Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Young children — even toddlers — are spending more and more time with digital technology. Hanna Rosin wonders what will it mean for their development? “As technology becomes ubiquitous in our lives, American parents are becoming more, not less, wary of what it might be…
In July, 2013 Edge invited a group of social scientists to participate in an Edge Seminar at Eastover Farm focusing on the state of the art of what the social sciences have to tell us about human nature, entitled “HeadCon ’13: WHAT’S NEW IN SOCIAL…
Article by Shlomo Goltz on “integrating the hero’s journey as part of the user-centered design process”: “There are many prominent and outspoken members of the design community, such as Steve Portigal and Jason Fried, who feel that personas are unnecessary. They make compelling arguments, but…
The humanitarian sector must lift barriers to user-led innovation by refugee communities if it is to meet the challenges of an ever-changing world, says a new report, Humanitarian Innovation: The State of the Art, published by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs…
Maria Bezaitis, PhD and Principal Engineer of Intel’s User Experience Ethnographic Research Lab, discusses the Real World Web and how internet-enabled sensors will create new kinds of intimacies and engagements. “Commitment and engagement are really powerful sentiments,†said Bezaitis. “The get to the heart of…
Nursing Research Using Ethnography: Qualitative Designs and Methods in Nursing Mary De Chesnay, PhD, RN, PMHCNS-BC, FAAN (Editor) Pub. Date: 08/28/2014 372 pp., Softcover Springer [Amazon] Ethnography is a qualitative research design that focuses on the study of people to explore cultural phenomena. This concise,…
Learning from Extreme Consumers by Jill Avery, Michael I. Norton Teaching Note, 9 pages, January 2014 Traditional market research methods focus on understanding the average experiences of average consumers. This focus leads to gaps in our knowledge of consumer behavior and often fails to uncover…
The “world’s first family robot†is based on efforts to elicit emotional response in humans—a powerful idea, but one fraught with challenges, writes Will Knight in the MIT Technology Review. “Resembling a static but animated lampshade (with a slightly Hal-like, glowing-orb face), Jibo is meant…
Enchanted Objects: Design, Human Desire, and the Internet of Things by David Rose Scribner (July 15, 2014) July 15, 2014 320 pages [Amazon] In the tradition of Who Owns the Future? and The Second Machine Age, David Rose, an MIT Media Lab scientist imagines how…
In its new Focus Note, Applying Behavioral Insights in Consumer Protection Policy, CGAP (a unit affiliated with the Worldbank) presents a summary of the growing evidence from consumer and behavioral research for consumer protection policy on four topics—disclosure and transparency; complaints handling and recourse; debt…
Over the past years the Amsterdam agency edenspeakermann_ collaborated in a European cooperation that aims to create a seamless air travel experience for passengers to Europe. As a result of research on four European airports they created the concept of the ‘Info Connectivity System’: a…
Mary L. Gray wrote a long essay for ethnographymatters that argues that technology builders and interface designers, data scientists and ethnographers (working in industry and at universities alike) “are now, officially, doing human subjects research”. She argues that all these professionals now really need “to…
Simon Roberts of Stripe Partners continues his three part series on ethnography. In the first two posts in this series he examined ethnography as practiced in two different contexts – the (1) market research (MR) industry and (2) corporate R&D labs. He argued that ethnography…
The aim of the Service Design Research UK (SDR UK) Network of the Network is to review and consolidate the current state of Service Design knowledge within the field of Design. Three workshops and three Advisory Board meetings formed the basis of the Service Design…
On 6 June OgilvyChange, the specialist behavioural sciences practice of Ogilvy & Mather UK, hosted the second edition of Nudgestock, the “largest gathering of behavioural experts in the world”. The one day event on May 24 saw speakers from fields as wide ranging as behavioural…
The Seoul city government has officially embraced the sharing economy by designating Seoul a Sharing City and is working in partnership with NGOs and private companies to make sharing an integral part of Seoul’s economy. The city is now creating an official sharing ecosystem and,…
Core77 has drawn my attention to IKEA’s newly launched Life At Home report, which explores the home lives of people all over the globe, with a focus on the morning routines, habits and wishes of those who live in Berlin, London, Moscow, Dubai, New York,…
Now and then we use this blog to announce activities that are dear to us and deserve some promotion. Today it is the exhibition of artist Marguerite Kahrl, who is the wife of Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels. The show opens on Thursday evening in the…
Daniel Kahneman, the ‘godfather’ of behavioural economics, has been challenged by rival psychologist Gerd Gigerenzer, director of the Centre for Cognition and Adaptive Behaviour at the Max Planck institute in Berlin, who claims that Kahneman presents ‘an unfairly negative view of the human mind’. Gigerenzer’s…
Promoted heavily by academic institutions and consultancies alike, design thinking has been a big buzzword during the past decade, turning some people on and others off. Though design thinking has actually been around for half a century, when asking creative professionals how they define it;…
