Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
This week the Financial Times has run two reports on the Millennial Generation. Part Two (pdf) came out today, whereas Part One is from June 3. Part Two’s leading article is definitely worth exploring, particularly in how it connects technology and mobile devices with empowerment…
“Throughout my career, and especially as a designer at IDEO,” writes Nathan Waterhouse, “I’ve been a passionate believer of the value of placing people first, of designing from an end–user perspective. […] Perhaps it was the abundance of rhetoric about human needs [at the recent…
EPIC, the premier international gathering on the current and future practice of ethnography in the business world, just announced the program of its upcoming conference in London (15-18 September) and Experientia is proud to announce that it will be presenting a paper on Monday 16…
“Google and friends should not be trying to make these things acceptable in polite society,” writes Roger Kay in Forbes. “If they persist, they can expect a wave of hostility the likes of which they have perhaps only begun to imagine.” “People can’t opt in…
The Jörgits and the End of Winter, an indie fantasy novel for kids nine and up, uses interactivity as a supplement to the story, not a stand-in for it, and shows how interactivity can work in a slightly more substantial text. The app was created…
The Consultative Group to Assist the Poor (CGAP) is an independent policy and research center, affiliated with the World Bank, dedicated to advancing financial access for the world’s poor. Their next five-year strategic direction lays out five priority themes, desired outcomes, and activities against each…
The deep reading of books and the information-driven reading we do on the web are very different, both in the experience they produce and in the capacities they develop, writes Annie Murphy Paul on MindShift. Recent research has demonstrated that deep reading—slow, immersive, rich in…
Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection by Ethan Zuckerman W. W. Norton & Company, June 2013 288 pages [Amazon link] Abstract We live in an age of connection, one that is accelerated by the Internet. This increasingly ubiquitous, immensely powerful technology often leads…
In large technologically-driven organizations with a broad and complex product range, establishing a user-centric approach to product design can be very challenging. The shift towards designing products and services for compelling experiences for users requires (among other things) changes in planning, resources and processes. This…
Next year Interaction14, the top interaction design conference will be in Amsterdam, the second time it is in Europe (after Dublin in 2012). Now the website is live. And it is responsive (works great on a smartphone). Participate and be a speaker or workshop chair.…
To be sure, big tech can zap some city weaknesses. But, argues Alec Appelbaum, many urban problems require a decidedly different approach. “The answers that make cities run more smoothly only inadvertently end up being the ones that make cities run more equitably. Deep data…
From the Journal of Information Architecture: Sense-making in Cross-channel Design Jon Fisher (Nomensa), Simon Norris (Nomensa), and Elizabeth Buie (Luminanze Consulting) Successful cross-channel user experiences rely upon a strong informational layer that creates understanding amongst users of a service. This pervasive information layer helps users…
During her keynote speech at the DataEdge conference, Kate Crawford, a researcher at Microsoft Research, identified what she calls “six myths of Big Data.â€: 1. Big Data is new 2. Big Data is objective 3. Big Data doesn’t discriminate 4. Big Data makes cities smart…
Ken Walsh reports on how Team Obama made an unprecedented effort to understand the voters and speak their language, slicing and dicing the electorate with a sophistication and savvy that the Republicans couldn’t match and are still scrambling to replicate. “The Obama team’s opinion research…
For future smart cities to thrive, it must be centred around people, not just infrastructure. This was the overwhelming message from a group of influential thinkers speaking at this year’s FutureEverything Summit. sustain’ went along to find out what smart-city planners can learn from bottom-up…
James Fallows of The Atlantic interviewed tech-industry veteran Linda Stone, coiner of the term “continuous partial attention,” on how to maintain sanity and focus in an insane, unfocused, always-on, hyperconnected world. “We all have a capacity for relaxed presence, empathy, and luck. We stress about…
Hillete Warner of The Enabling City, an initiative started and guided by the very inspiring Chiara Camponeschi, interviewed interaction designer and an event coordinator Manuel Portela about about collective brainstorming, community-building and the power of 10.000 ideas. One of your projects, 10.000 ideas, is a…
Visceral design is the key to creating experiences people can’t get enough of. Game designers and mobile app developers have done a great job of leveraging visceral design, web designers can and should leverage it too. So what exactly is visceral design? Foster, from Mysterious…
Business agrees with governments — the more personal information they gather about us, the more “helpful†they can be. Should we give in to this “harmless†new science of benign surveillance, asks Steven Poole in The New Statesman. “Through Big Data analysis, the “cloud†comes…
The BBC’s R&D department has been working on how to exploit the interactive functionality now available through connected televisions through a number of projects under themes such as companion screens, authentication, Internet of Things, recommendation services, accessibility and so on. On Saturday 27th April, at…
