Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Languaging reality, dialogue and interaction [41:05] Keynote by Klaus Krippendorff, Emeritus Professor of Communication at The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania In his keynote, Klaus distinguishes four theories from the philosophy of language and elaborate on dialogical conceptions of how reality comes to…
Keith Hart is Professor of Economic Anthropology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at Goldsmith’s, University of London. He has contributed to the concept of the informal economy to development studies and has published widely on economic…
Rachel Carmen Ceasar (@rceasara) is a doctoral candidate in the Joint Medical Anthropology Program at UC Berkeley and UC San Francisco (California, USA). She writes about the subjective and scientific stakes in exhuming mass graves from the Spanish Civil War and dictatorship in Spain today.…
Mario Campana (@mariocampana), a PhD student at City University London’s Cass Business School, researches the growing trend of local currencies – of which there are currently over 3000 around the world. He recently presented at EPIC, where in a Pecha Kucha presentation he discussed his…
Tricia Wang interviewed Daniel Miller, the anthropologist at the heart of the Facebook ethnography kerfuffle, and published the transcript on EthnographyMatters. Dr. Daniel Miller (@dannyanth) is Professor of Material Culture at the Department of Anthropology University College London and a Fellow of the British Academy.…
Experientia has lately been doing a lot of work on mobile OSes, from feature evaluations of some of the more interesting new arrivals, to comparisons of some of the classics. We have also conducted user research into people’s behaviours and attitudes to OSes, exploring their…
Qualitative 360 Asia Pacific 2013 took place in Singapore in November 2013, and some videos are now available: Winning with shoppers via qualitative research [23:57] Michael Biscocho, Consumer and Market Knowledge Manager, Procter & Gamble • Leveraging qualitative techniques to complement quantitative methods in consumer…
Energy usage and conservation can be a seemingly mundane part of an individual’s daily life on one hand, but a politically, ecologically, and economically critical issue on the other. Despite its importance, there is a startling lack of insight into what guides and influences behaviors…
The Museum of Future Government Services, which in Dubai on the 10th of February at the UAE Government Summit, is an interactive design futures exhibition. The Museum explores the future of travel, healthcare, education and urban services. It brings together over 80 designers, technologists and…
In 2006 a major European brewing company we’ll call BeerCo was faced with falling bar and pub sales and, despite muscular market research and competitive analysis, couldn’t figure out why. Customers liked its core product, a standard lager, and store sales were up. But something…
The past decade has brought enormous and growing benefits to ordinary citizens through applications built on public data. Any release of data offers advantages to experts, such as developers and journalists, but there is a crucial common factor in the most successful open data applications…
What are the advantages and challenges inherent in working with children in the design process for creating games or apps? How do you stop them getting bored, and get useful information? This case study by Monica Ferraro (a UX Researcher at City University London) looks…
Talking to Strangers: Chinese Youth and Social Media by Tricia Wang Doctor of Philosophy in Sociology, University of California, San Diego, 2013 Professor Richard Madsen, Chair Abstract The sudden availability of social media and open-market capitalism is creating new spaces in China that are shifting…
Adam Gopnik, who writes for the New Yorker, has only ever sent nine tweets. In this long BBC article he explains why: ” Everyone insists that the technological transformation of the daily shape of our lives by new gadgets is enormous, while allowing that their…
Rick Wise, CEO of Lippincott, says experience innovation is the next design imperative. Here are five things you can do this year to make that happen. “Today’s enlightened leaders are achieving success by crafting the entire customer experience–shaping, innovating, branding, and measuring it. They are…
Leisa Reichelt, Head of User Research at the Government Digital Service [GDS] in the UK Cabinet Office, argues that UX belongs everywhere and nowhere. That there is no UX team, but that everyone is the UX team. “At GDS we don’t have a ‘UX team’…
Chris Carlsson started reading Adam Greenfield’s new book, Against the Smart City, “with the expectation that it would be a critical view of the ways our urban lives have changed during the past half decade with the massive adoption of so-called “smart phones†and the…
The tech industry easily convinced the public to accept a myriad of free services for the price of some loss of privacy. But getting them to embrace the smart home is going to be a far harder sell, writes Nick Statt. “A Google spin on…
At the center of this kerfuffle is an anthropologist, Daniel Miller, his ethnographic research with teenagers in a small town in the UK, and a press report on a blog post about his research that went viral. What’s exciting about this story — leaving aside the business…
Alex “Sandy†Pentland, a professor of computational social sciences at MIT Media Lab and others like him are now convinced that the great academic divide between “hard†and “soft†sciences is set to disappear, since researchers these days can gather massive volumes of data about…
