Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Donald Norman‘s shining career began with a post at Harvard and then the University of California, San Diego, where his interests in psychology turned toward cognitive science. As one of the founders of that field, he eventually shifted his energies toward the relationship between user…
Jim Gilmore and Joe Pine, authors of the 1999 marketing classic, The Experience Economy: Work is Theater and Every Business a Stage, have just published a new book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want (see also this post). In a review Bob Jacobson calls it “an…
Business Week looks at how improving the user experience could inspire people to tap into the system more regularly to help stave off more serious illness. “Focusing on improving the user experience could inspire people to tap into the system more regularly to support healthful…
Doing Anthropology in Consumer ResearchPatricia L. Sunderland; Rita M. DennyLeft Coast Press, Inc.352 pp.Nov, 2007 Abstract Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research is an essential new guide to the theory and practice of conducting ethnographic research in corporate consumer environments. Patricia Sunderland and Rita Denny argue…
Bruce Tognazzini was Apple’s 66th employee, developing the company’s first usability guidelines and founding its Human Interface team. Almost thirty years later, he’s a principal at Nielsen Norman Group and still making his feelings known when companies commit design errors. In this interview n E-Consultancy,…
Using the Slow Food Movement as a metaphor, innovation and creativity expert Derek Cheshire suggests a slow approach to innovation. “There is immense pressure to innovate quickly or to rush to market, but does this bargain of speed versus quality really benefit a company?” In…
At the first keynote of Toronto’s Future Play 2007 conference for game educators and developers, Dr. Constance Steinkuehler, assistant professor in the Educational Communication & Technology program for the University of Wisconsin-Madison, argued that MMOs and online worlds are good “push technologies” for education, rather…
The 19th issue of Vodafone’s Receiver magazine is devoted to communities. Receiver is Vodafone’s magazine for future thinkers, attracting a wide range of influential writers and industry leaders. It is conceived as a neutral space, where pioneer thinkers challenge readers to discuss exciting and future-oriented…
An interview with Peter Morville, widely recognised as a founding father of information architecture, on the topic of Web 2.0 was just published in Shanghai Talk, a city lifestyle magazine published in English in China. The article, also picked up by Beijing Talk and Macau…
Processing is an open-source programming language that can be used by students, artists, designers, architects, researchers, and anyone who wants to program images, animation, and interactivity. There were many people involved in making Processing to what it is now, but at is origins were two…
Our increasingly interconnected world has made it easier for information and disease to spread. However a new study from Harvard University and Cornell University, entitled “Complex Contagions and the Weakness of Long Ties” shows that fewer “degrees of separation” can make social networks too weak…
From the New Scientist: “Making sense of an ever-increasing number of emails, web pages, feeds, and social networking contacts is a tough job for even the most organised person. But now a new website can organise your life like a personal assistant, say its developers.…
Theorists have long argued that two distinct concepts of value drive the production of the built environment: exchange value and use value. In this article Joost Beunderman, a researcher at the UK think-tank Demos argues that, “if we would wish to favour the use value…
Design, Wit, and The Creative Act is a half day conversation, organised by Core77, about leveraging the power of humor towards great customer experiences. In the run-up to the event, Randy J. Hunt did a short interview Allan Chochinov of Core77 about the event’s aims,…
Bob Jacobson, design consultant and editor of the anthology Information Design (MIT Press, 1999), is on a roll these days. Today the focus of his provocative commentary is the DUX 2007 conference, which he thinks is “ideologically discomforting” and “fundamentally off the mark”. “The DUX…
Nathan Shedroff, the new programme chair of the MBA in design strategy at California College of the Arts (see also this post), gave a very powerful talk entitled “Design is the Problem” at the recent Connecting ’07 congress on the topic of sustainability and design.…
Bob Jacobson, design consultant and editor of the anthology Information Design (MIT Press, 1999), was a keynote speaker last month at the 3rd International Conference on Information Design (ICID), Curitiba, Brazil. His talk which deals with “information design, user experience design, designing for experience, and…
According to an article in Adweek magazine, P&G’s efforts to reinforce consumer perception of quality in its brands will be a key to the company’s success. “Historically at P&G we looked at product performance. We didn’t pay as much attention to product experience,” says Claudia…
Riyad Emeran wrote a thought piece in Trusted Reviews on what matters to people: “The thing about technology is that the vast majority people out there don’t really care about it. Despite the fact that those same people wouldn’t leave the house without their mobile…
Last week Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken attended the Philips Simplicity Event in London. It was a mixture of a vision presentation, a prototype exhibition, a networking event, and a marketing opportunity. The prototypes on show were conceptual designs for social care environments five years into…
