Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Two upcoming conferences are exploring some of the implications that widely distributed technologies in our living environments (also called ambient intelligence, intelligent environments or ubiquitous computing) might have for people and the way we live. International Symposium on Intelligent Environments: Improving the quality of…
Donald A. Norman of Northwestern University and the Nielsen Norman Group will be awarded the 2006 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science “for the development of the field of user-centered design, which utilizes our understanding of how people think to develop technologies designed…
In her blog gotomobile design ethnographer Kelly Goto reflects extensively on the importance of context assessment and the challenges of usability testing when assessing the user experience of mobile devices, as opposed to other electronic devices. “Surrounding the entire mobile user experience, and setting it…
Motorola is undertaking some interesting initiatives to deliver on its corporate slogan of ’seamless mobility’, reports Marek Pawlowski in the blog of the PMN Mobile User Experience conference. Today it announced the winners of its MOTOFWRD competition, which encouraged university students from throughout the UK…
The Financial Times reports on Project:LIFE, a unique research project by David Wilson Homes and the University of Nottingham’s School of the Built Environment, to understand how the design of the home affects how we live together and to enable future houses to incorporate elements…
Denmark was the first country in the world to make public services available online and is now going a step further – forcing its citizens online. Since the beginning of February, for instance, companies dealing with state institutions must submit their invoices electronically. Around 15…
In her Outside Innovation blog, best-selling author and management consultant Patty Seybold engages MIT professor Eric von Hippel (author of Democratizing Innovation) in a lively debate about lead users and lead customers. In a response Matt Locke, Head of Creative Research and Development of BBC…
Local authority internet services in the UK are showing signs of improvement, though the overall level of progress is slowing, a major survey reveals. The eighth annual Socitm Insight survey of local authority websites – Better Connected 2006 – also concluded that general improvements in…
It seems engineers and programmers are discovering the importance of user experience and understanding the “invisibility” of technology: “It appears as though the cold, soulless world of submicron silicon geometrics and robotic place and route iterations are giving way to a warmer, fuzzier engineering…
Aeroports de Paris presents the first ethnographic study about men’s buying behaviour in an airport. This unprecedented survey was carried out in January 2006. In an airport environment, a man travelling on his own becomes a true shopper: He is more autonomous; he takes responsibility…
In a long interview with The Deal’s Tech Confidential, Prabhakar Raghavan, head of technology research at Yahoo! Inc., says Yahoo!’s goal is to let Internet users retrieve precisely the information they’re seeking on the Web without having to search for it. “We have this huge…
The second issue of Ambidextrous Magazine, a project of the Stanford d.school, features interviews with Don Norman and Patrick Baudisch. In a long interview with Bjoern Hartmann, Don Norman reveals that he is working on a new book with the working title: the “design of…
Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm tells Corporate Design Foundation Chairman Peter Lawrence about her plan to make the state the innovation capital of the U.S. At the very start of the interview, she outlines a user-centred vision of design: “To me, design is more customer-focused —…
DIY checkout or self-scanning has long been called the next big thing in supermarkets, but perhaps because of the hellish line situation, Inferno-familiar Italians were quick to adopt them. Unicoop Firenze was the first Italian retailer to introduce self-scanning in its stores back in 1998.…
[New flexible work] arrangements are bringing jobs to thousands of people with disabilities, including those with spinal cord injuries and vision loss. Fast computers and broadband connections have become so inexpensive and reliable that location is now not an issue for certain jobs, like customer…
Live from Internet User Experience 2006, Tim Keirnan and Tom Brinck interview friend and fellow usability professional Keith Instone about his work with User Experience Network. “UXnet was formed to help make connections between the people and organisations that represent User Experience disciplines, and to…
NextD, the journal for “ReRethinking Design”, just published a very long interview with Peter Merholz, founding partner of Adaptive Path and the mind behind Peterme.com. The interview by GK VanPatter, founding partner of NextD, Humantific and UnderstandingLab, covers such issues as user experience design, anthropology,…
They are unlikely revolutionaries. Bearing walkers and canes, a veritable Merck Manual of ailments among them, the 12 old friends — average age 80 — looked as though they should have been sitting down to a game of Scrabble, not pioneering a new kind of…
At his keynote speech at the Italian IA Summit, Peter Boersma, senior experience designer for info.nl, argued that information architects are all user experience practitioners who practice IA from time to time. “Unless you have never done anything else than analyse, structure and group large…
Sorting, Classifying, and Labeling Experiences … in order to understand all factors contributing to how a product (or service) is perceived While plenty of practitioners invoke the word ‘experiences’, how often are we talking about the same thing? From ‘user experiences’ to the ‘experience economy’,…
