger task. Read full story
With concerns mounting over the safety of cell phone use while driving (about 25 to 30 % of all traffic accidents are distraction-related and an estimated 40 % of all mobile traffic takes place in vehicles), Motorola’s Driving Simulator Lab…
In a blog that talks about participatory design and how users can contribute to the design of services, we cannot sidestep the ethical issue. Often people’s creativity and cultural contributions are used against their own interests. In a long and…
“Putting people first”, the experience design blog that you are reading now, has been chosen as blog of the month by Techsmith, the company that produces the Morae usability testing software. It is listed on the Techsmith site under usability…
Next year there will be more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the world. Marko Ahtisaari, Director of Design Strategy at Nokia, outlines seven challenges to our shared mobile future: reach, sometimes off versus always on, hackability, social primitives,…
A video-blogger from Bergen in Norway is aiming to energise a new generation of voters ahead of Norwegian parliamentary elections, and turning his camcorder on politicians. Read full story
The Sacred World Foundation was founded several years ago by Ranjit Makkuni, a visionary and designer and a former leading researcher at Xerox PARC. It is a state of the art research and design think tank, located in New Delhi,…
Despite increasing numbers of data-enabled mobile phones it seems that users are lost when it comes to data services. In a survey carried out by mobile software company SurfKitchen not one mobile phone user could correctly identify the data package…
From 21st to 23rd September 2005 the First World Conference on the Future of Science will be held in Venice, Italy. The idea of this conference arises from the awareness that the problems/ questions generated by the enormous scientific and…
As the new vice-president of the user experience and design group at Yahoo! Inc., Larry Tesler is charged with fine-tuning some of the Internet’s primest real estate: the Yahoo.com home page. Read full story
The Economist has just published a survey of higher education (which can be viewed without subscription) and argues in an editorial that the state of Europe’s higher education is a long-term threat to its competitiveness. Europe’s only chance of preserving…
Glocalmap.to (site currently in Italian only) is a large-scale cultural “social tagging” project that integrates web mapping, thematic tagging and mobile phone messaging, to create a new urban narrative for the city of Turin. It allows citizens and visitors alike…
> The yearly CHI conferences are the premier international meeting place for human-computer interaction. The next edition, CHI 2006, will take place in Montreal, Canada on April 22-27, 2006. A call for participation has just been posted. Submissions are organised…