XD is a quarterly print magazine, to be launched from Australia in April 2014, which showcases the work of experience design practitioners and researchers from a wide range of human service industries and fields. Each issue of XD will feature a series of projects, interviews,…
Junkyard Planet: Travels in the Billion-Dollar Trash Trade by Adam Minter Bloomsbury Publishing 2013, 304 pages [Amazon link – video] Abstract When you drop your Diet Coke can or yesterday’s newspaper in the recycling bin, where does it go? Probably halfway around the world, to…
Marc Landsberg, CEO of socialdeviant, believes that marketing departments will increasingly invest in social platforms that are committed to users’ needs and interests In his article, Landsberg considers three immutable human truths, and how they connect to what’s happening in the marketplace: 1) People want…
Practical Ethnography: A Guide to Doing Ethnography in the Private Sector By Sam Ladner Left Coast Press April 2014, 200 pages [Publisher link – Amazon link] > Download free sample: pdf – kindle Abstract – Ethnography is an increasingly important research method in the private…
Tricia Wang (see also previous post) just published her interview with Leisa Reichelt, Head of User Research at UK Government Digital Services. Tricia introduced it with a kind reference to me (thank you!): “>We are excited to interview Leisa Reichelt (@leisa)Â for our January EPIC theme…
Sociologist and ethnographer Tricia Wang has posted the notes of “The Conceit of Oracles: How we ended up in a world in which quantitative data is more valued than qualitative data,” her inspiring and much appreciated opening keynote at the EPIC Conference in London, which…
Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers and the Quest for a New Utopia by Anthony M. Townsend W. W. Norton & Company October 2013. 400 pages [Amazon link] Abstract An unflinching look at the aspiring city-builders of our smart, mobile, connected future. We live in…
Belindar Parmar, CEO of Lady Geek and founder of Little Miss Geek thinks that current wearable devices are “emblematic of a lack of empathy that pervades the technology industries.“ “Empathy is the ability to see the world from somebody else’s perspective. In order to develop…
Designing Customer-Centric Branchless Banking Offerings Claudia McKay, Yanina Seltzer The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) 20 December 2013 pdf, iBook, Kindle Branchless banking services have taken on a significant challenge: developing new channels through which to provide financial services to customers who have…
Design Transitions – Inspiring Stories. Global Viewpoints. How design is changing. By Joyce Yee, Emma Jefferies and Lauren Tan BIS Publishers [Book site – Amazon link – selected pages] Abstract Design Transitions presents 42 unique and insightful stories of how design is changing around the…
Cheryl Heller of CommonWise argues that there’s a new design emerging that works from inside a community and at a systems level, impacting human relationships instead of things. It emerges from the new discipline of design for social innovation, in which the discipline is applied…
Small devices with embedded intelligence can do more than just measure; they’re showing their potential to change the way we act, writes Sean Madden in Fast Company. “For the first time, we have in essence a kit of parts–sensors, software, wireless protocols, an ecosystem of…
At the LAUX Meetup Group, Media Contour’s Luke Swenson was able to track down Don Norman, author of The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition and get his thoughts on problem solving, identifying the right problem, and why copying your competitors is unwise…
The Rational Animal: How Evolution Made Us Smarter Than We Think by Douglas T. Kenrick and Vladas Griskevicius Basic Books September 2013 [Amazon link] Abstract Why do three out of four professional football players go bankrupt? How can illiterate jungle dwellers pass a test that…
Empathy on the Edge Scaling and sustaining a human-centered approach in the evolving practice of design Katja Battarbee, Jane Fulton Suri, and Suzanne Gibbs Howard IDEO January 9, 2014 Remarkable things can happen when empathy for others plays a key role in problem-solving. In today’s…
In order for commercial drones like Amazon’s or Australian startup Flirtey’s to become a reality, the drone (or any future-world technology, really) can’t merely do its job—meaning, it can’t randomly drop off deliveries and simply fly away as the drone in the Amazon demo video…
Hiring managers know that design plays, and will continue to play, a critical role in the success of their companies because: What has been seen cannot be unseen., writes Dr. Leslie Jensen-Inman of the Unicorn Institute. And what has been seen is companies like Apple,…
War, Peace, and Human Nature: The Convergence of Evolutionary and Cultural Views Douglas P. Fry Oxford University Press April 2013 [Amazon link] Abstract Have humans always waged war? Is warring an ancient evolutionary adaptation or a relatively recent behavior–and what does that tell us about…
To help you build better mobile experiences, UX Archive finds and presents mobile’s most interesting user flows so you can “compare them, build your point of view, and be inspired.†“Documenting user flows is probably something many UX designers already do to some degree. Now…
In our new dystopian world of pervasive surveillance, most people are at a loss what to do. The tools that allows us to maintain a semblance of privacy are really, really hard to use. Most of us won’t even try and just accept our fate,…