Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Design and Public Services is the second publication in the UK Design Commission‘s ‘Restarting Britain’ series. The first set out the strategic importance of design education as a driver of economic renewal and growth. This 64-page report turns to the question of public service renewal.…
methods@manchester is a website created by the University of Manchester to highlight and explain research methods in the social sciences. Many sections come with lecture videos and reading lists. Readers will be particularly interested in the sections on collaborative approaches, ethnographic methods and qualitative interview…
‘The best design is invisible’ is the interaction design phrase of the moment. Design and technology will ‘disappear’, become ‘invisible’, and the ‘best interface is no interface’… A cluster of thinking which Timo Arnall calls ‘invisible design’. Arnall agrees with some of the reasons driving…
(As if it hasn’t already). In developing countries, where smartphones and dependable cellular networks are still scarce, it’s been difficult to gauge the real impact of the mobile education movement. But with the combination of different factors — the advent of new technology, decreased pricing…
For French readers: Instruments de design management – Théories et cas pratiques Cabirio Cautela, Francesco Zurlo, Kamel Ben Youssef, Stéphane Magne Préface : Gilles Rougon Editeur : De Boeck 2012 Comment se développe un processus d’innovation guidé par le design {design driven) ? Existe-t-il des…
Service Design – From Insight to Implementation by Andy Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie & Ben Reason Rosenfeld Media – March 2013 (book will be published tomorrow) We have unsatisfactory experiences when we use banks, buses, health services and insurance companies. They don’t make us feel happier…
Putting People First rarely plugs conferences (before they happen) but this one seems intriguing: RE:DESIGN/UX Design will take place in Silicon Valley on April 29–30, 2013. The events are capped at 125 attendees and the focus is on small-scale, spirited, salon-style discussions with industry leaders…
Jonathan Rowson @Jonathan_Rowson, who leads the RSA Social Brain Centre, recently gave a 15 minute presentation on the Social Brain Centre’s emerging ideas relating to behaviour change in the context of Climate Change. The title was: “What kind of behaviour change do we need?” The…
Opening up the Stories to Action edition of Ethnography Matters is Panthea Lee’s @panthealee moving story about a human trafficking outreach campaign that her company, Reboot, designed for Safe Horizon. In David Brook’s recent NYT column, What Data Can’t Do, he lists several things that…
Where static computer screens and smartphones suck in our gaze and extract us from the world around us, many of the most interesting new tech gadgets and ideas move us back out into the open. Instead of all-purpose, full-focus devices, these new tools are migrating…
After technology received so much attention as a key differentiator for Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, Cooper Managing Director Doug LeMoine asked Scout Addis, the Director of User Experience at Practice Fusion, to discuss his experience working on the campaign and how design and technology worked…
Who needs a kettle with four heat settings? A washing machine with a ‘freshen up’ function? A toaster with six browning modes? What happened to the good old days of the on/off switch, asks Tom Meltzer in The Guardian. “Function inflation or “setting creep” –…
Last September, social anthropologist Nora Schenkel had the opportunity to interview Brigitte Jordan, described by Cat Macaulay as one of the “godmothers” of design ethnography. Schenkel interviewed her on how she transitioned as one of the first from academically grounded anthropology into the field of…
In 2020 we might just regain some of the humanity that was lost in 2010, argues John Maeda, president of the Rhode Island School of Design. “The software industry is poised to embrace its craft heritage. By 2020 software will return to a cottage industry,…
Drew Bamford, Director of User Experience at HTC, explains Sense 5.0 and why the company’s Android UX needed redefining. “HTC radically overhauled the look and feel of Sense UI aboard the HTC One. It removed the standard homescreen of app icons and a weather widget…
The Google Glass feature that (almost) no one is talking about is the experience – not of the user, but of everyone other than the user, writes Mark Hurst in a thought provoking post. “Anywhere you go in public – any store, any sidewalk, any…
Stacey Higginbotham reports on a the GigaOM Internet of things meetup in San Francisco a few days ago: “All of the participants agreed that the connected device wasn’t the product; the service was. Ideally, the Internet of things should fade into the background; what matters…
A survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project of teachers who instruct American middle and secondary school students finds that digital technologies have become central to their teaching and professionalization. At the same time, the internet, mobile phones, and social media have brought…
A couple of weeks ago Evgeny Morozov and Steven Johnson had a very public spat (writers’ favorite kind), prompted by Evgeny’s review of Johnson’s latest book in the New Republic. The result was predictable: two geeky boys with big egos each hell bent on proving…
In this thoughtful piece for Ethnography Matters, Sarah Kendzior (@sarahkendzior) discusses the ways in which the internet has transformed the relationship between the writer and the people about whom he or she writes. Sarah has written extensively about open access to scholarly publications (‘one paper (she) uploaded…
