Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Driven by marketing tick lists and a seeming disregard for how ordinary people will use their products, manufacturers have simply chucked more and more features into their sets until existing user interfaces have creaked at the seams with it all. Even new UIs, designed from…
Motorola Mobility, which Google acquired in May, recently released new smartphones and reintroduced itself as the “New Motorola.†But what does that even mean? One thing is for sure: Motorola is not the same company that it was when it was riding the huge success…
The fall 2011 issue of AnthroNotes (pdf) starts off with an article by Genevieve Bell, senior cultural anthropologist at Intel. She describes her latest research project, designed to understand how cars around the world can serve as windows into the future of mobile technology and…
Facebook is great for checking out photos of your exes and all, but for social innovators working in the developing world, there’s no point to new technologies unless they make life better for the people they’re trying to help, writes Meagan Fallone. “How can our…
Expereal is a free iPhone app developed to help people better understand themselves, to feel even more connected to the world, and to, hopefully, make more informed decisions about their lives. The marketplace has social media platforms, physical measurement products and mood apps and sites,…
In the last five years UK schools have spent more than £1 billion on digital technology. From interactive whiteboards to tablets, there is more digital technology in schools than ever before. But so far there has been little evidence of substantial success in improving educational…
School children who use a tablet computer benefit the most when allowed to take it home, rather than just using it in school, reveals research from the University of Hull, reports Engineering & Technology Magazine. The iPad Scotland Evaluation Study set out to establish the…
The Design for Usability project, that researched how best to contribute to the development of usable products, published a book that provides the product development community with a comprehensive and coherent overview of the results of the project, in such a way that they can…
The Designing Design Education for India (DDEI) Conference, which will take place in March 2013 in Pune, India, has an unusual, but engaging format: “This will be an interactive conference. Unlike other conferences where the presenters speak from one side and the attendees are mere…
“Toy Design and Inclusive Play†Designing Innovative Toys for People with Special Needs Invitation to join International Creativity Workshop in Bavaria, Germany Play is crucial for all children, helping them to develop skills and to learn patterns of behaviour. Also for adults with special needs,…
Judd Antin is a social psychologist and user experience researcher who studies motivations for online participation at Facebook. In 2011, he was named an MIT Technology Review Innovator Under 35. Prior to joining Facebook as a user experience researcher, he worked with Yahoo Research. His…
As part of ServiceD, a three-year service design project, which researched future educational needs and piloted service design education, Lahti University of Applied Sciences from Finland and The Estonian Institute for Futures Studies from Tallinn University have published two remarkable service design publications: Service Design:…
The people from Ethnography Matters, an ethnography group blog that is celebrating its first year anniversary today, interviewed their new regular contributor Nicolas Nova. He joins the all-woman team of Tricia Wang, Heather Ford, Rachelle Annechino, and Jenna Burrell. Nicolas teaches at the Geneva University…
Pulled from store shelves after a month, the first high-profile wearable activity tracker was a humiliation for Jawbone. Now, the Up is back, and anyone vying for a stake in wearable tech should pay close attention to the product’s resurrection, according to Fast Company. Interestingly,…
The role of UX Strategist is a relatively new one on UX design teams, and has recently addressed in two articles on UXmatters: “UX Strategy: The Heart of User-Centered Design” and “What Does a UX Strategist Do?“. To provide more insight, Paul Bryan, manager of…
Living Offline – A Qualitative Study of Internet Non-Use in Great Britain and Sweden by Bianca Christin Reisdorf (U. of Oxford, UK), Ann-Sofie Axelsson (Chalmers U. of Technology, Sweden) and Hanna Maurin Söderholm (U. College of Borås, Sweden) Paper presented at the Internet Research International…
Advancing Ethnography in Corporate Environments: Challenges and Emerging Opportunities Edited by Brigitte Jordan Left Coast Press November 2012, 224 pages [Amazon link] Abstract In this innovative volume, twelve leading scholars from corporate research labs and independent consultancies tackle the most fundamental and contentious issues in…
Although there are many tablet deployments in schools worldwide, there is a glaring lack of serious research on what actually happens in the classrooms with these devices. In fact, there is so far no aggregated evidence that tablet technology significantly aids learning. Obviously, official endorsement…
Dan Turner discusses why the experience of reading a book on tablets (iPads in particular) is a chore rather than a delight. In a long article for UX Magazine, he discusses a number of reasons, often related to usability and even biology, why that may…
Last week I posted links to a few videos from NEXT Service Design, the European conference for designing digital services, which took place on 8 October in Berlin. In addition to the presentations by Alexander Baumgart and Pedro Custódio, two more videos have now been…
