Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
In a battery of experiments, Imperial College’s Johannes Hattula and his coresearchers Walter Herzog, Darren Dahl, and Sven Reinecke interviewed marketing managers about their personal preferences for a selected product or service. The researchers then primed some managers to be empathetic by having them describe…
It is no secret among Customer Experience (CX) professionals that most CX efforts fall flat. Forrester found that only 25% of CX professionals say their companies’ CX programs actually improve customer experience, and Avaya recently published a study indicating that 81% of organizations have seen…
Ethnography for the Internet: Embedded, Embodied and Everyday by Christine Hine Bloomsbury Academic, 2015 The internet has become embedded into our daily lives, no longer an esoteric phenomenon, but instead an unremarkable way of carrying out our interactions with one another. Online and offline are…
University of Derby finds smartphone users in study spent average 3.6 hours a day on devices, often causing severe distraction from relationships and ‘real life’. Haroon Siddique reports in The Guardian: Smartphones are psychologically addictive, encourage narcissistic tendencies and should come with a health warning,…
Is it time to re-examine our anthropocentrism in design, asks ASU design professor Prasad Boradkar and to extend design’s locus of action towards biocentrism. “Clearly, the things we design with such diligent research and utmost care for people do not impact only people. The consequences…
The trend of an ageing population is reflected across Europe. It is estimated that by 2035 nearly a quarter of the population in the United Kingdom will be over 65 years. Ageing is traditionally associated with a decrease in mobility and social interaction, and this…
Activists have leaked the latest draft of Europe’s planned data protection law – which is supposed to safeguard Europeans’ personal information when in the hands of businesses and governments, reports The Register “The proposed rules have been agreed by the European Parliament. Now Euro nations’…
The average tenure of a CMO is just 45 months, according to a recent study released by executive recruiting firm Spencer Stuart. Fortunately, for CMOs in need of help, there’s an elegant and simplistic process called “human-centered design,” which takes all the guesswork out of…
Corporate ethnography isn’t just for innovation anymore. It’s central to gaining a full understanding of your customers and the business itself, writes Ken Anderson, anthropologist at Intel Research, in the Harvard Business Review. The ethnographic work at his company and other firms now informs functions…
Life Off Grid is a two-year journey exploring the lives of Canadians in every province and territory who have made the choice to disconnect. Life Off Grid is a film and book about people who have chosen to build their lives around renewable energy, with…
The well known anthropologist and sociologist Anne Galloway just announced the launch of the More-Than-Human Lab at Victoria University (New Zealand), which extends and augments human-centered design practices to our multi-species ecosystems. “What if we refuse to uncouple nature and culture? What if we deny…
The Smart Care unit of the insurance arm of the Italian bank Intesa Sanpaolo has just launched an innovative home security offering. Branded “ACasaConMe” [AtHomeWithMe], the service combines a personalized insurance package and a security kit that people can easily install themselves [as demonstrated in…
Netnography Redefined by Robert V Kozinets (York University, Canada) Sage Publications, 288 pages July 2015 Social media and the internet are rich, fertile sources of data for social researchers, though online data offer both opportunities and challenges. In this updated new edition, Robert V. Kozinets…
Open Policy Making is about recognising that top down thinking and decision making no longer can deliver the range of services that people and communities have come to expect in a connected society, writes William Barker, Head of Technology Strategy and Digital Futures at the…
Doing Sensory Ethnography by Sarah Pink Sage Publications Paperback, 232 pages Second edition, February 2015 Between 2010 – 2014, a team of UK anthropologists, engineers and designers worked towards a deeper understanding of how energy and media consumption fit in to everyday practices and habits…
The acclaimed UX researcher Steve Portigal hosts the DollarsToDonuts podcast series [iTunes | Twitter] where he talks with the people who lead user research in their (corporate) organization. Six programs so far: Carol Rossi, Senior Director of UX Research at Edmunds.com On her small-but-mighty team,…
David Lee Scher, MD – Owner & Director, DLS Healthcare Consulting discusses what he thinks are five important issues in achieving the ideal mobile technology user experience, specifically for those technologies hoping to enter the healthcare (vs. consumer) market: 1. Clinician involvement in development. 2.…
Kara Pernice, the Managing Director at the Nielsen Norman Group, was a proud early adopter of the unique, cool, and pretty Nest device: “It helped me save energy, and communicated to me. But things went bad when it let me down emotionally.” Now she calls…
In early January, Mozilla UX conducted user research to refresh their understanding of how people save, share, and revisit mobile content with the goal of building a knowledge base for a larger contextual research project on multi-device task continuity that is currently being conducted. Primary…
There are many areas of life – e.g. utility providers – where we could be getting a better deal by making what seems to be an easy switch. Behavioural scientist Nathalie Spencer of The RSA asks why we don’t do it more often. In a…
