Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley Pantheon, Hardcover January 2009 Abstract Over the past three decades, our daily lives…
Whitney Hess, an independent user experience designer, writer and consultant, asked some of the most influential and widely respected [USA] practitioners in UX (including Steve Baty, Mario Bourque, Dan Brown, Liz Danzico, Bill DeRouchey, Will Evans, Chris Fahey, Kaleem Khan,…
New York Times technology reporter Steve Lohr reports on the “dream” of the smart home. “Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been…
Nearly by accident I discovered Nokia’s recently launched IdeasProject, an effort “to surface Big Ideas about the future of communications — and to show the many ways that these ideas are connected”. It is definitely a site rich with content.…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, has posted a thoughtful essay on his blog about how trends in computing and design might affect the way that futurists work: how they could be used to sharpen…
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India and Camilo Andres Tellez of the London School of Economics and Political Science have together written a paper on mobile banking and economic development that just got published in the December issue of the…
Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan argues that most gadget and software makers don’t understand what users want most: control. Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability.…
John Maeda, the new president of RISD, wrote some smart words in Esquire (where he was profiled as one of 75 most influential people): “Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of “I can” than “I should,”…
Last week, the World Bank’s CGAP hosted a roundtable and webinar on the important topic of how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better (see also this blog…
Increasingly our personal records and social lives are being privatised, with normal people having very little recourse when these private services are being cancelled or the companies themselves disappear (as most companies eventually do). Currently the country where I live…
A Pew/Internet survey of internet leaders, activists and analysts shows they expect major tech advances as the phone becomes a primary device for online access, voice-recognition improves, artificial and virtual reality become more embedded in everyday life, and the architecture…
In a BBC background article on how Microsoft is missing the boat (again) on the latest technology development, Tim Weber points out usability as Microsoft’s main weakness: “The real Achilles heel of Microsoft’s devices was their abysmal user interface –…
The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has awarded UC Irvine a $1.7 million grant to create a new research institute focused on the growing use of mobile technology in providing banking and financial services to people in developing countries. The…
Bruce Sterling looked at the KashKlash questionnaire results and condensed it all into four narrative future scenarios. An excerpt from the last one: But then his son — who had gone into “cloud design,†God help him — started referring…
MIT’s Technology Review reports on how touch interaction on small and large displays could be the next big thing. “Thanks to the popularity of the iPhone, the touch screen has gained recognition as a practical interface for computers. In the…
I am currently watching a live webcast from the World Bank in Washington on mobile banking in emerging markets. If you are near a computer, you might want to check in too (there is 2.3 hours to go at the…
Mobile advertising specialist Alan Moore, founder of the communication consultancy SMLXL, was asked by Microsoft US to write a paper on the future of the mobile society. It is available as a whitepaper. “When it comes to mobile telecommunications, it…
Designing for Services in Science and Technology-Based Enterprises was an interdisciplinary research project (2006-2007) initiated by Saïd Business School (SBS) at the University of Oxford. The study explored how academics, service designers, and science and technology entrepreneurs understand the designing…
A year ago I wrote about Adam Greenfield’s pamphlet Urban computing and its discontents. Adam’s pamphlet was the firsts in a nine-part series that aims to explore the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture and urbanism: How are our experience…
The Tactical Technology Collective, an international NGO helping human rights advocates use information, communications and digital technologies to maximise the impact of their advocacy work, has just released “Mobiles in-a-Box“, a collection of tools, tactics, how-to guides, and case studies…