Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Senior [UK] MPs are calling for an urgent government inquiry into the “targeting” of children with cartoon mobile phone merchandise, including Winnie the Pooh, dangly soft toys and Scooby-Doo mobile phone covers. They warn that a huge selection of mobile phone toy accessories and “wallpaper”,…
Travelers are starting to leave behind heavy, dog-eared guidebooks and instead are cramming their much lighter mobile devices with all the necessary tips they’ll need to discover new parts of the world. Airlines, tour operators, entrepreneurs and even old-fashioned travel book publishers have been unleashing…
The company at the heart of the machine is trying harder to get into the heads of its users. In the latest MRWho, MrWeb’s Michael Kenyon talked to Ken Anderson, Manager of People and Practice Research at Intel and one of the company’s small but…
Philips unveils the Entertaible – a 21st century tabletop gaming platform that marries the best of electronic and traditional board games in a natural and simple way. Sitting comfortably around the game table, people can enjoy both the shared experience of playing together and the…
Looking to generate new ideas about the future of play, Mattel invited the Interaction Design Institute to present concepts during its company-wide Play Experiences for the Next Generation workshop. Children discover the world through play. Playing shapes human mental and physiological development, social relationships, identities,…
The credit-card giant scored a hit with its online “advergame.” And it’s not alone, as companies try to think of new ways to snag eyeballs There’s a new competition at the Winter Olympics this year — and it involves virtual, rather than actual, athletes. On…
The British design magazine Design Week reports today that Richard Eisermann, director of design and innovation at the UK Design Council, has left the organisation prematurely to co-found the start-up consultancy Prospect, after two and a half years in the role. He will not be…
More than ever, people are getting on the Internet to hang out or just blow off some time, a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project said Wednesday. Some 40 million Americans said they go online just for fun, up from 25 million…
This Business Week article by John Hagel and John Seely Brown focuses mainly on an American context, but many of its points could easily be applied to government policies on innovation elsewhere: “In the West, we still confuse invention with innovation. Even worse, we tend…
The Persona Lifecycle, First Edition : Keeping People in Mind Throughout Product Design The Persona Lifecycle (Amazon – Elsevier) addresses the “how” of creating effective personas and using those personas to design products that people love. It doesn’t just describe the value of personas; it…
Bob Jacobson just published a thoughtful reflection in his Total Experience blog on how experience design can help us becoming better prepared in dealing with a bird flu pandemic. “How we experience a potential crisis, a condition that by definition we haven’t experienced before (any…
Features don’t matter any more. Welcome to the Age of User Experience. As computing and digital devices move more and more into the consumer space, features and functionalities will increasingly take the back seat as motivators for technology adoption: As the iPod abundantly shows, user…
The high-tech tracking of people’s preferences puts firms in touch with tastes. Over the past decade, e-commerce has taken a cue from the notion that friends give the best recommendations. Personalized suggestions have become more commonplace as various forms of media converge, industry professionals say,…
in/situm, a qualitative research and user-centred consulting firm with offices in Mexico, Brazil and USA, published a short report summarising those contributions and discussions at the Davos World Economic Forum 2006 dealing with design and innovation strategy. Download report (pdf, 144 kb, 7 pages)
The Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) just published the second issue of its Journal of Usability Studies, a peer-reviewed, international, online publication dedicated to promote and enhance the practice, research, and education of usability engineering. THE IMPLICATIONS OF CULTURAL DIFFERENCES The issue of cultural issues and…
From industry giants Mattel and Hasbro to smaller players LeapFrog and VTech, toy manufacturers are lowering the age ranges for their high-tech and educational offerings at this year’s Toy Fair, betting that “toddler tech” will help reverse several years of slumping sales. The toy industry…
Developing Leaders for Innovation is the name of a new minisite of the Chicago-based Institute of Design, with many examples of their work. The site is particularly interesting because it describes some user experience design tools and processes, such as user observation, early prototyping, behavioural…
The Olympics have barely started, but Torino is already looking ahead to its next venture: in 2008 it will become the first World Design Capital. At a prestigious and well-attended press conference today, an illustrous panel, consisting of Sergio Chiamparino, mayor of the City of…
The Hong Kong School of Design MDes programme positions product and interaction design education between cultural identity, local relevance and global competitiveness. “The aim of the Master of Design programme is to equip students with knowledge in design at a level that facilitates the integration…
Dan Saffer, an interaction designer at Adaptive Path and the author of the upcoming book “Designing for interaction” just published an interview with Marc Rettig. Marc Rettig is a designer, educator, and researcher, as well as founder and principal of Fit Associates. He has taught…
