Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the international UX consultancy
Four European Union consumers associations – OCU (Spain), Altroconsumo (Italy), DECO-Proteste (Portugal) and Test-Achats/Test Aankoop (Belgium) – in collaboration with Cibersomosaguas Research Group (Universidad Complutense of Madrid) and Ouishare Spain, came together to undertake a pioneering research project on the collaborative consumption phenomenon from the…
The U.S. federal government needs to improve how it interacts with the public. Enter the Federal Front Door, an initiative to improve public-government interactions across the board. The team is currently exploring projects to improve the quality of experiences and interactions people have with the…
Nine UCL anthropologists spent fifteen months living in nine communities around the world, researching the role, uses and consequences of social media in people’s everyday lives. University College London just launched an enormous repository with the results of this global ethnographic research project, all easily…
In this article Laura S. Oswald discusses the advantages of semiotic research methods for decoding consumer experiences and translating them into marketing strategy. Oswald focuses specifically on the innovative research techniques we used to decode the meaning of chronic pain for patients, one of the…
Do Europeans Like Nudges? By Lucia A. Reisch (Copenhagen Business School) and Cass R. Sunstein (Harvard Law School) 29 February 2016, 37 pages Available at SSRN: Abstract: In recent years, many governments have shown a keen interest in “nudges†– approaches to law and…
Arti Mulchand reports in the Straits Times, Singapore’s main newspaper, on Experientia’s “Design for Ageing Gracefully” project: Putting faces to end-users early in the design process is changing the way designers and organisations are approaching products aimed at Singapore’s growing elderly demographic. Experientia’s ethnographic study,…
In this long essay, published in MIT’s brand new Journal of Design and Science, Kevin Slavin argues that designers of complex adaptive systems are not strictly designing systems themselves. They are, he says, hinting those systems towards anticipated outcomes, from an array of existing interrelated…
Patients Know Best: Qualitative Study on How Families Use Patient-Controlled Personal Health By Hanna Schneider, Susan Hill, and Ann Blandford Journal of Medical Internet Research 2016;18(2):e43 Background: Self-management technologies, such as patient-controlled electronic health records (PCEHRs), have the potential to help people manage and cope…
Behavioural Insights Applied to Policy: Overview across 32 European Countries Publications Office of the European Union February 2016 56 pages The Report covers a wealth of policy applications either implicitly or explicitly informed by behavioural insights (BIs). It reviews institutional developments and puts forward a…
In his review of four recent books (see below), Jacob Weisberg explores in the New York Review of Books what it means to shift overnight from a society in which people walk down the street looking around to one in which people walk down the…
A new government website for Australia, focused around citizens’ needs rather than government structures, could be launched by the end of the year, Paul Shetler, chief executive of Australia’s Digital Transformation Office (DTO), has told Global Government Forum. The site, which will bring together a…
In the ‘age of the customer’, IT leaders should be paying particular attention to the growing business case for UX testing and research, writes Chloe Green in Information Age. She writes: Numerous studies have found that every dollar spent on UX brings in between $2…
PMLiVE, the news site for the pharmaceutical industry, is quite outspoken on the need for UX and customer experience methodologies in the pharmaceutical industry. Here are some recent posts: A five-step plan for patient-centred digital communications Letizia Affinito and John Mack – 19 February 2016…
August de los Reyes came to a new understanding of design after thinking about (and experiencing) disability. Disability, writes Cliff Kuang (who interviewed him), is “an engine of innovation simply because no matter what their limitations, humans have such a relentless drive to communicate that…
Glen de Vries argues that tracking basic biology can create positive reinforcements for health-related behaviors?. Yet, he is faced with a challenge: those who actively track their health metrics still represent a minority of consumers, while most people who should be keeping track of health…
A recent study showed that in early wearable app development, the lack of identifying the user scenarios resulted in too much focus on technology and neglecting the users, writes Jennifer Elias in Forbes. “The people in at-risk communities are used to researchers coming in for…
A year ago Juliette Melton led a design research field project to explore how The Times could best share its journalism with the Spanish-speaking world. What the team learned from that in-depth research, as well as from subsequent explorationâ, led directly to today” launch of…
Understanding User Motivations and Drawbacks Related to Product Repair By Nazli Terzioglu, Dan Lockton, Clare Brass (Royal College of Arts) Conference Paper, Sustainable innovation 2015 The Centre for Sustainable Design, London This paper presents the findings from an exploratory study that looks at current user…
In an unassuming research lab, Volkswagen is solving problems that Tesla and Google haven’t come close to cracking. Cliff Kuang reports for Fast Company. In his article he features the work of Brian Lathrop, who runs the UX group at Volkswagen’s little-known Electronics Research Laboratory,…