The Emergence of Law and Behavioural Science: A European Perspective by Anne-Lise Sibony (Université de Liège) and Alberto Alemanno (HEC Paris; NYU School of Law) February 16, 2015 Introductory chapter to the forthcoming book: Nudge and the Law: A European Perspective [working title], by the…
Erin Taylor and Gawain Lynch of the Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion (UCI) lead a research project aimed at understanding people’s financial behaviors. Their project, Consumer Finance Research: Global Approaches and Methods, is investigating how different sectors – development, commercial, academia, and government–…
Digital Assurance: Reaching a Seamless Customer Experience by Shawndra Hill (Wharton professor of operations and information management) and Kumudha Sridharan (vice president and global head of testing services at Wipro Technologies) White paper produced by Knowledge@Wharton and sponsored by Wipro Technologies February 19, 2015 As…
The journalist Hamza Shaban is concerned by the contents of a new US Federal Communications Commission report that probes the privacy implications of connected devices: “That the pervasive collection of information from within our homes might create automated forms of profiling, discrimination, and exploitation seems,…
Data harvesting, data mining and analysis has transformed the way we look at our mobile devices and computer screens. Content is now adaptive and responsive to our behaviour. But, writes Paul Levy, Senior Researcher in Innovation Management at University of Brighton, that does not necessarily…
In a recent study, every connected home security system tested by HP contained significant vulnerabilities, including but not limited to password security, encryption, and authentication issues. HP’s Fortify on Demand security service assessed the top 10 home security devices – such as video cameras and…
​In a pretty short period of time, the internet has changed how we take care of our basic needs, stand up for ourselves, and talk to each other. But psychologists are still debating how much this rapid change has changed us in return. Enter the…
Analytics is typically discussed in terms of computer technology, machine learning algorithms, and big data. Behavioral nudges, on the other hand, concern human psychology. What do they have in common? Quite a bit, says James Guszcza, US chief data scientist for Deloitte Consulting LLP. “Business…
increasing penetration of data into the domain of the “personal†and to the management and care of the self suggest that something is afoot in how the self is understood, experienced, and practiced more broadly, argues cultural anthropologist Jamie Sherman of the Intel Corporation. Understanding…
Davey Alba explains in Wired how UserTesting runs an online panel of over 1 million testers—volunteers mostly—who can test products and other company materials on demand. : “The company has developed a way for businesses to “peek over†the shoulders of users and hear candid…
After the Chief Experience Officer, the new trendy job title from corporate America is the Chief Behavioral Officer: “Dan Egan of the automated investing service Betterment estimates that between 10 and 20 Fortune 500 companies have someone at a C-suite level serving in the role…
Privacy and human behavior in the age of information Alessandro Acquisti, Laura Brandimarte and George Loewenstein (of Carnegie Mellon University) Science 30 January 2015: Vol. 347 no. 6221 pp. 509-514 This Review summarizes and draws connections between diverse streams of empirical research on privacy behavior.…
In the past three years, Heather Ford — an ethnographer and now a PhD student — has worked on ad hoc collaborative projects around Wikipedia sources with two data scientists from Minnesota, Dave Musicant and Shilad Sen. In this essay, she talks about how the…
The new Wikipedia page on “Design for behaviour change” starts as follows: “Design for behaviour change is a sub-category of design, which is concerned with how design can shape, or be used to influence human behaviour. All approaches of design for behaviour change acknowledge that…
Beyond Design Ethnography: How Designers Practice Ethnographic Research Edited by Prof. Nicolas Nova along with Lysianne Léchot-Hirt of HEAD-Genève (CH), and Fabienne Kilchör and Sebastien Fasel (Emphase.ch) Head-Genève, January 2015 What do designers mean when they say they’re going to do “ethnography” and “field research”?…
Gradinar Razvan discusses some of the questions that UX designers will need to consider when designing for wearables. In particular, he presents the key things that designers should keep in mind when they are designing for a wearable device: Make it usable First, you need…
Every January, hundreds of politicians, CEOs, scientific experts, and celebrities gather for their annual meeting in the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos to “improve the state of the world.” Yet, the World Economic Forum’s influence on society and consumption is surprisingly little understood. A…
In 2013 Pfizer leadership realized that to better enable patient engagement throughout the entirety of the drug discovery, development, and delivery process, the company needed to be more systematic. Pfizer CMO Freda Lewis-Hall, M.D. explains what patient-centricity means for them and how they have used…
Microsoft’s second annual survey (pdf) of Internet users around the world has many obvious insights on the benefits of technology for how people shop, work, learn, and generally get stuff done, but only one real news item: people’s huge concern about privacy: “If there is…
Numbers don’t tell us everything we need to know [in health care], writes strategic consultant Dan Beckham. We must also consider human culture: “That’s often the problem with big data, analytics and chasing metrics. They too often breed myopic overconfidence. The numbers, after all, never…