Before the turn of the 20th century into the 21st century, a movement began. This movement called for a more user-centered approach, or also commonly referred to as human-centered, to designing products, software, digital interactions, and design concepts. It is rooted in the belief, which…
Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems: What System Designers Need to Know about People by Frank E. Ritter, Gordon D Baxter and Elizabeth F. Churchill Springer, 2014, Paperback 442 p. 108 illus. Interactive technologies pervade every aspect of modern life. Web sites, mobile devices, household gadgets,…
Digital services in the public sector must have user-centred design as a ‘primary focus’ if people are to benefit from IT growth, the report “Designing the Digital Economy” claims. The report, commissioned by the British Parliament’s Design and Innovation Group, describes designers as “critical agents…
Spending a weekend sitting in someone else’s house reporting when, why and how much they ate, drank, bathed, watched TV or used their mobile phone isn’t everyone’s idea of a good time, but for a marketer it is one of the best ways to gain…
The sharing economy is a harmful misnomer, writes John Harvey, a researcher at the University of Nottigham. It conflates people who actually share with those who make money through collaborative consumption. “It is true that much of the work within the broad gamut of the…
Among the numerous implications of digitalization, the debate about “big data” has gained momentum. The central idea capturing attention is that digital data represents the newest key asset organizations should use to gain a competitive edge. Data can be sold, matched with other data, mined,…
Simply making data available online isn’t enough – it needs to be created with the end user in mind, writes Jed Miller in The Guardian. “But online or off, the measure of a tool’s value is it usefulness to the people it is meant to…
Our well-being centers on the meaningfulness of our relationships: our intimate ties, our associations with a larger circle of people, and our sense of interconnectivity with a collective tribe. Technology has become deeply embedded in how we build these relationships and define ourselves. It is…
The infographics “What Are InfoVis And DataVis About?”, designed by Experientia collaborator Eloisa Paola Fontana, was selected and published in the book “Information Graphics“, by Sandra Rendgen and Julius Wiedemann, published by Taschen. “The idea was to create a friendly and very simple metaphor to…
There are endless choices when it comes to recording and sharing our ideas. Reliable analog tools are converging with innovations in technology to produce new ways of working. So what’s the future of note-taking? In celebration of 150 years of the Politecnico di Milano, Moleskine…
The World Economic Forum has released three new reports on strengthening trust, transparency and privacy in personal data usage. Rethinking Personal Data: A New Lens for Strengthening Trust, prepared in collaboration with A.T. Kearney, looks at how to enhance transparency and accountability in the use…
Foodborne illness is a major public health problem in the UK. Recent increases in cases of listeriosis in older people have focused attention on consumer food-related practices. Previous studies highlight poor relationships between what people know, what they say they do and what they actually…
A new study from Opera Mediaworks found that people use these larger-screen devices — which combine a smartphone’s instant access to information with the tablet’s richer viewing experience — in ways that are distinct from how they use other portable gadgets. “Social networking dominates use…
Can looking at the hipster tell us something about the anthropologist and the academy? Alex Posecznick (anthropologist at the University of Pennsylvania) explores the role of anthropologists in academia from a parallel hipster point of view. With his blog posts Posecznick hopes “to contribute to…
In a recent study out of the Mayo Clinic (reported on by iMedicalApps), patients undergoing cardiac rehabilitation post-MI were offered the opportunity to use an app that provides the ability to track their progress and delivers daily supportive messaging as well as education material. In…
Handbook of Anthropology in Business Editors: Rita M. Denny and Patricia L. Sunderland Left Coast Press 752 pp. / May, 2014 In recent years announcements of the birth of business anthropology have ricocheted around the globe. The first major reference work on this field, the…
NAACE NAACE, a UK association of educators, technologists and policy makers who share a vision for the role of technology in advancing education, has published two studies on the role of tablets in secondary school education: Evolving Pedagogies for Mobile Technology in Schools A study…
Designer and social entrepreneur Aral Balkan believes it is time to build an alternate future where we own our own tools, services, and data. And to do this we must create a new category of design-led, experience-driven ‘technology’. That’s the point Balkan made at a…
Steve Tengler recently sat down the user experience folks at Mercedes’ Research and Development Center in Sunnyvale, California, and interviewed Paolo Malabuyo (Vice President of Advanced UX Design), Vera Schmidt (Senior Manager of Advanced UX Design), and Viviane Eide (Manager of UX Research). An excerpt:…
Three articles – all published on Medium – confront the challenge of designing an effective car user interface: The State of In-Car UX by Geoff Teehan, Teehan+Lax No matter the price or the brand, the interfaces that adorn today’s vehicles are in a bad place.…