Katherine Benjamin, digital services manager at NHS England, asks some clever questions in this Medium piece: “Digital health services and wearable technologies are meant to empower users to change behaviours and become better informed, more engaged patients. However, to what extent has the rhetoric of…
The U.S. Army is already using design thinking to inform its battle doctrine, and now voices go up to apply it to US foreign policy as well. Design Thinking Comes to the U.S. Army by Roger Martin The U.S. Army has incorporated design thinking into…
The Design Thinking for Museums site is the outcome of a 2012 partnership between the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school). It is conceived as a resource for professionals and practitioners interested in applying design thinking…
Asian Perspectives on Digital Culture: Emerging Phenomena, Enduring Concepts Edited by Sun Sun Lim, Cheryll Soriano Routledge, 2016 214 pages Abstract In Asia, amidst its varied levels of economic development and diverse cultural traditions and political regimes, the Internet and mobile communications are increasingly used…
New report by Argus Insights suggests disappointing apps break user experience, may cause decline in consumer delight over time. The Smart Home ecosystem comprises both hardware devices and software apps and together they are supposed to make an efficient system for consumers. A new report…
Because personas focus on creating a story made up of a customer’s attributes, instead of a story that explains a purchase, personas leave the brain in a unsatisfied state, argues Alan Klement. To fix this, in just a split second, the brain decides to make…
Stephen Klasko (an MD with an MBA, CEO of Jefferson Health System and Thomas Jefferson University) and Bon Ku (MD, a professor of emergency medicine at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital) joined the Knowledge@Wharton show on Wharton Business Radio to talk about why design is so…
In this half-hour film (commissioned by The Guardian and Silent Circle), Aleks Krotoski travels the world to undergo challenges that explore our digital life in the 21st century. Watch her be stalked and hacked, fight to get leaked documents back, dive into open data and…
Melissa Cefkin is a Principal Scientist & Design Anthropologist at Nissan Research in Silicon Valley where she explores the potential of having autonomous vehicles as interactive agents in the world. In an article that was published yesterday, she considers two ways in which, to me,…
Ford CEO Mark Fields recently declared that Ford would be remade as a user-experience driven company: “We have obviously a lot experience in the car business, over 113 years, and our differentiation is going to be clearly the whole user experience, and how you experience…
The privatization of human rights: illusions of consent, automation and neutrality by Emily Taylor Published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation and Chatham House 2016 The Internet enables the free flow of information on an unprecedented scale but to an increasing extent the management…
When people think of quantitative analytics, big data, and statistics, they rarely picture an anthropologist. The truth is that although anthropology is well known for gathering qualitative data, anthropologists are trained to understand all kinds of data. In many graduate anthropology programs, the required research…
It’s easy to design for the idealized user, someone who’s smart, calm, and informed. It’s less easy, and thus more important, to design for a more realistic user: still smart, but harried and uncertain. The best designs handle both with care. But how many designs…
Every Thing We Touch: A 24-Hour Inventory of Our Lives [Tumblr page] by Paula Zuccotti Viking Books, November 2015 256 pages What’s the first thing we touch when we wake up? How do our favourite things reveal our hopes and fears? Can objects tell the…
Financial times journalist/anthropologist Gillian Tett deconstructs the idea that the internet hands power to the people. In fact, she writes, in most countries power remains firmly in the hands of the elite. The bitter — and dangerous — irony of our modern age is that…
In a new report the McGraw Hill Financial Global Institute (MHFI) argues that we need a new thinking about how to create “age-friendly cities.” Adapting to the challenges of an aging urban population, they write, requires a fundamental change in the mindset of policymakers and…
Anthropologist Michael Thompson believes in the power of creativity from below in solving some of the smaller and bigger problems of our time. “People generally are very creative and innovative. Many anthropological case studies have shown that. If development happens, it does not happen just…
For going on four years now, IBM has been working to reinvent itself as a design-led business. In 2012, the computing behemoth employed just one designer for every 80 coders. Today, that ratio stands at 1:20. By the end of 2016, the company hopes to…
Target CEO Brian Cornell’s quest to understand shoppers takes him inside customers’ homes, looking in their cupboards and closets during pre-arranged visits. The Target Corporation is the second-largest discount retailer in the United States, behind Walmart. It is headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and operates 1,801…
In June 2015, Google commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate how prepared mobile marketers are to deliver to consumers during quick mobile “moments” – i.e. — instances when they reflexively turn to their devices to act on a need to learn, discover, find, or buy something.…
Validating Product Ideas Through Lean User Research by Tomer Sharon Rosenfeld Media, January 2016 344 pages Want to know what your users are thinking? If you’re a product manager or developer, this book will help you learn the techniques for finding the answers to your…