Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Has the cell phone forever changed the way people communicate? The mobile phone is used for “real time†coordination while on the run, adolescents use it to manage their freedom, and teens “text†to each other day and night. The mobile phone is more than…
Is Google simple? No. Google is deceptive. It hides all the complexity by simply showing one search box on the main page. The main difference, is that if you want to do anything else, the other search engines let you do it from the home…
Mark Hurst of Good Experience contacted me today about the Gel 2006 conference. Gel is a conference and community, exploring good experience in all its forms — in business, art, society, technology, and life. The goal of the conference [which is well regarded and highly…
A “social” web browser has been created to meet the needs of a new generation of web users who want to edit, comment on and share web content, rather than just peruse it. With the underlying capabilities of a basic web browser like Microsoft’s Internet…
The Guardian published today a reflective article on how cell phones and the internet have fundamentally changed the way we live. But unfortunately the writer doesn’t state much more than his amazement at the speed of social change due to these technologies and his surprise…
When Lego executives recently discovered that adult fans of the iconic plastic bricks had hacked one of the company’s new development tools for digital designers, they did a surprising thing: they cheered. Unlike executives at so many corporations, who would be loath to let their…
How do you find your way in an age of information overload? How can you filter streams of complex information to pull out only what you want? Why does it matter how information is structured when Google seems to magically bring up the right answer…
John Maeda, professor at MIT Media Lab, argues in this short article that good design gives users just enough, but not too much, information — once knowledge is gleaned, attention moves easily on to a larger task. Read full story
With concerns mounting over the safety of cell phone use while driving (about 25 to 30 % of all traffic accidents are distraction-related and an estimated 40 % of all mobile traffic takes place in vehicles), Motorola’s Driving Simulator Lab in Tempe is testing mobile…
In a blog that talks about participatory design and how users can contribute to the design of services, we cannot sidestep the ethical issue. Often people’s creativity and cultural contributions are used against their own interests. In a long and thoughtful article about the over-branding…
“Putting people first”, the experience design blog that you are reading now, has been chosen as blog of the month by Techsmith, the company that produces the Morae usability testing software. It is listed on the Techsmith site under usability resources, and will be featured…
Next year there will be more than 2 billion mobile phone users in the world. Marko Ahtisaari, Director of Design Strategy at Nokia, outlines seven challenges to our shared mobile future: reach, sometimes off versus always on, hackability, social primitives, openness, simplicity and justice. The…
Bob Jacobson and Paula Thornton of Total Experience just opened a discussion (which is also taking place on this blog – see comments) on defining experience design and on the future of their professional blog. Here is their working definition of experience design: “Experience…
A video-blogger from Bergen in Norway is aiming to energise a new generation of voters ahead of Norwegian parliamentary elections, and turning his camcorder on politicians. Read full story
The Sacred World Foundation was founded several years ago by Ranjit Makkuni, a visionary and designer and a former leading researcher at Xerox PARC. It is a state of the art research and design think tank, located in New Delhi, India, whose projects are exploring…
Despite increasing numbers of data-enabled mobile phones it seems that users are lost when it comes to data services. In a survey carried out by mobile software company SurfKitchen not one mobile phone user could correctly identify the data package on their phone. The survey…
From 21st to 23rd September 2005 the First World Conference on the Future of Science will be held in Venice, Italy. The idea of this conference arises from the awareness that the problems/ questions generated by the enormous scientific and technological progress that will characterise…
The French “buzz marketing” agency Nouveau Jour has been collaborating with the creative team of fashion designer Jean-Paul Gaultier on a new online section for the designer, conceived as a virtual world to experience and share chance encounters. In addition to the permanent part of…
As the new vice-president of the user experience and design group at Yahoo! Inc., Larry Tesler is charged with fine-tuning some of the Internet’s primest real estate: the Yahoo.com home page. Read full story
The Economist has just published a survey of higher education (which can be viewed without subscription) and argues in an editorial that the state of Europe’s higher education is a long-term threat to its competitiveness. Europe’s only chance of preserving its living standards, they state,…
Glocalmap.to (site currently in Italian only) is a large-scale cultural “social tagging” project that integrates web mapping, thematic tagging and mobile phone messaging, to create a new urban narrative for the city of Turin. It allows citizens and visitors alike to enrich a detailed satellite…
