Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Michael Ohler, Phil Samuel and Mark McMurray of BMGI argue in Industry Week that focusing on human behavior and personal experiences can help you discover unmet customer needs and gain a deeper understanding of your customer. “Ethnography does not start…
Last year, I posted about the very interesting PhD dissertation by Alice E. Marwick (downloadable here). Based on ethnographic research of the San Francisco technology scene, she explains how social media’s technologies are based on status-seeking techniques that encourage people…
Alexa Curtis recently attended EPIC, the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference, a truly international gathering of ethnographers, anthropologists, strategists, designers, and others who are committed to understanding audiences in order to inform appropriate solutions. Unlike past years, there was no…
Two new articles on Ethnography Matters: Ethnographies from the Future: What can ethnographers learn from science fiction and speculative design? Laura Forlano (@laura4lano) is a tenure-track Assistant Professor of Design at the Institute of Design at Illinois Institute of Technology…
People-Centered Innovation: Becoming a Practitioner in Innovative Research by Pedro Oliveira Biblio Publishing, 2013 194 pages [Amazon] Written with a general audience in mind, People-Centered Innovation focuses on innovation research in corporate settings. Starting with a biographical standpoint, it describes…
Delivering Design: Performance and Materiality in Professional Interaction Design is the title of the PhD dissertation Elizabeth Sarah Goodman defended last year to obtain the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Information Management and Systems at UC Berkeley. It is…
This week, business anthropologists from all over the world descended on the Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference at London’s Royal Institution, the historic site where Michael Faraday first demonstrated the power of electricity, reports Emma Jacobs in the Financial Times.…
This month’s theme of EthnographyMatters, edited by Nicolas Nova, is about the relationships between ethnography, speculative fiction and design. “In design circles, the current interest in “design fiction†is geared towards exploring how prototyping and storytelling can benefit from each…
Design Anthropology: Theory and Practice Editor(s): Wendy Gunn, Ton Otto, Rachel Charlotte Smith Bloomsbury Academic, 2013 304 pages Design is a key site of cultural production and change in contemporary society. Anthropologists have been involved in design projects for several…
EPIC 2013, the conference on “ethnographic praxis in industry”, kicked off in London today, with experts from around the world gathering for the three-day conference exploring ethnographic investigations and principles in the study of human behavior as they are applied…
Brigitte Jordan, the legendary corporate anthropologist, once described as one of the “godmothers†of design ethnography, has posted four new papers on her website: The Double Helix of Learning: Knowledge Transfer in Traditional and Techno-Centric Communities Draft. Comments appreciated. In…
The July 2013 issue of the Journal of Marketing (a publication of AMA, the American Marketing Association) describes the results of a comprehensive study (pdf) by Julian Cayla and Eric J. Arnould on the way various organizations use ethnography to…
Juliette de Maeyer kicks off this month’s edition of EthnographyMatters which focuses on Ethnographies of Objects, with a response to two questions posed to her: ‘Why is the hyperlink an interesting object of journalism?’ And ‘What’s the best way to…
Applying ethnographic methods to digital experiences can yield myriad benefits that go beyond simply validating that something works or identifying opportunities for improvement, write Jessica Weber and John Cheng of AnswerLab. Ethnography reveals how digital and physical processes work together…
This month’s edition of EthnographyMatters is dedicated to education. Says editor Morgan G. Ames, “ethnography is unique in being able to dig below the surface and uncover the complicated processes and contingent effects of education and education reform.” Some personal…
Anthropologist Natalie Hanson has written a series of blog posts regarding Agile methods and the implications for user experience work. Recognizing Agile List of the top ways to know you’re working in an Agile environment A brief overview of Agile…
What are people’s philosophy and attitudes toward loans and debt? And how financial marketers can respond to their basic emotional needs in the lending process? Americans have a complicated relationship with debt, one that defies easy analysis. That’s why a…
Large-scale surveys are useful but if we are serious about changing behaviours, we must use every tool to understand human complexity, writes Steven Johnson in the Sustainable Business section of The Guardian. Ethnographic approaches allow us to observe consumer behaviour…
EPIC, the premier international gathering on the current and future practice of ethnography in the business world, just announced the program of its upcoming conference in London (15-18 September) and Experientia is proud to announce that it will be presenting…
From the Journal of Information Architecture: Sense-making in Cross-channel Design Jon Fisher (Nomensa), Simon Norris (Nomensa), and Elizabeth Buie (Luminanze Consulting) Successful cross-channel user experiences rely upon a strong informational layer that creates understanding amongst users of a service. This…