Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
The traditional agency model is physically more than alive on a small scale, but mentally has been stagnating, writes Tobias van Schneider, Product Design Lead at Spotify NYC: Agencies are now tasked to find their own voice, build their own brand and craft their own…
Esko Kilpi, the principal of Esko Kilpi Ltd, a leading research and consultancy firm focusing on the art of interaction, science of social complexity and the design of digital work, writes about how the value of a product is changing in the age of the…
Behavioural Economics and Health: Nudging Toward a Culture of Wellness Report by David Verbeeten The Conference Board of Canada, 52 pages, January 15, 2015 This report explores “nudging,†a new, cost-effective policy tool than can be used to modify behaviours that cause disease or undermine…
At Experientia we believe in the importance of understanding cultural differences, no matter how wide they might be. There is not much qualitative research, it seems, that aims at understanding the lived experience of Muslim and Arab youth in European cities. “Terra incognita,” as one…
Recent research from the University of Kansas looks at the way technological advancements influence interpersonal communication, with a focus on familial relationships. The study tested whether the number of media used by families to interact with each other altered the way they related. Nic Denholm,…
Case study: Service innovation in the public sector Service Design Network site This case study is based on a series of public sector projects commissioned by the Chamber of Commerce in conjunction with local governments in two large cities in The Netherlands. A nationwide survey…
On 7-8 October around 650 global thought leaders and practitioners from sectors such as hospitality, insurance, retail, telecommunications, finance, IT and healthcare gathered in Stockholm for the 7th Service Design Global Conference. Coming from 40+ countries, they gathered to share the latest thinking, trends and…
Design, When Everybody Designs – An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation By Ezio Manzini The MIT Press, 264 pages February 2015 In a changing world everyone designs: each individual person and each collective subject, from enterprises to institutions, from communities to cities and regions,…
UPDATE: Yesterday we wrote that all keynote speakers were American. The conference site has meanwhile been updated and they are in fact …as they should be… all European! UX STRAT Europe will take place in Amsterdam on June 4 – 5, 2015 at the Tobacco…
Or said differently: “If you want to understand how animals live, you don’t go to the zoo, you go to the jungle.” Jörgen Vig Knudstorp began turning the company around by making several key moves: improving processes, cutting costs, and managing cash flow. Then came…
Complementary social science? Quali-quantitative experiments in a Big Data world Anders Blok and Morten Axel Pedersen University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark Big Data & Society – August 6, 2014 The rise of Big Data in the social realm poses significant questions at the intersection of…
TNS, a global company specialised in market research, global market information and business analysis, has published some papers that are quite aligned with what the UX research and design community has been practicing for years as well: A manifesto for qualitative research Qualitative research has…
Robert Fabricant, who moved from design consultancy Frog to development consultancy Dalberg, writes that the business of design consulting is undergoing mass extinction. In a long article for Wired he presents the history of design consulting in three phases (digital change agents, innovation consultants and…
Carl DiSalvo, an associate professor in the Digital Media program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is struck that there is very little design history in HCI. Design history is important to HCI, he argues, for at least two reasons. First, it can help us…
[Video] “Designing Delightful Details for a UI Revolution” by Toby Sterrett at push.conference 2014 Toby Sterrett, Simple’s Director of UX, offers a deep dive on how Simple’s reinvented banking by placing customers at its core. In a static industry dominated by off-the-shelf solutions, the team…
Experientia has now its own Twitter feed. Four months of Putting People First posts and other links have already been uploaded. If you followed Experientia on Twitter through the feed of its CEO, Mark Vanderbeeken, make sure to now also follow the company (but don’t…
Leslie Bradshaw, managing parter of Made by Many, describes Americans’ shifting value systems. “Young people have redefined success, and their new definition values experience over possession. The word “experience†may sound like a code word for “free,†but the change is not necessarily a reaction…
“Technology and business organizations often default to a positivist worldview and subsequently believe that quantitative results that provide numeric measures have the most value,” writes Bill Sellman, Lead User Researcher on Firefox. “The hype surrounding big data methods (and the billions spent on marketing by…
BOOK Beautiful Users: Designing for People Edited and designed by Ellen Lupton Princeton Architectural Press, 2014, 144 pages In the mid-twentieth century, Henry Dreyfuss, widely considered the father of industrial design, pioneered a user-centered approach to design that focuses on studying people’s behaviors and attitudes…
Experientia’s Putting People First blog has been redesigned. It is now entirely responsive, allows for easier browsing, searching, and filtering, and features larger images on the posts. The entire history of posts remains accessible as before. We are still tweaking things and welcome any feedback.