Publicis Groupe has set up a new digital venture – a standalone consultancy to help clients, and their budgets, leave behind traditional advertising and move toward digital, interactive and mobile media. Publicis Groupe, the international advertising and media conglomerate, has announced the launch of Denuo,…
The resume of Larry Tesler (Wikipedia article – personal site) reads like the history of interaction design. He worked at Xerox PARC and Apple, created and managed the usability group at Amazon, and is now vice president of user experience and design at Yahoo!, managing…
Sixteen years after the Wall came down, the German capital looks like a mess: it’s virtually bankrupt, unemployment is rampant and the property market is dismal. To all intents the city is a failure – but its reborn creativity makes it a fabulous failure. [In…
AIGA, the professional association for design, has just relaunched its Gain journal, dedicated to stimulating thinking at the intersection of design and business. The launch issue contains a huge amount of material (no less than 30 articles) organised in such categories as customer-centered design, the…
Design Continuum CEO Gianfranco Zaccai imagines an airline that strives to provide an overwhelmingly positive customer experience I recently visited Boston’s new Ikea store with my two young children. A few days later, I flew to Italy on my usual carrier, Alitalia. The two experiences…
Mark Van Doorn of Philips Research published a short paper on the website of the European Centre for the Experience Economy, that provides a cognitive science angle on the experience economy. "Many views on the experience economy start with the behavior of actors in…
Education guru Sir Ken Robinson talks about the importance of nurturing innovative solutions in the classroom — indeed, in every aspect of modern life. Sir Ken Robinson, now a senior advisor to the J. Paul Getty Trust in Los Angeles, was knighted in 2003 for…
The UK Design Council published its first RED report: ‘Open Health’, following up on the paper “Health: Co-creating Services” (which was discussed here). Chronic disease and conditions related to an unhealthy lifestyle have reached epidemic proportions and are rising still. This presents a momentous challenge…
A new design discipline is emerging from groups across the world. It applies traditional design skills in a new way to social and economic issues. It uses the design process as a means for a wide range of disciplines and stakeholders to collaborate. It develops…
What everybody in advertising, marketing and media should know about the technologies that are reshaping their business. What’s the effect of an advertising campaign, in a world where every consumer has instant access to all hard data about any given product? How can we even…
The Catharina Hospital in Eindhoven, the Netherlands and Philips today opened the world’s first Ambient Experience Catheterisation Lab (CathLab). The ambient experience design concept aims to improve the workflow of physicians considerably and reduce anxiety of heart patients undergoing catheterisation. Initial tests show that the…
The former coalmine area of Zollverein has become a symbol of structural change in the Ruhrgebiet of Germany. The large scale interventions taking place there are an example of how creative industries can become the engine of economic transformation. After from having become a UNESCO…
Gapminder is a nonprofit, supported by the UNDP, dedicated to better communicating and disseminating global-development statistics — as a means to “mind the gap” between the world’s rich and poor, sick and healthy. Gapminder wants to be more than just graphics. Between the clean lines…
Why is Intel, the giant chip maker, in the process of hiring more than 100 anthropologists and other social scientists to work side by side with its engineers? While the success of this strategy will become clearer over the next 12 to 18 months, it’s…
The European Union is to unveil plans Wednesday for the creation of a rival to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reflecting fears that academic standards are slipping further behind the United States and risk being overtaken by China and India. The proposal for a “European…
When six-year-old Tilly Griffiths from Staffordshire wanted to join her elder sister’s ballet class, her parents turned for help to a little known charity that designs and manufactures one-off pieces of equipment for disabled people. Based in an old chapel just outside Watford in Hertfordshire,…
Britain’s historic city of Bath is to host an experiment in advanced wireless computer technology that could provide the blueprint for developing the world’s next generation of mobile phones and lap-tops. Called Cityware, the project will see 30 volunteers using state-of-the-art mobile telephones to access…
Bob Jacobson is starting a new trend on his blog Total Experience. Rather than looking at precise commercial or institutional issues, he analyses broad social phenomena from the point of view of experience design, and hints at the possibility that there might be ways to…
How we spend our money is changing. In the new ‘experience economy’ we pay to do things, not have things. Melanie Howard, sociologist and co-founder of the Future Foundation, a consumer think-tank, believes that, as a society, we are hauling ourselves up Abraham Maslow’s famous…
Researcher Bill Buxton started his career as a musician in Toronto, but found his true calling mixing computer science with his passions for music and design. Now at Microsoft Research, the human-computer interaction and computer graphics pioneer will collaborate with researchers in the company’s five…