Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Gunnar Camner and Emil Sjöblom recently spent three months in Tanzania for their master’s thesis in Media Technology at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, Sweden, to investigate mobile banking services from a user perspective. In which contexts…
Nokia’s MeraNokia (Majha Nokia in Marathi) is actually a Nokia Life Tools (NLT) application coded into the 2300 and 2323 handsets being used in the pilot. Farmers and villagers pay around Rs 2 per day, every 10 days, for the…
Fascinating and seemingly very realistic tale on the potential of Nokia (and other device manufacturers) to be able to react to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007, based on the time frame of their product development cycles. “When the…
Can the Apple iPhone measure your happiness, asks Jenna Wortham on the New York Times Bits blog. “Matt Killingsworth, a doctoral candidate in psychology at Harvard University, thinks the phone might at least help researchers gather some data about it.…
In this article Jessica Ching, Laura Henneberry and Shally Lee share the findings of a collaborative project between the Ontario College of Art and Design (OCAD) and Canadian network operator TELUS. “Touch is a vital human need and a deeply…
While most people see mobile as the answer to so many problems, research from Nielsen Norman Group sees it as another problem on the list. “The key finding showed that users are 35 percent less successful completing Web site tasks…
In a country where people don’t have electricity, much less Internet access, the Grameen Foundation partners with Google to relay information through mobile phones. Dara Kerr reports from on the ground for CNet: “The research for this project began a…
Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Edinburgh and has spent more than a year investigating customer adoption and usage in both urban and rural Kenya, and has been sharing some of her insights on the CGAP blog.…
A promotional video earlier today, and now a patent application — too much of a coincidence: “We know that Nokia is looking into more areas than just buttons and touchscreens for phone controls, and a recently revealed patent has shed…
The Nokia Conversations blog reports: Designing gestures to help you interact with your device in intuitive ways is a challenge that Nokia is grabbing with both hands and welcoming with a respectful bow. Younghee Jung is one of Nokia’s explorative…
Mobile Communication by Rich Ling and Jonathan Donner Polity, 2009 200 pages With staggering swiftness, the mobile phone has become a fixture of daily life in almost every society on earth. In 2007, the world had over 3 billion mobile…
The Wall Street Journal and India Knowledge@Wharton present a unique mix of reporting, analysis, interviews and video on life and business in rural India. The Rural India reader resource combines specially-commissioned material with recent articles. A selection of articles relevant…
Last week Google announced a suite of SMS services in Uganda. In a follow-up post on the main google blog, the company explains that it is the result of more than a year of true user-centred research and design. “We…
Katrin Verclas of Mobile Active points out that the new Google/ MTN/ Grameen collaboration on mobile information services in Uganda is very expensive, and this is creating some problems: “This will, be definition, limit access of such services to the…
A few days into the brouhaha about Nokia-Siemens Networks equipment being used for surveillance in Iran, Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase reflects on the controversy, and delves into the subject of privacy.
In an article for Computerworld, Paul Lamb suggests that we are transitioning from online social media to an era of social mobile media or “SoMoâ€. “Social media is literally on the move. While useful for anonymous and asynchronous communications, computer-based…
In an article with a very stupid illustration, MobileCrunch reports on a short story that appeared in the German version of Technology Review, which states that Gesche Joost, head of the Design Research Lab of Deutsche Telekom Laboratories, says “making…
Now that the refrains of “Twitter Revolution” and “the first uprising powered by social media” are fading into the distant memory that is 24 hours ago, we can start debating, says Jonathan Salem Baskin, what impact, if any, it had…
Last week I quoted from Robert Fabricant’s contribution to a Fast Company discussion roundtable on the impact of the mobile phone. Robert has meanwhile posted the full text of his response to the questions. Here another quote: “Density and connectivity…
A recent HarvardBusiness.org article about the use of anthropology and ethnography in global R&D strategies (blogged about here), has got Nokia’s user anthropologist Jan Chipchase a bit worked up, as he thinks it “largely misses the point”. “For all the…