Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
THE customer is king. So some firms have started appointing chief customer officers (CCOs) to serve the king more attentively. These new additions to the (already crowded) C-suite are supposed to look at the business from the customer’s point of view. They try to focus…
Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century By Jeanne E. Arnold, Anthony P. Graesch, Enzo Ragazzini, and Elinor Ochs UCLA, Cotson Institute of Archaeology July 2012 Life at Home in the Twenty-First Century cross-cuts the ranks of important books on social history, consumerism, contemporary culture,…
In this new RSA Animate, Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, explores the circumstances under which someone would lie and what effect deception has on society at large. The RSA Animate was taken from a July 2012…
Observing the User Experience A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research by Elizabeth Goodman, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and Intel PhD Fellow Mike Kuniavsky, Founder, ThingM Andrea Moed, Staff User Researcher at Inflection Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann…
John Wood, Emeritus Professor of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, argues on Core77 that the user-centered mindset is based on a one-dimensional map in which only two places exist—master and servant. In the workplace, the designer is the servant and the client is the…
A few days ago SAP announced the opening of the new SAP Mobility Design Center to help customers meet the growing need for individualized mobile solutions. Headquartered on the company’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., the center is focused on enabling companies to keep up…
Post-touch hasn’t found the killer use case that the mouse found with GUIs and the touchscreen found with mobile web browsing and apps — but it’s not for lack of trying. We’ve had a flood of prototypes, demos and art projects, any one of which…
In this guest post for Ethnography Matters, Mike Gotta from Cisco Systems, makes the case for bringing the human back into enterprise software design and development, starting out with enterprise social networking (ESN). The introduction to the post is by ethnographer Tricia Wang. “One of…
Sampling views from a panel representing Imperial College London, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the University of Washington, other international academics and the UK government, research has just been published that points to dramatic changes in the workplace as we know it. Forget whether…
Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation by Richard Caddick and Steve Cable Wiley 2011, 352 pages ISBN 978-1119971108 (Amazon | Scribd) Abstract As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to…
Report by Experientia researcher Anna Wojnarowska Harvard Medical School hosted this weekend the Medicine 2.0 conference in Boston. The fifth edition of the event invited academics, practitioners and clinicians for two days of lectures, discussions and presentations, analyzing the changes taking place in the healthcare…
Experientia researcher Anna Wojnarowska spoke this Sunday at the Medicine 2.0 conference in Boston on her research on the influence of the hospital environment, communication devices – laptops, mobile phones – and the technologies involved in the curing process such as drips and cardiac devices…
Make It So – Interaction design lessons from science fiction By Nathan Shedroff & Christopher Noessel Rosenfeld Media September 2012 ISBNs: paperback (1-933820-98-5); digital editions (1-933820-76-4) Many designers enjoy the interfaces seen in science fiction films and television shows. Freed from the rigorous constraints of…
Today Albert Boswijk, founder and CEO of the European Centre for the Experience Economy, contacted us about his new book “Economy of Experiences”. Boswijk co-founded the Centre, a structure affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, in 2000 with Joseph Pine, who was the first to…
UX Curve: A method for evaluating long-term user experience Sari Kujala (a), Virpi Roto (b), Kaisa Väänänen-Vainio-Mattila (a), Evangelos Karapanos (c), Arto Sinnelä (a) a) Tampere University of Technology, Finland b) Nokia Research Center, Finland c) Eindhoven University of Technology, Dept of Industrial Design, Netherlands…
Jonathan Ross, business development director at FACT-Finder, discusses the steps luxury brands can take to ensure a more rewarding online retail experience for consumers. “A recent study by McKinsey and Altagamma, the Italian association of luxury brands, appears to finally dispel the idea that online…
In an article for GigaOM, Ellen Isaacs (personal site), a user experience designer and ethnographer for PARC, explains the benefits of using ethnography to develop better mobile products. “Ethnographic studies likely save businesses far more time than they take. These observations and analysis can reveal…
This article by my compatriot Koen AT Claes claims that our current notion of UX design mistakenly focuses on experience, and that we should go one step further and focus on the memory of an experience instead “Studies of behavioral economics have changed my entire…
We live in an age of sharing. As consumers and online, we regularly share personal information, and generate new data through our browsing or purchasing history. Businesses and government are increasingly aware of the value of this information, which can result in better and cheaper…
In honor of its Ten-year Anniversary, the Association of Professional Futurists (yes, they exist!) launched its first publication, The Future of Futures. Edited by Andrew Curry, the book (also available as ebook) is orrganized in sections of Past, Present, and Future, and contains essays and…
