Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Adam Greenfield has written a truly excellent post — in fact more like a short essay — on the difference between location and context, calling the first one positivist and the second one phenomenological. “But it [the positivist tradition] stands…
Russell Davies is concerned that “we’ll end up blundering into cities plastered with the equivalent of flash banners and microsites.” “Technologists are busying themselves turning buildings into displays, or at least draping them with informatics (whether physically or via various…
MobileActive reports on how farmers in emerging markets are using mobile phones to improve their livelihoods: Agriculture is what keeps economies in most developing countries alive. However, farmers in many countries face major challenges. In an age of global markets,…
The International Herald Tribune reports that leading consumer technology companies “are revamping their audio and video equipment for a future centered around the Internet, a world in which televisions, stereos, computers – even kitchen appliances like dishwashers and refrigerators –…
The PICNIC conference website has posted a short but intriguing interview with Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s new head of design direction. An excerpt about the urban experience, technology and solitude: “You know, I believe that cities are all about difficulty. They’re…
Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Twine, reflects in an smart foresight article on ReadWriteWeb on the future of the desktop, now that everything is moving to “the cloud”. Here are his predictions: The desktop of the future is going…
A new generation of well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according…
The Economist is enlisting the “collective power of [its] readers” to improve its online resources, and has created “Behind the curtain“, a blog to “give our readers a way to engage in what we build and how we build it,…
The New York Times reports on how software designers get hands-on with real world objects to learn to think more creatively and intuitively, featuring examples from Adobe and Mike Kuniavsky’s Sketching in Hardware gatherings. Using computers to model the physical…
Benjamin Dangl of AlterNet reflects on how cell phone use has crept into every aspect of daily life, ironically weakening the basic human communication that is the fabric of any community. As Slate commented in his Adbusters essay, “It seems…
Jonathan Follett writes on how as UX designers or researchers — we’ll be on the forefront of the movement to handle the coming flood of data — and make it not only available, but easy for people to use and…
It has been pointed out before [The Economist – San Francisco Chronicle] that immigrant workers are often the most advanced users of communications technology. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica today provided an unusual example of this phenomenon: drug dealers (which…
Coinciding with the introduction of Dell’s new laptops, the company launched a new community site called Digital Nomads (with not much Dell branding to be seen). According to a Dell press release, the site “is designed for individuals who are…
Alan Cooper was asked by the leadership of the Agile 2008 Conference to give the closing keynote address at their annual conference in Toronto. Since the audience at Agile08 consisted of about 1500 programmers, engineers, product managers, and others involved…
Carolyn Wood contemplates in another article on A List Apart how we can transform discussion sections on major sites and online magazines from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration. “The real challenge is to move beyond basics to something much…
Because of limited awareness around Deafness and accessibility in the web community, it seems plausible to many of us that good captioning will fix it all. Lisa Herrod argues on A List Apart that it won’t. “How many times have…
CNN reports on the cell phone boom in Africa: “In less than a decade, cellphones, once the preserve of the very rich, are now ubiquitous in Africa and parts of Asia. A device that’s sometimes used as a fashion accessory…
Randal Stross of the New York Times explains why many experts propose dropping website passwords entirely for a security system based on cryptography. The best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination…
Because today’s social networking rarely function or perform well on a mobile device, Oz Communications CEO Jim Knapik argues that carriers must find a simple way to bring the best social networking communities to the mobile masses. A complete mobile…
According to the Register, HP Labs is hard at work figuring how to harvest the collective intelligence of groups arising from “web 2.0” and turn it into a profit. In a short article, the Register reports on an update that…