Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Ethnographer Tricia Wang wrote an excellent and long comment on why Google is having troubles in China: While unfortunate that Google.CN may be shutting down, my ethnographic work in China revealed five things that aren’t being told in the current…
Arup Australasia has published a three-part technical overview on its research blog of its ‘urban sensing via mobile phones’ project. The research project, in collaboration with the UTS Centre for Real-Time Information Networks, explores technical approaches to sensing the presence…
Western companies are struggling to bridge the growing gap created by the evolution of a cyberspace with Chinese characteristics. Kathrin Hille explains some of the cultural (and political) differences in today’s Financial Times. “[Chinese people] tend to roam the web…
Skype commissioned the Institute for the Future to research and start a conversation about the future of real-time video communication and what will it feel like to live and work in a world where real-time video is ubiquitous. The newly-released…
The average young American now spends practically every waking minute — except for the time in school — using a smart phone, computer, television or other electronic device, according to a new study from the Kaiser Family Foundation. Those ages…
Interesting Google Blog article on how user research dramatically improved driving directions on Google Maps India. The research was based on the fact that street names are not commonly known in India and the typical wayfinding strategy is to ask…
The World Economic Forum today released its study on Scaling Opportunity: Information and Communications Technology for Social Inclusion, an analysis of how ICT is evolving to address the social and economic needs of the poor. The study notes that, as…
The New York Times reports on “natural” gestural interfaces in an article entitled “Giving Electronic Commands With Body Language”: “In the coming months, the likes of Microsoft, Hitachi and major PC makers will begin selling devices that will allow people…
Yahoo Labs is beefing up its ranks of social scientists, adding highly credentialed cognitive psychologists, economists and ethnographers from top universities around the world, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. “In the last year, Yahoo Labs has bolstered its ranks of…
In his new book, “You Are Not A Gadget,” online pioneer Jaron Lanier explains how the Internet has gone off course. In this Wall Street Journal, he summarises the key ideas and it turns out to be a full-blown rant…
A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web, so Stowe Boyd wrote a “short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive science/anthropology angle”. “The framing of…
The Trill Centre is a project by Intel, Ireland’s Industrial Development Agency (IDA), and academic partners including Trinity College Dublin, University College Dublin and the National University of Ireland Galway, focused on technology research for independent living (TRIL). In essence,…
Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook, writes Dana Oshiro on ReadWriteWeb. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook’s collegiate origins encouraged a group of…
That new phone or laptop may be giving you a warm glow, but beware a stealth attack on your happiness, warns Yair Amichai-Hamburger in The New Scientist. “Our lifestyles are increasingly driven by technology. Phones, computers and the internet pervade…
Thomas Petersen, co-founder and partner of Danish digital creative agency Hello, reflects on the experience and design implications of the exponential growth of information. “Constantly checking our feeds for new information, we seem to be hoping to discover something of…
Bonnier R&D, the research unit of Bonnier, the publisher of Popular Science, invited the designers from BERG London on a corporate collaborative research project into the experience of reading magazines on handheld digital devices. “The concept aims to capture the…
Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world, argues Adrian Higgins in the Washington Post, who writes…
Augmented Reality is overhyped and abused, writes Matthew Szymczyk in Advertising Age, and we’re in danger of killing off a rather useful technology. “As web-based augmented-reality applications have exploded, it’s more important than ever to remember AR is a technology…
The UK’s Technology Strategy Board is calling for individuals to take part in a five-day interactive workshop (‘sandpit’) to explore the challenge of reducing the demand for energy in non-domestic buildings, through human factors research and user-centred design. The focus…
Danah Boyd, a social media researcher at Microsoft Research, is quite in the news these days, including a very nice profile in The Guardian: The Guardian – 9 December 2009 Danah Boyd: ‘People looked at me like I was an…