Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Paul Graham is at it again. Just one random quote, when he is arguing that bloggers working at home are often much more productive than the so-called “professionals”: “The atmosphere of the average workplace is to productivity what flames painted on the side of a…
On Neopets’ candy-colored, youth-oriented web site, kids create virtual pets and send them cruising the streets of the online land Neopia. They play games, shop, or make artwork for the site’s online galleries, which all sounds like harmless, creative fun. But the company’s business model…
Sites like Shadows and MyWeb 2.0 could represent a huge threat to corporations that try to control how their brands are perceived. After all, if you can leave a comment about crappy service or shoddy products on a company’s shadow page – out of the…
To prepare students for an evolving information-based society, architects are designing innovative schools to support new models of teaching and learning. Read full story (Related story: Students at Roy Lee Walker Elementary School don’t just study textbooks to learn about the environment and sustainability. They’re…
Missing from yesterday’s Feeedster’s Top 500, was R´´gine Debatty’s cult blog we-make-money-not-art.com (which has been a favourite link on this blog pretty much from its beginning). Feedster has now rectified the error and not only does we-make-money-not-art.com make the list, but ranks in the top…
Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life is the title of a new book published by MIT Press that attempts at understanding how mobile technology shapes Japan’s culture — and our own. Co-edited by University of Southern California research scientist Mizuko Ito, Keio University…
This list has been replaced by a shared list on del.icio.us. The tag is xdcompanies.
Peter Jones of Redesign Research has written a viewpoint article on Designing From the User’s Experience for the August 2005 Design Management Institute eBulletin. In the article, he ties the broad the user experience concept to product and user research. He advises design managers on…
Mobile phones have made people less organised and more willing to be late when meeting their friends, according to a survey.Nearly one in five people admitted to being unreliable about timekeeping because they had the “safety net” of a mobile. Three quarters said mobiles had…
A digital diagram by Matt Zellmer shows how the “Experience” a company delivers to its customers (no matter what is sells) differs from “Experience” as a separate offering for which a company charges money. Read full post
In his blog Chris Lawer of The OMC Group just posted a copy of the presentation he gave to the research panel at Cranfield University School of Management. The pdf paper defines the “story of co-creation”, explores his research question, presents a conceptual framework for…
Polar Electro, the innovative leader in heart rate monitoring, and adidas, one of the world’s leading sports brands, have formed a partnership that will introduce the world’s first completely integrated training system. Called “Project Fusionâ€, it seamlessly integrates Polar heart rate and speed and distance…
The latest ‘Big Bang’ in information-sharing is free, and its flagship already gets more traffic than the New York Times and USA Today combined: Meet the ‘wiki.’ Read full story
This month, NTT DoCoMo, Inc. will release a mobile phone able to slow down speakers’ voice speed. The key targeted users are the elderly, reveals Tech-on. The speed converter technology slows down speakers’ voice speed up to 0.7x, so the listener can feel like that…
6 August 1991: Tim Berners-Lee posts the first website. Fourteen years later it is impossible to imagine the world without the internet. A Guardian profile on Tim Berners-Lee.
When Richard Florida published his upbeat Rise of the Creative Class in 2002, he became the instant darling of progressives everywhere. What’s not to like about a man who says diversity, tolerance, and a vibrant cultural life are required ingredients for economic success? Florida’s latest…
Blinklist, a new social bookmarks manager (still in Beta), makes a lot of claims about functioning the same way that our mind does: “BlinkList is a tool that allows you to create a mental map of the internet of sites that are important to you.…
This list has been replaced by two shared lists of del.icio.us, one on experience design blogs and one on mobile experience design blogs. The tags are xdblogs and mxdblogs.
