Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The Economist reports on how virtual worlds are being put to serious real-world uses—and are starting to encounter some real-world problems. “With the popularity of virtual worlds such as Second Life and games such as “World of Warcraft” and “Sims Online”, companies, academics, health-care providers…
The EPIC 2007 conference on ethnographic praxis in industry has a blog, and it’s not what you think. The format is that of a newspaper or magazine advice column where readers can ask questions to a specialist. Each week the “doctor” will be selecting one…
In a Business Week interview design guru Don Norman argues for making autos less automated and for infusing gadgets with natural, easy-to-interpret feedback signals. In his new book, The Design of Future Things (Basic Books), Don Norman isn’t afraid to call himself out on statements…
Business Week profiles Anne Kirah, former design anthropologist at Microsoft, and now Dean of the new Danish school called 180°academy, where she is “shaking managers out of their traditional ways of doing things and forcing them, perhaps for the first time, to understand their customers’…
A conversation between the authors Adam Greenfield and Mark Shepard provides an overview of the key issues, historical precedents, and contemporary approaches to designing situated technologies and inhabiting cities populated by them. “The Situated Technologies Pamphlet series explores the implications of ubiquitous computing for architecture…
The current issue of the magazine of Philips Design contains a long article about the company’s design research approach: “Scientists send probes into deep space in an attempt to get a better understanding of the unknown. Philips Design does something similar with its own probes…
The TED conference has published its video of the talk by Nokia’s “user anthropologist” Jan Chipchase in March this year: Nokia principal researcher Jan Chipchase’s investigation into the ways we interact with technology has led him from the villages of Uganda to the insides of…
Nokia’s latest study, ‘A Glimpse of the Next Episode’, predicts that within five years a quarter of all entertainment will be created, edited and shared within peer groups rather than coming out of traditional media groups. Trend-setting consumers from 17 countries were asked about their…
According to Niti Bhan, Nathan Eagle‘s post on the limitations of the current perception of the mobile internet experience for the developing world are “spot on and the most insightful I have come across to date”. Here is a quote from his article on the…
In an article for UXmatters, Hilary Cooldige of Molecular reviews current research on teen mobile phone us, argues for contextual user research and mobile usability studies in the field, and presents some of the results of her own field studies. Read full story
M3, the Dutch marketing conference, was this year devoted to co-creation. Keynote speakers were Charles Leadbeater (author of We-Think) and Andrew Keen (author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture), arguing their “enemy” positions. Future Lab‘s Alain Thys lets…
2007 Summer at Kitchen Budapest (Paperback) by Bircsák Eszter, Somlai-Fischer Szabolcs (ed.) Kitchen Budapest (KiBu), opening in June 2007, (see also here) is a brand new media lab for young researchers who are not only interested in the convergence of mobile communication, online communities and…
Dott 07 was a year of community design projects in North East England that explored what life in a sustainable region could be like – and how design can help us get there. It is called a manual (rather than a book, or catalogue) because…
UXnet, the user experience network, launched its new website this week, with some major improvements. UXnet is a platform organisation that provides tools and resources for the user experience community. It works with a worldwide network of local ambassadors. The new site, which has been…
Tom Davenport (Babson College) has written a Harvard Business column entitled “The Rise of Corporate Anthropology” where he lauds the contribution of anthropology because of its emphasis on observation: “What’s so good about systematic observation? It’s the key to knowing what’s working and what isn’t,…
Changing the change. Design Visions, Proposals and Tools is an international conference, chaired by Ezio Manzini (blog) of the Politecnico di Milano, on the role and results of design research in the transition towards sustainability. The conference will be held in Torino, Italy, 10 to…
Mitchell Ashley, ceo and chief strategist of Converging Network, analyses why there is a growing number of dissatisfied users who’ve tried and given up on Microsoft’s Vista operating system. He concludes that it is “the user experience where many of Vista’s problems emanate” and gives…
The New York Times reports on how in the collective patter of profile-surfing, messaging and “friending,” academic researchers see the resurgence of older patterns of oral communication. “The growing popularity of social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace and Second Life has thrust many of us…
The Urban Atmospheres project (video) is exploring how people who live in cities might want to use technology, how it could help them develop a sense of community or belonging, or play into their emotional experiences of urban living. “By gaining a better understanding of…
From Intel’s Essential Computing website: Intel Research’s over-arching vision for the future is evolving from one of proactive computing to one of Essential Computing. Over the years, we’ve been part of a steady evolution moving computing from the machine room out into people’s workplaces and…