Since the invention of personal computing three decades ago, how we interact with computers has remained about the same: monitor, keyboard, mouse. Monitors have gotten a bit bigger, keyboards are smaller, and mice are wireless, but today’s PCs at Best Buy would still be familiar…
“There are better ways to handle spatial ideas,” writes commercial artist Christian Brown, “ways which are more in line with the way our bodies are built. Human hands and fingers are good at feeling texture and detail, and good at gripping things—neither of which touch…
Someone told Intel’s futurist Brian David Johnson that technology could do away with all lying in the future. He was horrified by the idea and wrote this: The Future of Lying – Can society survive if computers can tell fact from fib? “There are really…
To Save Everything Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov Public Affairs Book, 2013 432 pages [Amazon] Abstract In the very near future, “smart†technologies and “big data†will allow us to make large-scale and sophisticated interventions in politics, culture, and everyday…
A bit of an older talk, but still quite interesting: Isobel Demangeat, UX researcher at Qualcomm Corporate R&D Cambridge (UK), spoke at MEX in December 2011 on the nuances of short-range mobile interactions through augmented reality. Her in-depth talk shares the results of ongoing studies…
Since its inception, the EPIC conference has brought together a dynamic community of practitioners and scholars concerned with how ethnographic thinking and methods for understanding the contemporary social world are used to transform design, business and innovation contexts. Presenters and attendees come from innovation consultancies,…
The mobile technology of tomorrow may be real-time, always on and algorithm driven in its characteristics, writes designer Jessi Baker, but there is a real opportunity to design, create and promote open, empathetic systems allowing the Internet and connectedness to not only empower us to…
There is an empathy gap in technology development, argues April Demosky on the FT’s Tech Blog. “In the analytic, data-driven world of Silicon Valley, emotions often do not get factored into the latest product design. This comes down to the way engineers and technicians think,…
Nick Hunn, CTO at Onzo, a “smarter than normal” Smart Energy start-up, criticizes the service model of the Nest thermostat: “A basic programmable thermostat in the US costs under $20, not the $250 price tag of the Nest. As such, Nest appeals to those who…
When anthropologist Natalie Hanson was asked last year to contribute to a new book called The Handbook of Business Anthropology, edited by Rita Denny and Patty Sunderland (who also wrote Doing Anthropology in Consumer Research, 2007) wrote a chapter about Lean and User Experience, because…
Will design researchers (and our models and explanations) be replaced by data tables and “experience actuaries†that tell us what to build, for whom, and what it should be like? Artefact’s Dave Mc Colgin doesn’t think so. “In our field of designing products and experiences,…
Interaction, the annual interaction design conference organized by IxDA (the global Interaction Design Association), will head to Amsterdam in in February 2014. Conference chair Alok Nandi asked Experientia partner Mark Vanderbeeken to be the Interaction14 Lead of Marketing and Communications (Marcomm Lead). Mark (and Experientia)…
Recently published Nielsen/Norman Group research shows that teens are (over)confident in their web abilities, but they perform worse than adults. Lower reading levels, impatience, and undeveloped research skills reduce teens’ task success and require simple, relatable sites.
Francesca Salvadori (Italian blog) is an Italian high school teacher who runs a 1:1 iPad pilot program in her school, and collaborates with Experientia on the topic of digital publishing. A few weeks ago she visited five schools in California and Ontario. Putting People First…
The Intel Collaborative Research Institute for Sustainable Connected Cities – a cooperation between University College London (UCL), Imperial College London and Intel – was launched in May 2012, which a focus on how to enable future cities to be more connected and sustainable. Their activities…
Divided Brain, Divided World; Why the best part of us struggles to be heard is an RSA report that explores the practical significance of the scientific fact that the two hemispheres of our brains have radically different ‘world views’. It argues that our failure to…
Nicolas Nova went skiing and saw a lot of GoPro cameras on people’s heads. He got intrigued, and wrote an Ethnography Matters column where he questions informal urban bricolage, weird cameras, curious gestures and wonders about their cultural implications. “Head-mounted cameras, necklace cams, vanity drones……
How seriously should we (as researchers, practitioners, users, and members of society) seek to understand and factor in the intentions of the designers who made them and the felt experiences of those who use them? Such intentions and felt experiences may include cognitive states, affective…
Michael B Griffiths is Director of Ethnography at Ogilvy & Mather, Greater China, Associate Research Fellow, White Rose East Asia Centre, and External Research Associate, Centre for International Business, University of Leeds, UK. He is also the author of the recent book Consumers and Individuals…
Hyper-connectivity – where people are constantly connected to social networks and streams of information – will have a transforming effect on how we see ourselves and others in the next decade, according to a new report published by the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Adviser Sir…