Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
In an open letter to the User Experience Community, Rich Gunther, President of what used to be called Usability Professionals Association (UPA), announces that UPA is no longer. As explained yesterday at the UPA 2012 conference by UPA treasurer Ronnie Battista, there is now a…
Free services in exchange for personal information. That’s the “privacy bargain” we all strike on the Web. Cory Doctorow argues it could be the worst deal ever. “Far from destroying business, letting users control disclosure would create value. Design an app that I willingly give…
Jim Ross, Principal of Design Research at Electronic Ink, thinks contextual inquiry is the most difficult user research technique to perform effectively, as it requires a difficult balance between traditional interviewing and ethnographic observation. In an article for UXMatters, he discusses the most common problems…
Rachel Botsman, founder and chief innovator of the Collaborative Lab (part of the Collaborative Consumption movement) writes that the biggest initial barrier to implementing Collaborative Consumption ideas is typically inertia. Some common questions are: “How do we use technologies to enable trust between strangers? What’s…
The annual Innovations Issue of the New York Times Magazine arrives this Sunday. Two highlights: 32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow An abridged guide to the many ways that your day is about to get better. 15. The Kindness Hack Researchers at Wharton, Yale…
The US Veterans Administration has announced it has created an initiative aimed at studying the benefits associated with the use of mhealth apps and tablet devices to improve and coordinate care between physicians, veterans and their families To that end, the VA is handing out…
Somehow I hadn’t noticed but Interactions Magazine is now (nearly) fully online. As far as I could discover (nothing is explained, sic), only some of the current year’s articles are fully available. Yet all the previous issues (up to 15 years ago) are fully available.…
MA thesis by Veronica Bluguermann in collaboration with Nokia, presented as part of the graduation requirements of the Industrial and Strategic Design Programme of Aalto University’s Department of Design. Not so long ago, cell phones were only used just to make phone calls. Today hundreds…
Reacting to the Wired Magazine article that suggests that “the data deluge makes the scientific method obsolete,†Jenna Burrell, sociologist and assistant professor in the School of Information at UC-Berkeley, lists some questions that she (and maybe other ‘small data’ people) have about the big…
Andrew Keen, a British-American entrepreneur and the author of “The Cult of the Amateur” and “Digital Vertigo”, tells CNN why he believes that Facebook is stealing the innocence of our inner lives, by sabotaging what it really means to be human. “I call this shift…
Ethnographic research by the Ericsson User Experience Lab, in collaboration with Trendethnography, aimed to discover unconscious behaviour related to health and to describe patterns of action. The study looked at events or insights that resulted in change. These turning points are essential in our life…
Dr Paul Bernal, a lecturer in information technology, intellectual property and media law at the University of East Anglia (UK), provides clarification on what the Right to be Forgotten means and what the issues are. Read article
The Event project for Kortrijk Xpo, Belgium, developed concepts for how to make trade fairs and temporary events more sustainable. Experientia developed the resulting concepts into a video, showcasing four of the best concepts in action. The video of these concepts is now online on…
Experientia has posted a new video on its vimeo channel, showcasing mobile phone concepts for emerging markets. The video was made three years ago for a project in developing markets for Vodafone, but we can only show it now. Set in India, the video introduces…
In Perspectives on Psychological Science (May 2012 vol. 7), Geoffrey Miller publishes a “Smartphone Psychology Manifesto” with methodological suggestions for the use of smartphones in psychological research that could indeed have a huge impact on the study of cognition and culture. By 2025, when most…
Facebook’s IPO demonstrates the power of networks for innovation, growth and jobs, says Jim Hagemann Snabe, SAP’s co-chief executive. “A fully networked business environment means better access to customer profiles and preferences, resulting in a stronger ability to deliver individualised products that consumers want. Broader…
Gartner research suggests that there is an inverse correlation between portable devices and PC usage, reports the Financial Times. “Is the PC era really over? The success portable computing devices including smartphones and PC tablets has some speculating that the dominance of the desktop PC,…
Debunking the Myth of Intuition Can doctors and investment advisers be trusted? And do we live more for experiences or memories? In a SPIEGEL interview, Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman discusses the innate weakness of human thought, deceptive memories and the misleading power of intuition.…