WASHINGTON, December 2, 2014 — Development policies based on new insights into how people actually think and make decisions will help governments and civil society achieve development goals more effectively. A richer and more accurate understanding of human behavior can make it easier to tackle…
Shirley Eadie, founding member and CEO of Pondering Panda, explored some of the idiosyncrasies of the human condition at last month’s MRMW Africa conference [Market Research in the Mobile World], in order to help attendees understand the impact of those idiosyncrasies on research design, to…
Elliott Hedman is the founder of the design consultancy mPath, where he’s pioneering a new approach to design research. It combines stress-testing sensors with traditional observational techniques. The idea is to uncover the tiny, often imperceptible emotional moments that shape our reaction to products and…
A McKinsey Center for Government survey finds that Americans are often dissatisfied with state services—and identifies significant opportunities for improvement. Deloitte measured the satisfaction of citizens by surveying approximately 17,000 people across 15 US states. This online survey included more than 100 questions asking citizens…
Peter Merholz argues that the entire “field†of user experience emerged for one reason — to accommodate, and overcome, poor (or non-existent) product management practices. He now wants to retire the term: “‘User experience design’ served a purpose when it was necessary to shine a…
Trebor Scholz, Associate Professor for Culture and Media at The New School in New York, writes that he “support[s] peer production and sharing practices but [he is] vexed by attempts to subsume them into the new corporate hype of “the sharing revolution†that comes with…
Last month, Ericsson published its latest ConsumerLab report, entitled “Smart Citizens: How the internet facilitates smart choices in city life.” The study covers 9 cities worldwide-Beijing, Delhi, London, New York, Paris, Rome, São Paulo, Stockholm and Tokyo-and explores how as citizens become smarter, so do…
Why the world needs anthropologists – Coming out of the ivory tower Location: Padua, Italy, Centro Culturale Altinate/San Gaetano Date and time: Friday, 5 December 2014, 13:00 – 18:00 Padua, Italy, 5 December 2014 – The second edition of the international symposium of applied anthropologists…
Five years into his role as head of strategic insights at Heineken UK, Mick Doran believes that the brewing industry is learning valuable lessons from other FMCG sectors in becoming more consumer inspired and brand led. “Since he joined the brewer, Doran has established a…
Underneath all the shopping, online searching, and purchasing is a human being who takes a particular action for very personal reasons, writes Jure Klepic in The Huffington Post. Those reasons maybe based on a response to advertising or a referral from a trusted influencer, but…
Why would Intel need to conduct a tremendous amount of ethnographic research if all they are manufacturing are microchips? This short essay by Ioanis Hristodoulou eexamines Intel’s role in design anthropology on a worldwide context, exploring the work of Tony Salvador, who directs research in…
Quotidian Ritual and Work-Life Balance: An Ethnography of Not Being There Jo-Anne Richard and Paulina Yurman (Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design, Royal College of Art) David Kirk and David Chatting (Culture Lab, Newcastle University) Paper presented at the EPIC Conference, New York, September 2014 This…
The London Design Museum has launched Health Tech and You – a search for the best new health tech ideas, inventions and devices. Director Deyan Sudjic reflects on how the digital revolution is breaking down doors in the health industry – and showcases three recent…
Banks should shift their role from payment processors to trusted consumer advisors by focusing on the customer experience, argues Rob Girling in an Op-Ed piece for PSFL. “My advice to banks is to start by looking from the outside of your organization in, in order…
Design for Policy Edited by Christian Bason, Chief Executive, Danish Design Centre Series: Design for Social Responsibility Hardcover: 250 pages Publisher: Gower Pub Co; December 28, 2014 Design for Policy is the first publication to chart the emergence of collaborative design approaches to innovation in…
In this edition of Ask UXmatters (a series curated by Janet M. Six), an eight-person expert panel looks at the importance of considering the fundamental principles of great design — not just UX design principles, but design principles in general. The panel also discusses how…
As part of an on-going series profiling people, institutions and programs in the EPIC People community, Katharina Rochjadi of Swinburne University of Technology has now profiled Elizabeth F. Churchill, Director of User Experience at Google. “Conducting ethnographic work is not an end in itself. Elizabeth…
Companies shouldn’t just give out wearables for free; they should pay users for data, argues Hans Neubert, frog’s chief creative officer. “Owners of wearable technology, like the upcoming Apple Watch or Microsoft Band, are the most vital part of the product ecosystem because they generate…
Steve Daniels, director at Makeshift magazine, explains why informal economies are the world’s biggest — and most overlooked — design research opportunity. “Informal economies are society’s sandbox, where early experimentation can take place freely. In the same way that thoughtless acts inspire us to rethink products and services, the…