Far from fading out, as some media reports indicate, Philips Design believes that there is serious attention being paid to virtual immersive spaces, like Second Life, as dialogue with virtual world residents uncovers what companies can achieve above and beyond public relations and branding activities.…
The San Jose Mercury News reports on why users need convincing that mobile banking is convenient and secure. “South Bay residents Curtis McGovert, Dave Ritter and Leon Mendiola have at least three things in common. They own cell phones. They bank at Wells Fargo. And…
Gaining a better understanding of queries is a top priority of the search industry. When it comes to common searches that repeat millions of times like “Britney Spears” or “Hybrid Cars,” returning the most appropriate results, or advertisements, is not difficult. But what about queries…
Bruce Nussbaum was the opening speaker at the IDSA Award Ceremony during the Connecting ’07 World Design Congress, co-organised by ICSID and IDSA. In his speech, Nussbaum says that design seems to provide a lot of value in a society of massive change and asks…
Brandon Schauer of Adaptive Path has just published a sharp and informative essay on “The Long Wow,” an experience and design-driven approach to creating real customer satisfaction by building genuine, widespread, and lasting customer loyalty over time. As Brandon describes it: “Notably great experiences are…
Also part of the Dott07 festival that I talked about earlier today were the Creative Communities Award. Guest speaker was Ezio Manzini, professor of industrial design at Politecnico di Milano and author of Sustainable Everyday. “The idea of well-being that has been promoted until now…
A very hot topic in the telecom engineering world is the IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS). IMS is an architectural framework for delivering internet protocol (IP) multimedia to mobile and fixed users. Users can connect to an IMS network in various ways, all of which use…
Bruno Giussani reports on a recent talk by Swisscom anthropologist Stefana Broadbent on how people really use technology. The talk was delivered at the 6th Communication Days conference in Bienne, Switzerland. “In traditional marketing research, she says, if you ask what the main constraints on…
The Dott07 festival, curated by John Thackara, and taking place in the English city of NewcastleGateshead, is now in its last few days. One of the events was a series of debates on a variety of topics, such as energy, food, health, movement, and schools.…
Recognizing the increasing importance of design and its impact on the business world, California College of the Arts (CCA) has launched a new MBA in Design Strategy program, the first of its kind in the United States. Slated to enroll its inaugural class of students…
Seoul was designated as the “World Design Capital (WDC) 2010” by the International Council of Societies of Industrial Design (ICSID) on the last day of its congress in San Francisco, Saturday, according to the city government Sunday, reports the Korea Times. The capital designation was…
The Serious Games Institute in Coventry, England, says that it is one of the first places dedicated to helping businesses enhance their own operations by harnessing virtual worlds for things like training, communication and emergency planning. “Much has been made of the potential of Second…
Hilary Cottam, UK Designer of the Year 2005 and former director of RED [archive site], the meanwhile closed innovation unit of the UK Design Council, is now one of the founding partners of Participle, a new social enterprise designing the next generation of public services,…
Forbes Magazine has a huge special report on the future and wonders why people simply aren’t very good at predicting the future and foresight remains largely blind. The issue is full of articles explaining this lack of foresight capacity, but only pays scant attention to…
Presence research is one of the more interesting new people-centred applications for the future. I am not entirely convinced that this new Microsoft approach is the right one though: Anyone who has ever used an instant-messaging program has seen the basic idea of presence. That…
James Gilmore and Joe Pine, authors of the 1999 bestseller “The Experience Economy“, have now published a new book “Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want”. Abstract Contrived. Disingenuous. Phony. Inauthentic. Do your customers use any of these words to describe what you sell–or how you sell…
The latest issue of Pictures of the Future, the half-yearly research and innovation magazine of Siemens, the German engineering conglomerate, looks at the future, with Epcot style utopian thinking and illustrations straight from the Jetsons (check page 40). Two topics stand out: “Factories of the…
Leonard Verhoef recently completed a Ph.D. at the Universiteit of Leiden (The Netherlands) on the reasons why designers cannot understand their users. He has now self-published his dissertation. Why designers can’t understand their users: Developing a systematic approach using cognitive psychology Dr. Leonard Verhoef 228…
The Design Reaktor Berlin is a multi-disciplinary research project of the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) and Berlin University of the Arts. The aim is to encourage innovative co-operation between small and medium-sized companies and designers, in order to investigate strategies and prospects for post-industrial…
A long article on the Telco 2.0 blog entitled “Nokia’s dilemma: operator friend or foe?” has some interesting passages on presence and mobile devices in it. Here is an excerpt: “At Nokia’s own internal thought leadership conference in Helsinki nearly two years ago they had…