The Work Foundation’s iSociety project is a definitive and independent analysis of the impact of information and communications technologies (ICTs) on our everyday lives. The UK-based project is especially focused on the ways that information and communications technologies (ICTs) are changing life at home and…
Technorati has published this chart (click to enlarge) that illustrates the influence or authority of a site or blog as measured by the number of people who are linking to it. As the chart above shows, the most influential media sites on the web are…
Design used to be associated purely with aesthetics. Today it has been embraced by business leaders and is advocated for social policy development. Nico Macdonald (blog) investigates these claims. Read text-only version Download laid out version (pdf, 176 kb) (via CPH127)
The forthcoming 2005 State of the Future report will outline what it considers to be the 15 greatest challenges facing humanity. Jerome Glenn, director of the Millennium Project, gives us a preview and a glimpse of some of the changes he believes the world is…
Mobile phones are used in Asia in strikingly innovative ways. In Japan, there have been stories of schoolgirls writing messages on scraps of paper, photographing them with their phones and then e-mailing them to friends. In Korea the third biggest national newspaper, Oh My News,…
MEX, the PMN mobile user experience conference, will take place on 6 and 7 September 2005 in London. The two day conference provides insight into all aspects of the mobile user experience, including technology platforms, design strategy and the commercial reality of delivering truly user-centred…
CKS (Center for Knowledge Societies) is the first and only usability and interaction design research practice in and for South-East Asia. The company, which is based in Bangalore and New Delhi, affords design driven insight into the contextual use of information and communication technologies for…
Graduate students from top schools in the United States, Europe and Asia, most from master of business administration programs, are vying for internships at India’s biggest private companies. For many, outsourcing companies are the destinations of choice. Read full story
Alumni and staff of the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea (which is now no longer based in Ivrea) have just founded an Interaction Design Association to “promote the interaction design culture, knowledge and experience” and “to create and maintain a network of contacts working in the…
Ethnobase is a web resource for ethnographic approaches to studying Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). The site is based at the London School of Economics, Department of Sociology, and aims to network the growing ranks of ICT ethnographers, increasing communication and awareness of their work.…
INCITE, an incubator affiliated with the University of Surrey (UK), supports critical inquiry into technology and ethnography and provides a creative interdisciplinary space for research projects which explore the socio-cultural dimensions of technology use and design.
In August 1991, Sir Tim Berners-Lee created the first website. Fourteen years on, he tells BBC Newsnight’s Mark Lawson how blogging is closer to his original idea about a read/write web. Read full interview
This very interesting Global Watch* mission report (which I just finished reading) summarises the results of an official UK field trip to the US to investigate the impact of people-centred research in the design process. The authors were interested in the ways in which people-centred…
Veteran designer Jane Fulton Suri who is the author of the new book Thoughtless Acts, discerns unmet consumer needs via keen observations of ordinary people doing ordinary things.Some industrial designers sketch, some study new material technology, some collect inspiration from garbage. Fulton Suri watches and…
[You could call it a less pleasant sort of “experience design”] The Washington Post’s website features a special report consisting of three in-depth articles, two video reports and various graphics that explore how al Qaeda has become the first guerrilla movement in history to migrate…
The industrial revolution is over, and the machines have won. But as jobs in factories and offices disappear, there are still opportunities to create new kinds of employment. According to Jeremy Rifkin, the first opportunity lies in what he calls the “Hydrogen Economy.” The hydrogen…
This list has been replaced by a shared list on del.icio.us. The tag is xdemailgroups.
In a bid to eventually sell more chips, Intel has set up four new offices in Bangalore, Cairo, Sao Paulo and Shanghai that are staffed with anthropologists and engineers to help design computers with features for emerging markets. The four so-called definition centres will examine…
A Booz Allen Hamilton innovation survey, conducted in the late summer and autumn of 2004, asked European executives to rate the importance of various drivers of innovation performance. Top of their list is improved customer understanding or customer insight, whether through partnerships with customers, traditional…
We all hear that successful innovation depends on creating value for customers. Repeatedly, we see that the key to creating value lies in designing meaningful experiences. But what does this jargon really mean? And more important, how does it impact us as innovators in business?…
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation is understood to have made a bid approach to the fast-growing internet phone group, Skype, which may have valued the two-year-old operation at almost $3bn. Read full story
View this nice comparison chart that summarises the difference between the business approach and the design approach to product and service innovation. (via Usability in the News)