Michael Hawley, user experience director of Mad*Pow published an article about card sorting as a user-centred tool to reorganise information-rich web sites. “Card sorting is an appealing research technique to assist in the organization or re-organization of an information-rich Web site. But conducting the sorts…
“Despite the rapid development of the internet, the overall goal of designing an intuitive, easy to use website has not changed,” says Mona Patel, executive director of Human Factors International. “The challenge that exists is how to gauge customers’ emotional responses accurately so that businesses…
Joannes Vandermeulen is a practitioner and teacher of Interaction Design. In 1987, he founded Namahn, a consultancy for user-centred design of software and online products, based in Brussels. Johannes was one of the keynote speaker at the German IA conference a few weeks ago. His…
Many mobile service providers are failing to capitalise on potentially lucrative corporate contracts because they don’t focus enough on client’s business needs, according to Gartner. Service providers that don’t update their sales strategies to provide tailored solutions to businesses risk losing valuable corporate customers and…
The UK Design Council sponsored conference InterSections 07 brought together 34 leading thinkers in design to consider how design is evolving and how this is affecting its relationships with other fields. The conference, held in NewcastleGateshead in October 2007, asked how design is transforming as…
Jakob Nielsen has published the executive summary of his study of 56 intranets. The study documents intranet IA processes and the resulting designs, both in terms of the visible user interfaces and the underlying structures. The report contains detailed profiles of 56 real-world intranets’ information…
At last week’s 7-Minute Soapbox in Waterloo, Canada, Declan Whelan of Whelan & Associates talked about how to fit user experience/design/usability into an agile development process. There is a crisis in the software world! Well, I’m not sure if you can call something a crisis…
An article in the New York Times cites recent surveys challenging the notion that smartphones are ready for primetime: Surveys by Yankee Group, a Boston research firm, show that only 13 percent of cellphone users in North America use their phones to surf the Web…
Jesse James Garrett, who coined the term AJAX, says that consumers want a personal relationship with the products they use, reports PC World. The inventor of the term AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), urged attendees at The Rich Web Experience conference in San Jose, Calif.…
Apple has been progressively changing its retail store format over the past year, eliminating cash registers while introducing several new services and increased staffing, to create a more personalized and friendly environment for customers, reports MacNN in an article entitled “Apple overhauls retail customer experience”.…
Now that Donald Norman‘s new book, The Design of Future Things, has been published, the man is on a book tour and interviews with him are popping up left and right. After a first one on Core77 (see also this post), Norman is now also…
The Wireless World Initiative (WWI) has developed prototype user-centred systems that will potentially enable millions of people to make the most of third-generation (3G) and beyond mobile technology to work, relax and play any time, anywhere. ICT Results reports back from WWI’s crowning event. “It…
Aparna Kalra reports in Mint, a new Indian business newspaper produced in collaboration with the Wall Street Journal, on how the trend of cool hunting – and then innovating – in India by companies also illustrates how the country is moving higher in the food…
From an article in the E-Commerce Times: “In today’s business world, losing any customer or partner is expensive and unnecessary. It costs up to 10 times more to acquire a customer than to keep an existing one, according to Gartner. Today, customers and partners must…
The people at Smashing present what they call “some of the outstanding recent developments in the field of user experience design.” The very visual feature contains an overview of the most recent tactile and touch interfaces. (via UX Magazine)
The French newspaper Le Monde has published a special report on Samsung, including a highly visual special on Samsung’s design strategy, which by the way features glimpses of a few rather interesting looking presentation slides (the design goal is to create a culturally-based emotional experience,…
The Experience Project (EP), which launched a public beta about a year ago, is built specifically around the concept of remaining anonymous while socializing, explains Josh Catone of Read/Write Web. The site has grown to 250,000 members, almost 60% of those added in the past…
In “Responsibilities and Implications: Further Thoughts on Ethnography and Design“, presented a few weeks ago at DUX2007, UC Irvine professor Paul Dourish continues to elaborate on the use of ethnography in human-computer interaction and the “implications for design” issues he addressed at CHI2006. In the…
Umpqua Bank has opened its new store concept in Portland, Ore’s South Waterfront neighborhood. The store will serve as Umpqua’s Innovation Lab, showcasing emerging and existing technologies that foster community and redefine what consumers can expect from a banking experience. As a testing ground for…
Last week Joe Lamantia, a New York-based user experience and information architecture consultant, gave the closing talk at the Italian IA Summit in Trento, entitled “The DIY Future: what happens when everyone is a designer?”. In his seemingly very interesting presentation, he talks about integrated…