Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Megacities may be congested and complex, but are also among the planet’s most exciting places to live. They have proven effective at stimulating creativity, innovation, freedom and economic development. Today, 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, a figure expected to reach about…
Across industries, companies are using the vast amounts of user-generated data to guide innovation of new products and services. But data mining does not equate to developing “customer intelligence,” write Lara Lee and Daniel Sobol of Continuum on Harvard Business Review’s Blog. Human behavior is…
HOW WILL the informal economy impact the global business landscape? The landscape of the Informal Economy is vast – from street vending to P2P networks, from piracy to ad-hoc businesses – it is the fastest growing sector of both emerging and developed markets. In fact,…
Care at a Distance : On the Closeness of Technology By Jeannette Pols Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2012, 204 pages This widely researched study demonstrates convincingly that neither grandiose promises nor nightmare scenarios have much to do with actual care practices employing telecare. Combining detailed…
It is not a secret that touch is not as easy as it seems and very difficult to get right, writes Wolfgang Gruener on Conceivable Tech. Cadillac is the first company that is trying to translate touch in a comprehensive way to be used in…
PSFK spoke to Dhani Sutanto, a Digital Art Director who became fed up with swiping his Oyster card through the reader like millions of other Londoners each day. He decided to tinker around with the card and create a more fashionable way to get in…
Interactive data visualizations are an exciting way to engage and inform large audiences. They enable users to focus on interesting parts and details, to customize the content and even the graphical form, and to explore large amounts of data. At their best, they facilitate a…
Walking through IKEA over the weekend with two young children, writes Shailesh Manga on UXMovement, was a healthy reminder of what contributes to an ideal customer experience: innovative product design and thoughtful service design. IKEA covers product design with innovative home furnishings that are cost…
By fighting over whether tablets or PCs are better tools for creating content—as a sort of proxy war over whose vision owns the future of computing devices—we may be overlooking something important: the possibility that these very different devices may simply be good at different…
“What marketing executives should know about user experience” is the title of a short and introductory piece, mainly aimed at marketing people, by Nick Myers, managing director of visual design & branding at Cooper (a design and strategy firm in San Francisco that I had…
Recently I have embarked on trying to understand better the underlying ideology and world view of the Silicon Valley tech scene, and how this is impacting our daily lives through the products and services they create. My mission is still far from complete and reading…
UX Best Practices – How to Achieve More Impact with User Experience Helmut Degen & Xiaowei Yuan (Eds.) McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2011 ISBN-10: 007175251X, ISBN-13: 978-0071752510 304 pages (Amazon) Helmut Degen, Ph.D., works as a program manager for Siemens Corporate Research (SCR). He was previously…
In three essays John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflects on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street. Payne was recently asked by IxDA NY’s local leadership to lead a workshop on Ethnography for User Experience.…
Brian David Johnson gets paid to predict the future. He is the first, the one, and the only futurist at Intel, charged with envisioning how people will interact with technology a decade from now. Currently, Johnson’s task is to foresee what life will be like…
“Design Principles for Eating Sustainably: Bridging the Gap Between Consumer Intention and Action” is the title of an ethnographic research driven service design project by Canadian design and innovation firm Cooler Solutions. Experience suggests that our intentions and actions are not always aligned. This is…
As part of its Power of 10 lecture series, PARC Forum invited John Maeda, President of the Rhode Island School of Design, and Don Norman, Co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group, last week for a dialogue on design and innovation. The video is now online.…
Ethnography Matters has embarked on a new series called “The Ethnographer’s Reading List” with UX professionals discussing their summer reading. Here are the latest three instalments: Nicolas Nova Nicolas Nova, who holds a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Swiss Institute of Technology (EPFL, Switzerland),…
Almost a year ago, Heather Ford was hired by Ushahidi to work as an ethnographic researcher on a project to understand how Wikipedians managed sources during breaking news events. Ushahidi cares a great deal about this kind of work because of a new project called…
The take of the author Paul Bryan: UX strategy and agile UX are neither compatible nor incompatible. In an agile shop, UX strategists have to get ahead of the curve and do their work before agile development starts. They need to coach UX team members…
With educational applications for kids, corporate eLearning, and online degree programs, more and more UX designers face design briefs for creating digital experiences with an educational purpose. In this article, Dorian Peters presents 14 design guidelines that derive from key findings from relevant psychology and…
