Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
A nudge toward participation: Improving clinical trial enrollment with behavioral economics Eric M. VanEpps, Kevin G. Volpp and Scott D. Halpern (University of Pennsylvania) Science Translational Medicine – 20 Jul 2016 Vol. 8, Issue 348, pp. 348fs13 Interventions informed by behavioral economics can address barriers…
A team including the Public Policy Lab (a New York City non-profit) worked with New York City’s Chief Digital Officer and her staff to use ethnographic research to develop the New York City Digital Playbook (available in 14 languages!), a policy and operational guide to…
The pressure to anticipate an audience’s needs and desires is intense—no longer only of concern to business sides of media organizations but a part of the editorial mission, writes Heather Chaplin in the Columbia Journalism Review. Certain newsrooms, including the Times’s, are turning to human-centered…
So close to home. That is what we feel at Experientia when work calls us to France. Just a quick trip across the border, to a country at once reminiscent of, and delightfully different from, our home town of Turin. So when tragedy strikes, it…
LEAP Dialogues: Career Pathways in Design for Social Innovation Edited by Mariana Amatullo, with Bryan Boyer, Liz Danzico and Andrew Shea Published by Designmatters at ArtCenter College of Design July 2016, 360 pages The professional landscape for design in social innovation has reached a critical…
Cultural anthropologist Jamie Lee writes that she is fully on board with UX’s role in the public sector, and that she is an advocate for its unique role in more ethical governance with, rather than just for, communities. She just can’t understand choosing to call…
Business anthropologist Simon Roberts has campaigned hard for the “Remain” side in the UK referendum and is deeply disappointed. He now explores a topic that I too have been arguing for some time now: Politicians, political parties and those in power, he says, “need to…
The Ethics of Influence: Government in the Age of Behavioral Science by Cass R. Sunstein Cambridge University Press, September 2016 In recent years, ‘Nudge Units’ or ‘Behavioral Insights Teams’ have been created in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, and other nations. All over…
Can behavioral change address local energy issues, raise peopleâ’s awareness energy consumption issues, and directly support non-profit organizations at the same time? With the Nice pilot of the CITYOPT project, we have seen strong suggestions that it can. It also suggests that the sense of…
The sum of our clickstreams is not an objective measure of who we are, but a personal portrait of our hopes and desires, argues Rebecca Lemov, associate professor of the history of science at Harvard University. When trying to understand the ramifications of the big-data…
Infrastructure providers are used to focusing on issues of project selection, funding, and regulation. The most successful firms are learning to provide great consumer experiences too. “The consumer experience matters. Infrastructure providers therefore need to tap into the disciplines and insights of great consumer-service companies,…
UXMatters has a new design and this seems to have benefited the quality as well, as there are more inspiring articles than ever. Here my pick: June 14 edition Algorithms as the New Material of Design A column by Pamela Pavliscak, Founder of Change Sciences…
Anthropologist and UX professional Natalie Hanson attended the Enterprise UX conference in San Antonio, Texas this week. The conference is dedicated to delivering useful, delightful, and humane experiences to people who work for and in enterprises, and Natalie did a terrific job at doing a…
“Big data” is one of the most promising developments in health care in a decade. Yet, writes Dan Beckham, they too often breed myopic overconfidence. “The numbers, after all, never lie — except when they do. Numbers without context or interpretation can create a dangerous…
The 3M Health Care Business Group follows a strict UX design process that allows for complexity—but isn’t overly complex. Jerry Cao and Eileen Conway report on the UX approach at 3M in Fast Company, and explain how 3M Design follows a disciplined UX process rooted…
User Experience in Libraries: Applying Ethnography and Human-Centred Design Edited by Andy Priestner, Matt Borg Routledge, 2016 212 pages Modern library services can be incredibly complex. Much more so than their forebears, modern librarians must grapple daily with questions of how best to implement innovative…
The limits of our imagination: design fiction as a strategy for engaging with dystopian futures By Joshua Tanenbaum, Marcel Pufal and Karen Tanenbaum (UC Irvine Published in: LIMITS ’16 Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Computing within Limits June 2016, 9 pages Abstract In this…
Quantified: Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life Edited by Dawn Nafus MIT Press, April 2016 280 pp. Today anyone can purchase technology that can track, quantify, and measure the body and its environment. Wearable or portable sensors detect heart rates, glucose levels, steps taken, water quality,…
The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality by Luciano Floridi Oxford University Press, 272 pages Reprint edition (May 17, 2016) Who are we, and how do we relate to each other? Luciano Floridi, one of the leading figures in contemporary philosophy, argues…
Patient-centricity is one of the defining issues facing clinical trials in the pharma industry. The past few years have seen a growing awareness by pharmaceutical companies of the importance of patient-centricity – but they have also illustrated that not everyone is clear on just what…
