Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Ken Banks argues in an article on PCWorld that mobile technology is showcasing African grassroots innovation at its finest. “Africans are not the passive recipients of technology many people seem to think they are. Indeed, some of the more exciting…
Alcatel-Lucent’s Worldwide Lab is an innovative primary research program focused on soliciting the end-user experiences and preferences from the highly coveted teen and young adult market. Lab Members are made up of users from around the world and range in…
Alastair Curtis, Nokia’s chief designer, discusses his design inspirations, coming Nokia devices and how Indian teenagers will influence the future of mobility, in an interview published on Forbes.com. As Nokia’s chief designer, a post the company veteran has held since…
Michelle Fuller, Director at eDigitalResearch, writes in the Financial Times on the user experience of online banking: With the banking sector moving towards consolidation, it is crucial that customers are understood, reacted to and rewarded for their loyalty. With the…
Hilary Cottam is the 2005 UK Designer of the Year and former director of RED [archive site], the meanwhile closed innovation unit of the UK Design Council. I interviewed her last year for Torino World Design Capital site. And she…
Last week frog design and IxDA NY organised Tiger.Blam, a public conversation with Nokia’s Jan Chipchase on effective design research in cross-cultural mobile markets, or in other words, how he ‘designs’ his research expeditions. No video or presentation download is…
Two user experience magazines landed on my desk this week. They are available only to subscribers, both in print and online. But subscriptions are relatively cheap. User Experience is the quarterly magazine of the Usability Professionals’ Association (membership is a…
Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM wrote an article on ubiquitous computing user experience design for ACM’s interactions magazine. The user experience design of most everyday ubiquitous computing devices—things you see in gadget blogs—is typically terrible. That’s because we do not address…
Videos of the September LIFT conference in Seoul, Korea are slowly being posted. The latest one is by Jan Chipchase, a well-known Nokia user researcher. “He details the nine trends he thinks will shape the future of social interactions, trends…
The Nordic Innovation Centre recently published a report on user-driven innovation in the Nordic region. The 137 page report describes in detail what user-driven innovation actually is, outlines the current state of affairs in each of the five countries (Denmark,…
Simon Pulman-Jones, head of ethnography & innovation at GfK NOP, argues that ethnography can provide unparalleled insight into any given experience from your customers’ point of view, and describes how it is different from ‘normal’ research. The unique value of…
The Department of Anthropology at the University of California at Irvine recently organised a workshop on innovation in digital money, entitled Everyday Digital Money. The workshop examined this emerging, complex, and unevenly distributed landscape of digital money innovation from cultural,…
In a cover article, BrandWeek explores the value of design thinking. While the design-thinking approach may sound rather seat-of-the-pants, the truth is that it’s surprisingly regimented, consisting of three phases: observation, ideation and implementation. […] Focus groups have their place,…
Nokia Open Studios are a design research method for engaging communities in shanty towns. According to Nokia’s senior design manager Younghee Jung, they were set up as a community design competition with the theme of ‘design your ideal mobile phone’,…
Hubert Guillaud has written again a short analysis on why it makes no sense at all for companies to create something like intelligent fridges. His main argument is that nobody has any need for such a device. Although the article…
The New York Times reports on a nine-person team at Microsoft Research India that assesses whether quirky ideas can make technology useful to those who have heretofore lived without it. “A nine-person team at Microsoft Research India […] approaches the…
Yesterday Genevieve Bell, a highly respected anthropologist and Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group, gave a lecture at Indiana University’s School of Informatics. One of the university’s doctoral student reports: Bell used an ethnographic lens to examine…
The fourth annual international Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference (EPIC) took place in Copenhagen, Denmark last week. As described by Lucy Kimbell, EPIC “brings together those working in organizations for whom ethnography is central to their practice. They might be…
A month ago I posted about Philips new intimate massager product range. It turns out there was quite a bit of qualitative user testing involved, as you can read in this background article and this interview.