According to Pew Internet research, the teachers who instruct the most advanced American secondary school students render mixed verdicts about students’ research habits and the impact of technology on their studies. More in particular, they say that students’ digital literacy skills are weak and that…
While digital ethnography is an established field within ethnography, we don’t often hear of ethnographers building digital tools to conduct their fieldwork. Wendy Hsu wants to change that. In the first of her three-part guest post series on Tricia Wang’s Ethnography Matters, she shows how…
The next generation of apps will require developers to think more of the human as the user interface. It will become more about the need to know how an app works while a person stands up or with their arms in the air more so…
Digital Anthropology Edited by Heather A. Horst, Daniel Miller Berg Publishers, Oct 2012 328pp Anthropology has two main tasks: to understand what it is to be human and to examine how humanity is manifested differently in the diversity of culture. These tasks have gained new…
In their natural habitats, social species organize into characteristic groups. Gazelles form herds, wolves form packs, and ants form colonies. Humans, in the same way, form tribes. Of course, we’re pretty far removed from our natural habitat these days. But tribes are a large and…
From our cities, to our farms, to our rubbish, humans have firmly stamped their mark across the planet. Humanity’s impact on the globe is so great and varied that we have launched a new geological time period in the Earth’s history. Its name is the…
This past week featured a worldwide experiment conducted via a mobile app: The Human Face of Big Data. On September 26, 2012, Against All Odds Productions launched a smartphone and tablet app. With it, users could map their daily footprint through GPS, share a picture…
Heather Kelly reports on the CNN website on The Atlantic’s recent Big Science Summit in San Jose, California: We have voice-controlled assistants on our phones, telepresence robots for when we can’t make it to a meeting in person, and self-driving cars that are headed to…
On October 22nd, 2012, Philips Design organized a special seminar and workshop to explore how businesses can innovate by translating ‘Big Data’ into value for people. The internet is becoming ever more intertwined with our daily lives, even more so now that mobile platforms are…
NEXT Service Design is the European conference for designing digital services, which took place on 8 October in Berlin. It focuses on design methods including design thinking, user-centric design and interaction design. Two videos are currently online. Strategy is a Service! What business leadership can…
The last ten years has seen a burgeoning of the Slow Movement in all aspects of life from management, travel and education to science and work. On 4 October, the RSA brought together a group of thinkers and practitioners at their offices in London who…
Prof Manuel Castells is regarded as one of the most-cited sociologists in the world. When most of us were still struggling to connect our modems in the 1990s, the Spanish academic was documenting the rise of the network society and studying the interaction between internet…
Meta Products Meaningful Design For Our Connected World by Wimer Hazenberg and Menno Huisman BIS Publishers, 160 pages 2012 Meta Products discusses the rise of the Internet of Things, a twenty-first century phenomenon in which physical consumer products (meta products) connect to the web and…
By encouraging more focused collaboration among multiple functional groups (notably marketing and sales, operations, engineering/R&D, and procurement), these leaders are combining deep insights about customers [particularly in developing markets], competitors, and supply bases to strip out costs and amplify what customers truly value. The results—including…
The new Google FieldTrip app probes the question: What digital information do you want to see overlaid on the physical world? A challenge that Bruce Sterling describes as “‘experience design’ problems”. Alexis G. Madrigal explores it in The Atlantic: “If you pick up a book,…
Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice by July E. Cohen Yale University Press, 2012 352 pages Free pdf version | Amazon link The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen…
In order to understand mobile phone usage at the Base of the Pyramid (BoP) in Kenya, iHub Research and Research Solutions Africa conducted a 6-month study, funded by infoDev (World Bank). A total of 796 face-to-face interviews were conducted along with 178 diaries, 9 interviews…
For the Stanford-educated founders of Emprego Ligado, creating a successful app in Brazil required dismantling every assumption about the target audience. Emprego Ligado, which translates to “connected job,” launched in Sao Paulo this summer with the aim of connecting unskilled laborers to jobs close to…
A few days before the EPIC conference in Savannah, Chicago’s IIT Institute of Design organised and hosted its yearly Design Research conference. Although no videos seem to be available yet, Ciara Taylor provides a concise report on two of the interactive sessions at the event…
Through the application of analytics to Big Data, as well as ethnography — the design and implementation of qualitative field studies to observe cultural patterns — Xerox is answering important questions about traffic congestion, our reaction to it, and how city governments most effectively can…