Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
In a series of blog posts Rebecca S. Kuchar of Sylver Consulting illustrates the challenges and rewards of orchestrating global and multi-cultural research. A first focus is on France and Rebecca talks with Caroline Baker, founder and managing director of…
The commonly held belief that the internet is turning an entire generation into solitary web-junkies is a myth, according to new research. In a paper to be presented to a gathering of Nobel prize winners later this month, three influential…
Four interesting articles in Research Magazine, a UK industry magazine. This month we… browsed a virtual supermarket Robert Bain explores a simulated supermarket used to research products and store designs. Behind the sofa Simon Lidington thinks researchers have forgotten the…
Kevin Miller, global head of insight at in-flight magazine publisher Ink discusses how the environment impacts airline travellers psychologically and in turn affects their choice of media. “The airline passenger journey, from home to boarding the plane and beyond, is…
Tablet platforms break traditional paradigms of computer and mobile use, shows ethnographic and interview-based research conducted over the last year by UX research firm AnswerLab. “We have learned that although many people purchased iPads thinking they would be “big iPhones, 
Sarah Brooks of Shareable has just published the second part of her interview with the Italian design strategist Ezio Manzini, who is one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design…
In a long post on reBoot, Panthea Lee has laid out some basic principles, approaches, and tools of design research so public institutions can better understand how it serves their work. As pointed out by Tricia Wang, the article is…
On June 23, CHI Netherlands organised Chi Sparks, its bi-annual conference, and the keynote videos are now available. The theme of this year’s Chi Sparks conference was ‘HCI research, innovation and implementation’, and more in particular the very important contributions…
Jacquelyn Krones, a Senior Product Manager from Microsoft, is in charge of an ongoing ethnographic research project on understanding search behavior. “I would say the other big insight for us was around knowledge creation, which is also called “sense-making†in…
MIT technology and society specialist Professor Sherry Turkle presents – during a June 1 talk at the RSA in London – the results of a fifteen year exploration of the colossal impact technology has had on our lives and communities.…
Ken Banks, founder of kiwanja.net and FrontlineSMS, reports on how Activate 2011, the one-day conference in London on technology and development, made clear it’s not just about technology, but who uses it and how. “As the day drew to a…
Ethnography and The Corporate Encounter Reflections on Research in and of Corporations Edited by Melissa Cefkin Berghahn Books 2010, 262 pages Businesses and other organizations are increasingly hiring anthropologists and other ethnographically-oriented social scientists as employees, consultants, and advisors. The…
DPPI 11, the 5th conference on Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces, will take place in Milan at the end of this month, with leading roles for two Experientia partners: Mark Vanderbeeken will act as co-chair of the user-centred design track…
The number of times that Google has failed at delivering a successful ‘social’ product is in danger of rising to an embarrassing degree. Google Wave is no longer actively developed for use; Buzz has experienced low usage, and seems to…
New Media Technologies and User Empowerment Jo Pierson, Enid Mante-Meijer and Eugène Loos (eds.) Peter Lang – International Academic Publishers May 2011 317 pages ISBN 978-3-631-60031-3 Synopsis Recent developments in new media devices and applications have led to the rise…
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India, together with Shikoh Gitau and Gary Marsden of the University of Cape Town, have published their ethnographic insights in mobile-only internet use in urban South Africa. “Using an ethnographic action research approach, the study…
At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in September last year, Justin Rattner, the director of Intel Labs, announced a new research division, called Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) and headed by Genevieve Bell, and also presented a new…
Hubert Guillaud of the French online magazine InternetActu interviewed Stefana Broadbent, anthropologist and digital ethnographer, who in the last 20 years has been investigating the evolution of digital activities both at home and in the workplace, and has now written…
Two new articles on UX Matters: User research Is unnatural (but that’s okay), Part I by Jim Ross From the perspective of a participant, user research is not very natural. We ask participants to try to act naturally in the…
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr, a Swiss product manager, reflects thoughtfully on the recent strong discussion on user-led innovation. “There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about a post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, titled “User-Led Innovation…