Social networks of mobile money in Kenya Sibel Kusimba, Harpieth Chaggar, Elizabeth Gross, & Gabriel Kunyu Institute for Money, Technology and Financial Inclusion University of California, Irvine With mobile money technologies, people use mobile phones to send money to friends and relatives, connect to bank…
Academia.edu, the platform for academics to share research papers, contains quite a few documents from fields such as design research, experience design and interaction design. Below a selection of the last few months, sorted by upload date (most recently uploaded papers come first): Designer Storytelling…
Despite all the hoopla about an “open data†society, many consumers are being kept in the dark, writes Natasha Singer in The New York Times. “A few companies are challenging the norm of corporate data hoarding by actually sharing some information with the customers who…
Design For Care – Innovating Healthcare Experience Peter Jones Rosenfeld Media, 2013 376 pages The world of healthcare is constantly evolving, ever increasing in complexity, costs, and stakeholders, and presenting huge challenges to policy making, decision making and system design. In Design for Care, Peter…
“While people are created equal, computers are not. When people share information freely, those who own the best computers benefit in extreme ways that are denied to everyone else. Those with the best computers can simply calculate wealth and power away from ordinary people.” Jaron…
In the coming years, there will be a shift toward contextual computing, writes Pete Mortensen of Jump Associates, defined in large part by Georgia Tech researchers Anind Dey and Gregory Abowd about a decade ago. “Always-present computers, able to sense the objective and subjective aspects…
Some time ago, we suggested to Todd Harple, an anthropologist at Intel, to consider doing his 10 week sabbatical here in Turin at the International Training Center of the International Labor Organization (a United Nations structure). His sabbatical is now coming to an end and…
In the wake of Big Data, ethnographers can offer thick data, says Tricia Wang. In the face of the derisive mention of “anecdotesâ€, we ought to stand up to defend the value of stories. “Lacking the conceptual words to quickly position the value of ethnographic…
“We have the technology to do anything. To make things happen you need to turn to design and redesign the context, the decision making and the question.†– Dan Hill, CEO of Fabrica, figured out that smart citizens are necessary to make smart cities. The…
Justin Reich of MindShift has launched a four-part series to explore four dimensions of using tablets, such as the iPad, in educational settings, examining how teachers can take students on a journey from (1) consumption of media, to (2) curation, (3) creation, and (4) connection.…
At the heart of the Smarter Cities movement is the belief that the use of engineering and IT technologies, including social media and information marketplaces, can create more efficient and resilient city systems. In an excellent blog post, Rick Robinson, an Executive Architect at IBM…
People are in the midst of making a Mobile Mind Shift, which can be defined as “the expectation that any desired information or service is available, on any appropriate device, in context, at your moment of need.” Attitudes and behaviors are shifting around the world,…
It seems like the UX community has been struggling a bit to reach a common definition of UX strategy. Is it a framework or an approach? Is it a methodology or a philosophy? According to Mona Patel, there are three concepts and perspectives that are…
Ericsson’s ConsumerLab studies people’s behaviors and values, including the way they act and think about ICT products and services. Here are some of their recent publications: How young professionals see the perfect company April 2013 A new study from Ericsson ConsumerLab called “Young professionals at…
Brian David Johnson, Intel futurist, shows how geotags, sensor outputs, and big data are changing the future. He argues that we need a better understanding of our relationship with the data we produce in order to build the future we want. “When you look to…
We’re already building the metropolis of the future—green, wired, even helpful. Now critics are starting to ask whether we’ll really want to live there. Courtney Humphries reports for the Boston Globe. “As political leaders, engineers, and environmentalists join the smart-city bandwagon, a growing chorus of…
Living by the Numbers [original title: “Leben nach Zahlen”] is the title of the cover story of the German magazine Der Spiegel, available for free in English translation. “For a modern society, an even more pressing question is whether it wishes to accept everything that…
Fernd Van Engelen of Artefact writes about how adding hardware design to a UX practice can create opportunities for a more holistic user experience. “We shared the belief that we could no longer separate what a product looks like physically from the way it behaves…
To solve the issue with content marketing, we need to start looking at content as part of a broader ecosystem, argues Ben Barone-Nugent, a senior digital writer & content strategist at TBWA, in a Digital Marketing special in The Guardian. “If we define experience as…
Reboot principal Panthea Lee discusses on The Atlantic how people communicate in one of the most dangerous places on earth. “Barbers, for example, are seen as well-informed about local news because they converse with a wide range of people daily. Despite the mobility constraints in…