Intel dabbles in science fiction, titles ReadWriteWeb. On Monday, they write, Intel debuted a book of science fiction stories. Dubbed Imaging the Future And Building It, the book includes a number of stories – from professional authors like Madeline Ashby and Karl Schroeder, plus more…
Recently I have been exploring developments on the impact of new technologies on the future of education, particularly in high schools. The latest trend in education is all about tablets, of course. My provisional assessment is that there is a lot of bling: shiny objects…
Peter Merholz, a UX thinker and practitioner whom I have always held in high esteem, has written a well thought through blog post on reframing UX design. The two central paragraph in his discourse are these ones: “UX Designer is not a workflows-and-wireframes role. It’s…
SDT2012 was the first international conference on service design thinking in the travel and tourism industry. For the first time, the conference brought together a community interested in the practical application of service design thinking within the travel and tourism industry. The conference was the…
Paul Dourish and Scott Mainwaring, the founders of the Intel funded Social Computing Research Center at UC Irvine, presented yesterday a paper at Ubicomp 2012 with the short but bombshell title “Ubicomp’s Colonial Impulse” (pdf). The abstract remains quite vague, and doesn’t much insight on…
Ahead of next week’s Dutch election, the UK think tank Demos launched Populism in Europe: Netherlands, which analyses the rise of Geert Wilders’ Partij voor de Vrijheid, through an analysis of its Facebook fans. Nationalist populist parties and movements are growing in support throughout Europe.…
Marko Athisaari, Nokia’s head of design, is pushing a general overall vision where advanced function is blended into unforgettable form¿post-industrial form. The dream, if not the exact language, is very familiar. Nokia is marketing its phone directly into the teeth of Apple’s strength: Design. He…
According to a recent multi-country study commissioned by Intel Corporation and conducted by Ipsos Observer on “Mobile Etiquette,” the majority of adults and teens around the world are sharing information about themselves online and feel better connected to family and friends because of it. However,…
A study by the Pew Research Center, released Wednesday, found that among Americans adults who use smartphone apps, half had decided not to install applications on their mobile phones because they demanded too much personal information. Nearly a third uninstalled an application after learning that…
Ericsson is publishing interesting research these days (and therefore gets featured on this blog). Its latest TV and video ConsumerLab report found that mobile devices are an important part of the TV experience, with 67 percent using tablets, smartphones or laptops for their everyday TV…
In a new report from its ConsumerLab, Ericsson maps out the potential of transformation within m-commerce across the region of sub-Saharan Africa. Based on in-depth, extensive interviews with mobile phone users in Ghana, South Africa, and Tanzania, the report has four key findings: that consumers…
MindLab is a Danish cross-ministerial innovation unit which involves citizens and businesses in creating new solutions for society. It is also a physical space – a neutral zone for inspiring creativity, innovation and collaboration. They work with the civil servants in three parent ministries: the…
The Ericsson UX Lab has been prototyping and testing gestural interaction solutions with data: “This spring we worked on how to visualise and interact with data. One issue that we focused a bit more on is that of interacting with a material indirectly, such as…
These are the topics of the latest update on UX Matters: Strengths and Weaknesses of Quantitative and Qualitative Research By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain Both qualitative and quantitative methods of user research play important roles in product development. Data from quantitative research—such as market…
Curious Rituals is a research project conducted at Art Center College of Design (Pasadena) in July-August 2012 by Nicolas Nova (The Near Future Laboratory / HEAD-Genève), and Katherine Miyake, Nancy Kwon and Walton Chiu from the media design program. This research project is about gestures,…
Earlier this year, the UK Design Council and the Arts & Humanities Research Council conducted a wide ranging review of the place of design research in UK universities, and its connection with businesses and policymakers. The aim was to identify future areas for research funding,…
A few weeks ago, Tricia Wang asked John Payne, a principal of Moment, to write a guest post on Ethnography Matters about his ethnographic field work on Occupy Wall Street. John had facilitated a 2 and half day course of ethnographic fieldwork on Occupy for…
The way we interact and respond to information depends on many things: our goals about what we want to do with that information, the nature of the information, the context we find ourselves engaging with it, etc. Throughout these interactions is a continual dance between…
Google published yesterday a research report on how consumers use different devices together and navigating the new multi-screen world. They set out to learn not just how much of our media consumption happens on screens, but also how we use these multiple devices together, and…
Golden Krishna of Cooper argues that it’s time for us to move beyond screen-based thinking. “Because when we think in screens, we design based upon a model that is inherently unnatural, inhumane, and has diminishing returns. It requires a great deal of talent, money and…