Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Context-based Research Group was established in 1999, the goal was simple – to help marketers and product designers do better work through the power of ethnography. Margaret’s Walking Stick is Context’s perpetual anthropology / ethnography education project. Each month contains…
You’ve seen “The Bachelor” and “The Apprentice” … now, “The Consumer.” Or maybe “The Urban Ethnographer.” Chances are these private episodes won’t be screened for you; Carl Marziali reports. Listen to this feature
“The mobile communication society: A cross-cultural analysis of available evidence on the social uses of wireless communication technology” is the title of a research report that offers an analytical overview of existing research on the social uses of wireless…
As the leader of Sony Corporation’s mobile media research and design groups in Tokyo, John Poisson spent two years focused on how people use cameraphones, and why they don’t use them more often. Now, he and human-computer interaction researchers…
User experience and interface design in the context of creating software represents an approach that puts the user, rather than the system, at the centre of the process. This philosophy, called user-centred design, incorporates user concerns and advocacy from…
This article describes critical design ethnography, an ethnographic process involving participatory design work aimed at transforming a local context while producing an instructional design that can be used in multiple contexts. Download article (pdf, 1 mb)
A recent survey conducted by Microsoft corp finds that workers average only three productive days per week and lays the blame on among other things, unproductive staff meetings. Employees spend an average of 5.6 hours in meetings each week…
Dan Saffer reports in his blog on a talk on service design by Mark Jones, head of service design for IDEO Chicago.
[…] There is a certain correspondence between Microsoft’s research agenda and the work of the old-time anthropologists, many of whom were funded by colonial governments that needed to understand their native subjects in order to rule them more effectively. The…
At Intel, which wasn’t used to having a direct relationship with its end users, the challenges for an anthropologist were not simple. Read full story
With more than 1 billion cellphones in circulation around the world, the questions of how, when and why people use them have turned from matters of curiosity and conversation into serious subjects of academic research. Read full story
“So how do you feel about e-mail?” asks Simon Roberts, a social anthropologist. “How has it changed your workload?” This is not what social anthropologists are usually expected to ask: they observe courtship rituals, try to interpret ancient chants,…
User Experience Magazine is the global publication of the UPA, Usability Professional Association. It comes out three times a year and is written in the easy reading style of Interactions Magazine. Go to website
Microsoft Corp.’s research unit is turning to social scientists in a new effort to understand the long-term possibilities for computer technology in developing countries. A Microsoft Research lab, to be inaugurated tomorrow in Bangalore, India, plans to employ anthropologists, ethnographers…
NPR’s Eric Weiner reports on the emerging field of corporate anthropology, where researchers dissect consumer appetites and help engineers build user-friendly products. Listen
Genevieve Bell, a cultural anthropologist at Intel, has fundamentally changed the way we think about design, technology and culture. Through research and observation, Bell brought to our awareness how concepts of ‘home’, ‘family’ and ‘individual’ vary from one culture to…
For a summer, Dev Patnaik and his team of researchers hung out with teens preparing to go away to college. Trained in anthropology and sociology, they observed while the teens and their parents shopped for the essentials of college…
Anthropologists have deserted the bush to study modern techno-man and how he’s adapting to a world of wild gadgets. Read full story
Designers look into the future to meet people’s needs. Design for Future Needs is a research project that discovered how their methods can help policy makers do the same. The 2002 project, run for the EC by a group of…
Suddenly, Microsoft cares. If you run a small business, this may be just what you’ve been waiting for. Many companies talk about getting close to the customer, but Microsoft pushed this idea to the extreme when it hired Nelle…