Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Applying Anthropology in the Global Village Christina Wasson (Editor); Mary Odell Butler (Editor); Jacqueline Copeland-Carson (Editor) 288 pp. – Nov, 2011 Left Coast Press Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5) Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2) [Amazon link] Synopsis The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional…
A two-year, five-campus ethnographic study on how students view and use their campus libraries showed that students rarely ask librarians for help, even when they need it. The idea of a librarian as an academic expert who is available to…
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…
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…
Architects and construction companies can learn a lot still from the techniques of ethnographers and UX designers. Here is an example from the Real Estate section of the Washington Post: “What do home buyers want? For more than two decades,…
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, 
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…
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…
Ethnographies of the Videogame: Gender, Narrative and Praxis by Helen Thornham, City University London, UK Ethnographies of the Videogame Ashgate, July 2011, 218 pages [Amazon UK link] Ethnographies of the Videogame uses the medium of the videogame to explore wider…
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…
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…
In his book The Human Factor, Kim Vicente presents the Human-Tech Ladder, which categorizes human and societal needs according to five factors: physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political. Many UX professionals are familiar with usability testing, which focuses on the…
As a follow-up to the previous post, Intel’s user experience discourse is further elaborated on by Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and the company’s Director of Interaction and Experience Research. Bell’s main job is to look at what motivates people, and…
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, a Xerox Company), a premier center for commercial innovation, announced that Dr. Margaret Szymanski, Senior Researcher and interaction analyst on PARC’s Ethnography Services team and Dr. James Begole, Principal Scientist and manager of PARC’s Ubiquitous…
L’École de design in Nantes, France, has just launched the second issue of their research journal CADI, which focuses on co-creation, cross-disciplining and knowledge transfer. The three core feature articles are: From art history to industrial design history Jocelyne Le…
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…
Simplifying the workplace so customers can allocate more time and resources to their core business is fundamental to the innovation incubating today in Xerox’s labs – and is the purpose of prototype customer care software revealed by the company this…
LiveMint.com, the Indian online partner publication of the Wall Street Journal, reports on India’s first Design!publiC conclave “on design thinking and the challenge of government innovation,” which took place in New Delhi on 18 March. The event — which was…
Designing and Conducting Ethnographic Research: An Introduction Paperback, 376 pages AltaMira Press; Second edition 2010 [Amazon link] The Ethnographer’s Toolkit series begins with this primer, which introduces novice and expert practitioners alike to the process of ethnographic research, including answers…
David Sherwin reflects on the frog design blog about the SXSW conference, starting from the questions raised in the contribution by Genevieve Bell (director of Intel’s Interactions and Experience Research Lab) there entitled “Our devices: how smart is too smart?“.…