Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Irene Au, former head of Google’s User Interaction Team, is the latest designer to make her way to a venture capital firm. Here’s why VCs are so hot for designers and how consumers could ultimately benefit from the trend. “It’s a common misconception that VCs…
Sceptics fail to grasp that this is a strategy that improves lives while treating citizens with dignity – unlike coercion, argues Cass Sunstein. It is true that nudges are not a sufficient approach to some of our most serious problems, such as violent crime, poverty,…
Doctors have known for decades that, in order to prevent disease or its complications, they were going to have to get into people’s living rooms and convince them to change everyday behaviors that would very likely kill them. The world urgently needs better ways to…
The surveillance program PRISM by the US secret service NSA has reminded us that all of our activities online may be monitored without giving us the chance to understand whether we really are targeted or what the purpose of this monitoring is. Information is being…
The people at frog design have been exploring sensing technologies and their impact on the human experience. Two interesting articles are the result: The Qualified Self: Going Beyond Quantification Just as stories yield data, data yield stories. And just as it is difficult to quantify…
The idea of the SMARTiP project is to take the experience developed by a wide range of existing user-driven, open innovation initiatives in Europe, particularly those developed through Living Labs, and to apply this experience to the challenge of transforming public services by empowering ‘smart…
Representing Future Situations of Service Prototyping in Service Design by Johan Blomkvist Linköping Studies in Arts and Science Doctoral Dissertation Human-Centred Systems Division Department of Computer and Information Systems Linköping University This thesis describes prototyping in service design through the theoretical lens of situated cognition.…
The world of business is changing, as are the locations of the people who are driving that business. How companies reach new users and how they treat them once they do will be the defining business issue of the future. Those who deliver the best…
Three posts by Simon Roberts (?) explore the rise, fall and possible futures of ethnography in commercial settings. Ethnography, magpies and shiny things The first piece explores how ethnography fell victim of the enduring quest for fashion and the need to differentiate in market research.…
Facebook recently made profiles more “contextual” on their iOS app, writes John Paul Titlow in Fast Company. That means that like Google searches or other personalized experiences, Facebook profiles will now appear differently based on who’s viewing. “We wanted to know what people find useful…
Criticizing Voice of the Customer (VOC) programs is like speaking out against motherhood and apple pie, writes marketing consultant Ron Shevlin. Yet, he says, there are (at least) two problems with the “voice of the customer†that many marketers don’t take into consideration: 1. It’s…
Only a few years ago, the corporate view of retirement planning at San Francisco-based Wells Fargo Bank tended to focus on dollars and cents — how much an individual needed to invest, by when and for how many years,†write Julien Cayla, Robin Beers and…
Museums around the world today face the challenge of increasing and maintaining visitor numbers, especially with younger audiences. A fall in visitors is seen by most as a negative outcome, both financially and in terms of wider social and educational impact. It can happen due…
A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences by Sarah Horton & Whitney Quesenbery Rosenfeld Media, 2013 288 pages In their new book, A Web for Everyone: Designing Accessible User Experiences, Sarah Horton and Whitney Quesenbery make a case for accessibility that begins and ends…
Alexandra Fiorillo, Principal of GRID Impact, writes that if we want to achieve full financial inclusion, we cannot simply offer more financial products and services to more people and hope they need, want, like, and use them. Instead, she writes, we should spend the necessary…
IBM this week announced plans to commit more than $100 million to globally expand its consulting services capability to help clients with experience design and engagement. As part of the investment, the company will open 10 new IBM Interactive Experience labs around the world and…
Are you a trainer? Do you facilitate meetings? The International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (ITC-ILO, a specialised, not-for-profit UN agency and an Experientia client) is currently experimenting with crowdfunding to finance a set of 60 cards featuring participatory knowledge sharing methods. The…
When you work in user experience or one of its many subsets, you tend to hear questions about what you do a lot. UX professionals often get this inquiry from parents, prospects, neighbors, friends, or casual acquaintances. Too often, Baruch Sachs gets the same level…
Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, explains in Re/Code how also in a business context a people-centric focus is increasingly essential. “In order to unlock the opportunity for “people-centric†experiences and to realize the new kinds of business value those experiences can generate, IT leaders need…
A long post by Rick Robinson, Executive Architect at IBM specialising in emerging technologies and Smarter Cities, admonishes Smart Cities planners and designers not to overlook the social needs of cities and communities. After all, he says, the full purpose of cities is: to enable…