This week at the San Francisco Wearable Technology Conference, Jennifer Darmour, UX designer at the Artefact Group, shared with other wearable technology experts her perspective and insights on the principles we must follow to make wearable technology more compelling to a broad consumer market. Through…
Experientia is one of 15 Italian companies and 53 companies worldwide participating in UCLA’s exclusive 2012 Global Access Program (GAP). GAP pairs Fully Employed MBA (FEMBA) students with international companies to develop a comprehensive business strategy that enables the companies to move to the next…
Computers, smartphones and other gadgets have made life easier, but now tech firms are worried that they may be harming people. Huh? Tech firms worried about addiction to devices? As also the author of the New York Times piece writes, it “sounds like auto executives…
“Make your users do the work< ” is the not very people-centred title of a guest piece by Nir Eyal on Techcrunch. He argues that putting users to work is critical in creating products people love, and he has a point. Some excerpts: “Several studies…
New research by published in the journal Psychological Science shows that awe-inspiring moments can literally make time seem to stand still, or at least slow down. That feeling improves our mental health since many people often feel time-deprived in this modernized world. Studies showed that…
In this short essay, Jon Fisher of UK consultancy Nomensa presents some introductory thoughts about Nomensa’s framework for â€sense making in cross channel designâ€. In particular, he demonstrates a potential method for visualising the information space from which understanding can be supported in a system.…
mHealth: The Next Frontier For Mobile Service Growth By Scott Wilson and Phil Asmundson of Deloitte Advances in wireless remote patient monitoring (RPM) are expected to have a big impact across targeted disease areas where chronic conditions are a leading cause of the readmissions problem.…
At the beginning of June, the Usability Professionals Association (UPA) announced that from now on it would be known as the User Experience Professionals Association (UXPA). This didn’t go unnoticed, and UX publisher Louis Rosenfeld reacted to this news with a strongly worded and much…
Drawing on the latest data and over 130 interviews with Indian policymakers, entrepreneurs and academics, this report by NESTA, the UK innovation agency, explores the policies, institutions and industries that are driving research and innovation. It measures how India’s research strengths are developing, and maps…
In a short post on the Huffington Post blog, author Soren Petersen describes how co-design – when firms and non-design users jointly design business and product offerings – is seen as a potential new avenue for breakthrough innovation in design. “Inviting expert users and normal…
This is Service Design Thinking: Basics – Tools – Cases Edited by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider BIS Publishers, 2011 376 pages (Amazon link) This is Service Design Thinking outlines a contemporary approach for service innovation. Service design and design thinking are lately evolving into…
A recent crush of smartphone and tablet apps claim to make hard decisions easier, and the range of ethical dilemmas they can weigh in on will only increase. At this rate, Siri 5.0 may be less a personal assistant than an always-available guide to moral…
Moralizing Technology: Understanding and Designing the Morality of Things Peter-Paul Verbeek University of Chicago Press, 2011 183 pages (Amazon link) Christine Rosen has written a very long and excellent book review / reflection in The New Republic on the recent book on the moral dimension…
In a long article Jonathan Cutrell talks about a strategy for creating content that revolves around its portability to multiple scenarios, devices, and access frames, and particularly about creating content that taps into multiple strong consumer motivations, and is consequently richly valuable to consumers. (via…
Stephen Shankland thinks that Google is becoming an extension of your mind, an omnipresent digital assistant that figures out what you need and supplies it before you even realize you need it. He also thinks that should both excite and spook you. “Think of Google…
Peter Maass and Megha Rajagopalan argue in the New York Times Sunday Review that the device in your purse or jeans that you think is a cellphone, is in fact a tracking device that happens to make calls. “We have all heard about the wonders…
A sociologist, ethnographer, and corporate consultant who studies global technology use among migrants, low-income people, youth, and others on society’s fringes, Wang has worked for the past several years in China. Since 2005, she’s crisscrossed the country–often riding the rails–observing the impact of digital technology…
Making products attractive and user-friendly is a smart idea, but it is no substitute for R&D and investment, argues James Woudhuysen, a professor of forecasting and innovation at De Montfort University, on Spiked, a British Internet magazine focusing on politics, culture and society from a…
At a Fisher-Price lab, researchers watch children at play to come up with ideas for new products, including toys that incorporate apps on iPads and iPhones. At Fisher-Price, “we bring babies in with their moms and watch them at play with different types of apps,…
Milan Guenther, founding partner of enterprise design associates, explores the word “user” in “user experience”, and compares it to customer experience, employee experience and brand experience. “For me, the word Experience in the context of Design work refers to the way people experience the world,…