Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Viktor Mayer-Schönberger says the ability to forget our past, both on and offline, is an essential part of what makes us human. “The more I’ve worked on data protection over the past 20 years, the more I’ve realised that at the heart of this, what…
Does design thinking address quick fixes at the expense of root causes, asks John Thackara, referring to “Why the d.school has its limits,” a provocative article in The Stanford Daily by Danny Buerkli, a Swiss Fulbright student at Stanford University: “Like any method, design thinking…
Why doesn’t a woman who continues to have unwanted pregnancies avail herself of the free contraception at a nearby clinic? What keeps people from using free chlorine tablets to purify their drinking water? Behavioral economics has shown us that we don’t always act in our…
Liana Dragoman writes on UX magazine about the role of experience design in employee empowerment. “It has become increasingly important for customer-focused organizations to turn their lens on employee engagement or how employees connect with, think about, and process their work in meaningful ways. Design…
Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights by Steve Portigal Rosenfeld Media To be published: early May 2013 Interviewing is a foundational user research tool that people assume they already possess. Everyone can ask questions, right? Unfortunately, that’s not the case. Interviewing Users provides invaluable…
Right now, data may be what we intentionally share, or what is gathered about us – the product of surveillance and tracking. We are the customer, but our data are the product. How do we balance our anxiety around data with its incredible potential? How…
As part of Ethnomining, the April 2013 Ethnographymatters edition on combining qualitative and quantitative data, edited by Nicolas Nova, Fabien Girardin describes his work with networked/sensor data at the Louvre Museum in Paris. Based on this inspiring case study, he discusses the overall process, how…
Scott Smith of futures research lab Changeist writes in Quartz about the long history of alternative currencies, and criticizes Bitcoin because “they set too high a bar for the average person”: “There have been various alternative currencies kicking around developed countries like Britain and the…
Access to big data is growing at an incredible pace. With increased information from various sources available on smartphones and tablets, many companies now realize winning services will be those that transform big data elements into personalized data experiences. The key to creating great service…
Service Design by Industrial Designers By Froukje Sleeswijk Visser Technical University Delft 2013, 104 pages Design practice is changing. The applications of design skills, knowledge, activities and processes seem to become wider everyday. More and more designers are tackling complex societal issues, and apply their…
The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the breakout talks that took place (grouped thematically). AGILE / LEAN Josh Seiden: A designer’s introduction to lean startup [15:04] Josh Seiden introduces…
The IxDA gathered in Toronto, Canada’s largest center for design, for its 6th annual conference. Here are the video records of the keynotes and panel discussions that took place. KEYNOTES Albert Shum: Connecting – emerging themes for interactions [36:59] This session will share some of…
Killed at Launch: A complete disregard for user experience leads to drastic action by Pete MacKie A failure to account for UX results in an e-commerce being pulled offline shortly after launch. POP UX! Clued Into Curiosity by Andrew Zusman Clue, the classic murder-mystery board…
A few days ago, I reported on the news that SAP has become the first major sponsor of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF). Today, Rikke Friis Dam, Co-Founder and Editor-in-Chief of the The Interaction Design Foundation, provides an overview of the kind of resources IDF…
“Some problems do genuinely lend themselves to Big Data solutions,” writes Gary Marcus in The New Yorker. “But not every problem fits those criteria; unpredictability, complexity, and abrupt shifts over time can lead even the largest data astray. Big Data is a powerful tool for…
This is an exciting time to be a digital designer, as the future of digital interaction is all around us, writes Nev Fordyce, reflecting on his SxSW experience. “What many have touted as the rise of the ‘Digital Native’, may be better described as the…
Jan-Christoph Zoels, one of Experientia’s founding partners and our creative director, is going to be a lot in Milan next week. Aside from his participation on Monday 8 April at the IxDA organized “The Long View of Interaction Design,” he will also speak on Thursday…
The April 2013 EthnographyMatters edition is edited by Nicolas Nova, consultant and researcher at the Near Future Laboratory, and is about combining qualitative and quantitative data. In his introduction, Nova writes: “While ethnography generally draws on qualitative data, it does not not mean that quantitative…
SAP has become the first major sponsor of the Interaction Design Foundation (IDF), writes Gerd Waloszek on the SAP Design Guild blog. The HCI encyclopedia, which recently appeared in its second edition, is one of IDF‘s major assets. But IDF offers designers a plethora of…
On 11 April, Experientia president Michele Visciola will be a guest speaker at the Town Re-coding seminar (pdf), a Turin event to discuss perceptions, tensions and actions for change in the physical and social spaces of cities. The Italian-language seminar involves the Polytechnic of Turin,…