The Interaction Design Group(IxDG), an international community of people who are practicing, teaching and studying interaction design, just launched a new Resource Library. The Library is a repository of information about interaction design (IxD) that the IxDG community has created. It includes documents, compilations…
As part of Turin’s Olympic Truce activites, the city’s government bodies are promoting an international meeting on 19-20 September 2005 to discuss cooperation, best practices and financial tools to narrow the “digital divide” as a guarantee for ensuring just and fair development and the elimination…
> The yearly CHI conferences are the premier international meeting place for human-computer interaction. The next edition, CHI 2006, will take place in Montreal, Canada on April 22-27, 2006. A call for participation has just been posted. Submissions are organised around CHI’s six communities, one…
One of the first activities of the newly founded Launch Institute is a conference on empathic market sensing on 20-21 September in Hamburg, Germany. Empathic market sensing builds upon voice-of-the-customer and observational “applied ethnography†techniques to dive deeply into how market place agents think and…
The HP research on Innovation for Emerging Economies is done from Bangalore, India, where they tackle such issues as the access divide, the communications divide, the need for contextual design, the language divide and the lack of sustainable business ecologies that affect the effective spread…
Intel’s People and Practices Research Lab engages the techniques of social science (including anthropology and ethnography) and design in order develop a deep understanding of how people live and work. This knowledge is then translated into insights for guiding corporate strategy and technology development. Research…
Like many large IT companies, Intel has tribes of anthropologists and social scientists on the books, and these people have considerable input on the way the company develops new products and platforms. The teams are especially prominent in Intel’s efforts to develop new international markets…
Accenture Technology Labs, the technology research and development organisation within Accenture, is at the intersection of business and technology, exploring the impact of new and emerging technologies on business in the future. Its research in “workforce performance and user experience” explores how emerging technologies can…
Since the launch of i-mode in 1999, NTT DoCoMo introduced numerous mobile services that shifted the concept of mobile phones from talking devices to multimedia tools. And now, NTT DoCoMo has further expanded the range of mobile phone usage by enabling the terminal interface to…
Receiver is Vodafone’s magazine for future thinkers. It is conceived as a neutral space, where thinkers discuss future-oriented aspects of communications technologies. Started four years ago as a platform for exchange about how innovations in this sector affect societies worldwide, Vodafone states that receiver is…
The Sony Ericsson website now contains an “Experiences” section with small visual scenarios of how mobile phone functionalities can provide added value to our lives. Or in their own marketing language: “It’s all about combining your emotions with our technology to create something unique.” Unfortunately,…
Whether it is wafting lavender or citrus scents to calm drivers and keep them awake, or vibrating seat belts to get them to slow down, smart cars in the future could help reduce road accidents. Dr Charles Spence, an experimental psychologist at England’s University of…
The August issue of Siemens Journal introduces Horizons2020, a Siemens foresight study on European life in 2020. Rather than attempting to predict the future, Siemens hopes that Horizons2020 will intensify public discussions and invite people to think about changes that we will face. How do…
“Smart Internet 2010” was an 18-month project conducted by Australia’s technology research consortium, the Smart Internet Technology CRC, to examine what the internet might evolve into by 2010 and the implications for end-users. The report was spearheaded by leading Australian scholar Trevor Barr, Alex…
As it becomes ever more difficult to gain consumers’ attention in an increasingly cluttered environment, more and more companies are looking to fragrance to help distinguish their brands from the competition. Read full story
Service problems, a botched rollout of its third-generation phone network and a skimpy lineup of new handsets have driven away Japanese Vodafone customers in droves. The company admits that its biggest misstep was a decision to focus its lineup in Japan on what it calls…
The latest MORI research into consumer technology, commissioned by European technology public relations consultancy Hotwire, has concluded that consumer technologies will not reach their full market potential until vendors can successfully engage with women and the over 45s. According to an expert panel made up…
Technology firms are pushing a futuristic vision of home entertainment not because consumers are desperate for it but because they themselves are. Whether or not computer, software, consumer-electronics, telecoms, cable and internet companies are in fact out of touch with consumers may be the biggest…
Martin Leith has created a website that lists and explains every idea generation method he has encountered during the past 15 years. The methods have been drawn not just from the worlds of creative problem solving and innovation, but also from other worlds such…