Responsive urban technology sounds enticing but citizens must not be disconnected from plans drawn up on their behalf, argues Gary Graham in The Guardian. “It’s not clear at the moment whether future cities are strategic experiments for [large companies such as IBM, Samsung, Cisco and…
The latest post of the User Experience Lab at Ericsson Research presents a UX view of the future of mobile networks and systems. “The “Remote Control over Mobile Networks†concept is one of several concepts that we have defined in a longer term research project…
Nick Seaver, a PhD candidate in sociocultural anthropology at UC Irvine, makes the case for the importance of “studying up“: doing ethnographies not only of disempowered groups, but of groups who wield power in society, like technology developers. This project focuses on the development of…
The Forum for Social Innovation Sweden is a meeting place for academia, industry, government, civic society and non-profit organisations in Sweden striving to develop social innovation and social entrepreneurship. As part of its mission to share news, information, network and what is happening within this…
Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path argues that the constellations in the user experience field are shifting and that we are experiencing some sort of collision of three different “galaxies”: “The customer experience community developed out of the marketing and customer support functions in organizations…
Search results pages on travel sites should help customers to find the best deal for them without having to work too hard. Graham Charlton of Econsultancy looked at a range of search tools from travel websites, which highlighted the importance of flexibility when users search…
The Guardian reports on how a new UK project where patients and NHS staff work together to improve services shows that even small changes can have a big impact on the quality of care. The project, with an impossibly long name, has been designed by…
Most big businesses globally are locked into some kind of reliance on enterprise technology. Unfortunately such systems are not only fiendishly difficult to install and maintain, but often equally challenging for the workforce to use. So asks Rob Gilham, why is the user experience of…
For once a post in French! Hubert Guillaud of InternetActu describes some examples – mostly from the recent EPIC conference – of the great contribution of ethnography in focusing our gaze on real life practices, in pointing out that what technologists do not see, and…
Are you a trainer? Do you facilitate meetings? Help the International Training Centre of the International Labour Organization (an Experientia client) to develop a mobile card set of 60 participatory knowledge sharing methods and technologies that you can use in any of your upcoming workshops…
Lauren Ruiz of Cooper in San Francisco has published two new instalments of the Designers Toolkit: A Primer On Capturing Research How you choose to conduct and capture your research will greatly impact your outcomes, and ultimately your client outcomes. I’m going to highlight a…
The first destination: The path to decent work in rural economies Experientia’s short documentary for the UN’s International Labour Organization It’s always a pleasure to work on a project that is out of the ordinary. Experientia’s short documentary for the UN’s International Labour Organization (ILO)…
Julia Angwin, a senior reporter at ProPublica, writes in the New York Times about how it takes a lot of money and time to avoid hackers and data miners. “In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After all, as the saying goes,…
A few weeks back I wrote that Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is running a short series on Savage Minds that features interviews with design researchers, ethnographic hackers, and field work makers with their take on anthropology and design. Besides her interview with Nicolas Nova, she…
The Moment of Clarity: Using the Human Sciences to Solve Your Toughest Business Problems by Christian Madsbjerg, Mikkel Rasmussen Harvard Business Review Press 2014, 224 pages Traditional problem-solving methods taught in business schools serve us well for some of the everyday challenges of business, but…
The City as Interface How New Media Are Changing the City By Martijn de Waal nai010 Publishers 2014, 208 pages Digital and mobile media are changing the way urban life takes shape and how we experience our built environment. On the face of it, this…
Genevieve Bell, Intel’s in-house anthropologist, sees constants in our behavior that could mean big bucks for businesses that find a way to capitalize on them. C|Net reports on her talk at the Mobile World Congress yesterday. “In this digital world, the story we’re telling about…
In his lecture “The Ethicist’s and the Lawyer’s New Clothes: The Law and Ethics of Smart Clothes,” I. Glenn Cohen, Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, warns of the potential for wearable technology to annihilate privacy for good. According to Fortune’s David Whitford,…
Is there a Language of Interaction Design [Not yet online] Keynote by Gillian Crampton Smith, Designer/Educator, IUAV University of Venice > Full description Bridging the Physical-Digital Divide [44:32] Jason Mesut, Head of User Experience at Plan Strategic Bridging the gap between Industrial and Interaction Design…
Body Languages of Interaction Design [38:53] Keynote by Irene Au Design is both art and science, yet while we teach methods and practices for hard design skills, we don’t teach practices that address the art of design, which is often mystified as “creative genius”. Irene’s…