Rebekah Rousi, a researcher of user psychology and PhD candidate of Cognitive Science at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland, describes on EthnographyMatters how the combination of qualitative and quantitative data collection was fruitful in her analysis of elevator usage. “A few years ago a leading…
As we move towards a quantified society, one shaped by data, we start to dismiss things that are unquantified, writes Om Malik of GigaOm. Empathy, emotion and storytelling — these are as much a part of business as they are of life. “The problem with…
Data and data sets are not objective, writes Kate Crawford, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, in the Harvard Business Review. They are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in…
In the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg explains how habits are formed and what it takes to break an ingrained habit. The book references a 2006 study from Duke University that found that 40% of the actions that people perform each day…
Dr Anne Galloway (@annegalloway) is Senior Lecturer, School of Design and Principal Investigator, Design Culture Lab, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Trained in sociology and anthropology, Anne teaches courses in design and culture, and researches relations amongst people, places, animals and technologies. Here are…
Consumers insist that they treasure their online privacy. But their mouse clicks tell a far different tale, as the experiments of a behavioral economist show. In a series of provocative experiments, Alessandro Acquisti, a behavioral economist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, has shown that…
The people behind the upcoming Interaction14 conference invite you to attend a panel discussion in Milan on the “Long View of Interaction Design”. On Monday 8 April at 6pm (on the eve of the Salone del Mobile), Claudio Moderini, Fabio Sergio, Jan-Christoph Zoels and Todd…
As gadgets get more complicated, UI’s must be able to teach their users over time. Philip Battin shows how flow can be used to improve the user experience in interactive electronic consumer products in an article for FastCo.Design. “More and more interactive products are being…
In an insightful blog post, Reboot principal Panthea Lee asks if open government initiatives make citizens more informed and engaged, and make governments more accountable to their people? What impact have open government initiatives had so far? Reboot is a USA-based service design firm working…
Open government initiatives offer new, often technologically enabled avenues for civic participation. But which populations have the access and motivation to use these channels? Frequently, programs and platforms privilege certain groups over others. An ethnographic study of participatory budgeting in Rome (conducted by Julien Talpin…
How do we help or support people that live in situations that do not fit into a system’s categories, e.g. by transforming perceptions of what a system can be? This question is constantly reoccurring in the development of our public service systems, writes Jesper Christiansen,…
In a broader article on Big Data and privacy, the New York Times writes about the work of Alex Pentland, a computational social scientist, director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the M.I.T., and academic adviser to the World Economic Forum’s initiatives on Big Data…
Apple has a vision of a future in which the disembodied voice of Siri is your constant companion. It goes something like this: You arrive home at the end of a long day and plop down on the couch. A beer in one hand, your…
It’s time to start thinking strategically about designing user experiences for interconnected ecosystems like health care, argues frog’s Fabio Sergio. “Within [massive inter-connected service ecosystems such as education, finance, or health care] the aim to shape an “experience” out of a jumble of disconnected products…
A Unilever sponsored sustainability supplement to The Guardian contains a short articles by Dan Lockton that is worth exploring. Design for sustainability: making green behaviour easy describes how design can enable sustainable behaviour by understanding everyday needs rather than treating people as the problem. “Design…
A History of Future Cities by Daniel Brook W. W. Norton & Company 2013 – 480 pages [Amazon link] The new book A History of Future Cities looks at the attempts of places like Dubai, Shanghai, and Mumbai to create Western-looking areas in an attempt…
Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer at PARC, spoke on January 28 at TEDx Broadway about the power of ethnography and how it might be useful in inspiring the future of Broadway. As per usual with TEDx events, a video is…
The hyper-connected smart home of the future promises to change the way we live. More efficient energy usage, Internet-connected appliances that communicate with one another and cloud-enhanced home security are just some of the conveniences we’ll enjoy. It’s going to be amazing. It will also…
Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now by Douglas Rushkoff Current Hardcover March 2013, 216 pages [Amazon] Abstract This is the moment we’ve been waiting for, explains award-winning media theorist Douglas Rushkoff, but we don’t seem to have any time in which to live it. Instead…
The UK Government Service Design Manual provides a (draft) digital by default service standard, as well as guidance and tools for building world-class digital services. The Government Digital Strategy set an ambitious target for teams building services: services so good that people prefer to use…