Beacon Hill Village is an innovative nonprofit organisation created by and for local residents determined to grow old in familiar surroundings, and to make that possible for others. Community-based models for aging in place designed by the people who use them are the wave of…
LocaModa is a company that creates proprietary interactive networks that extend the power of the web to the steet helping consumers to opt-in and connect to brands. The have launched two services: StreetSurfer and StreetMessenger. StreetSurfer is a mobile-enabled interactive marketing application for retail, real…
In a thoughtful article in the New York Times, Hal R. Varian, professor of business, economics and information management at the University of California, Berkeley, explores the potential business models that could be built around cheap laptops in developing countries. Starting from historic examples —…
International professional development and training for professionals working in management and design. The Zollverein School of Management and Design is the only research and educational institute of its kind in Europe. The school was founded in 2004 and its first international MBA degree course in…
In a long story on the Design Council website, Peter Davies, chief executive of Pera International, reflects on the implications of emerging technologies and the pace of technological change for design and design professionals. “By tracking and understanding today’s emerging technologies we can predict what…
The UK Design Council provides some interesting case studies of what creativity and innovation can do to public procurement and regional and local authorities. Borough of Tower Hamlets – Idea Store Libraries in the London borough of Tower Hamlets were unused and unloved until the…
The Finnish EU Presidency will launch a European Network of Living Labs – Co-creation of innovation in public, private and civic partnership on November 21, 2006. This is the first step towards a New European Innovation System (EIS). A European Network of Living Labs is…
Microsoft’s chief blogger Robert Scoble interviews his colleague Jenny Lam, creative lead of the MSX (Microsoft User Experience) design team, to talk about the user experience work her team is doing for Windows Vista. At CES 2006 Jenny Lam also talked with Chris Pirillo about…
Design for Democracy increases civic participation by making the experience clearer, more understandable, easier to accomplish and more trustworthy. Design and social research professionals collaborate to enable compelling, efficient and trust-building experiences between government and the governed. On a nonprofit basis, Design for Democracy offers…
Ray Kurzweill, author of The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology and featured before in this blog (link and link), was recently a guest speaker at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he discussed how our lives might look like in forty years, given…
The Winter 2006 issue of the magazine of the Rotman School of Management is devoted to healthcare and features a four page article by IDEO’s Peter Coughlin and Ilya Prokopoff. The article, entitled “Managing Change, By Design”, discusses three design tools for creating ‘futures’ based…
Chronic disease and conditions related to an unhealthy lifestyle have reached epidemic proportions and are rising still. This presents a momentous challenge for our current healthcare system. Looking at the problem from a design perspective shows that there are many gaps in the way that…
I would like to remind the PPF readers that they can find a calendar dedicated to experience design conferences and events on the Eventful website, which currently contains thirty upcoming activities of interest to the community. It is a shared calendar so everyone can add…
The Design Council knowledge cards summarise a unique resource of online in-depth information compiled by expert authors on design topics and issues that matter. The 30 cards in a pack provide an overview of our knowledge experts resources introducing each topic by explaining what it…
During the recent O’Reilly Emerging Telephony Conference (January 24-26, San Francisco), Roberto Tagliabue, digital experience creative director of Nike TechLab , B.J. Fogg, a researcher at Stanford University and author of the book “Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do” and…
Swisscom’s Vision 2015 highlights the most probable future with respect to developments and usage of ICT. Taking into consideration both technological and societal trends, Swisscom developed a number of storylines covering different aspects of the every-day life in order to understand how these trends could…
Are people “specialising” their use of different communication channels? Are there different usages for mobile, fix, e-mail, etc in terms of content, partners in the communication or habits? And are new channels affecting how other channels are used? Bruno Giussani has a nice report on…
Plenty of people seem to be blogging at the 2006 LIFT conference, taking place in Geneva, Switzerland, today and tomorrow. Just this check this overview. Bruno Giussani is my personal favourite, because of his capability to condense the talks in tight and well-written summaries.
I just looked in amazement at an astonishingly realistic 3D animation of a military robot patrolling the (real) streets of Johannesburg, South Africa. The effect of reality is so overwhelming that most people will accept this footage as a fact. This raises the question how…
Textually.org reports on a very entertaining article in The Guardian, where Ben Goldacre explains how he tracked his girlfriend’s whereabouts for a full week through her mobile phone. “For the past week I’ve been tracking my girlfriend through her mobile phone. I can see exactly…