Your brain does not process information, retrieve knowledge or store memories. In short: your brain is not a computer, writes acclaimed psychologist Robert Epstein in a long essay on Aeon. “We don’t store words or the rules that tell us how to manipulate them,” he…
The School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University has started talking about ‘Transition Design.’ In his long reflection about this new kind of design practice, Cameron Tonkinwise, CMU’s Director of Design and Doctoral Studies, writes: Transition refers to phased change – not revolution or sudden…
Age-friendly banking: What it is and how you do it Age UK 30 April 2016 The new report showcases examples of good practice which, if rolled out more widely, could revolutionise the way in which the banks interact with older people and transform their customers’…
Building on research supported by the MacArthur Foundation’s Digital Media and Learning initiative, New York University Press launches Connected Youth and Digital Futures, a new series that explores young people’s day-to-day lives and futures. This series offers books – available free online – that describe…
User Experience and Usability in Complex Systems Final Report 1/2015 FIMECC (Finnish Metals and Engineering Competence Cluster) November 2015, 225 pages Five years ago, some of Finland’s metals and engineering industry companies were looking for new ways to tackle challenges and concerns. With the shared…
Scott A. Nelson and Paul Metaxatos write that, as B2C companies rush to exploit new IoT applications, pushing technology to potential end users no longer works. Increasingly, the pull of user experience will drive market demand, and product design will be critical to getting consumers…
Gwendolyn Betts explores how to reconcile one of the biggest challenges in interface design: security versus user experience. Betts writes that it is not uncommon for security measures to be tacked on at the end as an afterthought, and that therefore it is of crucial…
As cities experience a demographic shift, the need for age-friendly design is becoming ever more critical. From almshouses to driverless cars, the future of urban housing and mobility may just be shaped for and by the elderly. Freelance journalist Alice Grahame writes about this trend…
The Politics of Design: A (Not so) Global Manual for Visual Communication By Ruben Pater BIS Publishers May 2015 Many designs that appear in today’s society will circulate and encounter audiences of many different cultures and languages. With communication comes responsibility; are designers aware of…
As more and more ‘Internet of Things’ products come into the market, most, if not all will come with significant challenges. The key to overcoming any obstacles, writes Joe Johnston, VP Experience Innovation for Universal Mind, is to unify them into one holistic user experience;…
Governments, public sector and community organisations are addressing increasingly complex challenges such as the ageing society, climate change, sustainable behaviour change, youth unemployment, impacts of austerity, health, housing and homelessness. They are doing this at a time when there is a growing gap between the…
Dr. John Sherry, Director of Business Innovation Research at Intel, says in an long profile on Epicpeople that anthropology is not only undersold, but also misunderstood: People too often talk about ethnography as a tool for understanding “the consumer” or ‘the customer.’ We don’t just…
Every year, the Energy-efficient Buildings (EeB) Public Private Partnership (PPP) publishes the EeB PPP project review – a round-up of energy-efficiency projects that have been co-funded by two European Commission schemes. This year, the print and digital booklet design was done by Experientia, in particular…
At Experientia, we live the mantra that experience design is always contextual experience design. Understanding and designing for people within a culture, a context and how people evolve and change within these, is at the very essence of what we do. It is therefore no…
As technology enables ad blocking online and ad skipping on TV, marketers are increasingly searching for ways to better engage consumers in person, Adrianne Pasquarelli explains. As consumers get more comfortable with e-commerce, marketers are finding they need to imbue their brick-and-mortar operations with updated…
Michael Thomas of Ford Motor Company argues in a thoughtful personal piece that User Experience design is greatly enhanced by establishing classical ethnographic methods as foundational for defining the domain of design intervention. How can UX account for subjective, positively regarded experiences that are time…
In this post we highlight a number of Interaction 16 conference videos especially relevant to the Putting People First readers. They are grouped thematically. Algorithm-inspired design Crowds, algorithms and computations: The new materials of design – Matthew Milan, Normative [54:21] Can computers design? – Antti…
Health Risk & Society is a new international scholarly journal devoted to a theoretical and empirical understanding of the social processes which influence the ways in which risks are taken, communicated, assessed and managed in relationship to health and health care. They have just published…
Gillian Tett is the Financial Times’ US Managing Editor, a very frequent writer, and an anthropologist. Her column this week unconventionally argues for on-the-ground ethnographic research on people’s expectations on inflation: What we need is not just economic analysis of price trends but on-the-ground ethnographic…
This morning we received two books by designer Robert Curedale (who seems to be an extremely productive writer): ​Comprehensive step-by-step Guide to Experience Maps Journey Maps – Blueprints – Empathy Maps Design Community College Inc. March 2016 400 pages Customers choose products and services that…