On Be Everyday, the site of a Brussels-based project, you can follow the stories of inspiring people that live in European cities and who have found their own creative ways to lead sustainable and meaningful lives, everyday! “Why are we stuck in non-sustainable lifestyles? There…
With the introduction of mobile devices such as the iPhone, iPad, and various other smart phones and tablets, the demand for websites to be ‘mobile friendly’ has never been greater. The purpose of this article by Chris Kinsey, a digital designer for Sixth Story (a…
The White House has unveiled plans to bring US governance into the mobile-centric twenty-first century. Dubbed the “Roadmap for a Digital Government,†the plan has two central principles. First, it tasks federal agencies with giving citizens easier access to information and services on modern web…
The Journal of Business Anthropology is an Open Access journal which publishes the results of anthropological and related research in business organizations and business situations of all kinds. On the website you will find the Published Issues as well as Reviews of literature relevant to…
In this new RSA Animate, Manuel Lima, senior UX design lead at Microsoft Bing, explores the power of network visualisation to help navigate our complex modern world: Network visualization has experienced a meteoric rise in the last decade, bringing together people from various fields and…
Aljazeera’s The Stream reports on how people declare economic independence by establishing alternative currencies. “People and businesses are establishing micro-currencies in the wake of the global financial crisis in order to take matters into their own hands. These small alternative forms of money are used…
Cristian Norlin, master researcher at the Ericsson Research User Experience Lab, alerted me via Twitter to the Lab’s new blog. The User Experience Lab at Ericsson Research studies people and make prototypes to better understand the experiential, affective and meaningful aspects of people’s interactions with…
Site works also as a full-screen swipeable tablet web app Today granstudio, the international design studio based in Turin, launches its new website, created by Experientia. Founded by internationally-renowned designer Lowie Vermeersch, granstudio is a creative, multidisciplinary consultancy that combines automotive design expertise with a…
Holger Rhinow, Eva Köppen, and Christoph Meinel: Design Prototypes as Boundary Objects in Innovation Processes. Conference Paper in the Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Design Research Society (DRS 2012), Bangkok, Thailand, July 2012 Abstract: In our paper we focus on how design prototypes…
In order for designers to navigate the complex ecosystem of digital platforms, they’ll need to master business modeling and become comfortable working across disciplines, says Samsung’s design chief, Sunghan Kim. The big design leadership challenge is the familiar one of managing design’s input and role…
Iota Partners is a new Chicago-based venture of Rick Robinson and John Cain (with whom Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels once worked at Sapient) that deals with user experience research, sensor-based data, and smart modelling. The papers section on their website is worth exploring in some…
According to a new driving study, conducted by Professor SeungJun Kim at Carnegie Mellon’s Human Computer Interaction Institute, young people and seniors each perform better with different types of feedback: “71% of elder drivers thought the auditory modality was the most useful and 59% thought…
Short report on the first European EPIC meeting by Anna Wojnarowska, UX researcher at Experientia: Last Friday, 11th of May, around 100 members of the ethnographic research community in Europe gathered in Barcelona for the 1st European EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) meeting, to…
The BBC have just released some interesting research around participation online, writes Neil Perkin on FutureLab. The findings (the result of a “large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today”) have raised a little controversy since they seem to…
Brian Pagán of User Intelligence in Amsterdam argues that touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) may open up further paths toward a true Natural User Interface (NUI). “User interfaces for computers have come a long way from vacuum tubes and punch cards, and each…
A conversation with senior Wells Fargo execs reveals a bank trying to use the Internet, social media and mobile technology to worm its way deeper and deeper into their customers’ lives. “Brian Pearce, senior VP in charge of Wells Fargo’s retail mobile channel, said the…
The people at Nesta, the UK innovation charity, think that co-production is potentially transformative and its power comes from re-framing the problem and re-establishing relationships to enable more holistic and people-centred approaches. Co-production can also tackle the lack of trust between some users and professionals,…
Harvard neuroscience researchers have just confirmed what many of us have suspected all along: social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are “brain candy†for Internet users. Every status update, every tweet, every pin is a micro-jolt delivered squarely to the pleasure centers of…
Leading neurologist Susan Greenfield tells Nokia Conversations that we need a new framework to make sense of our ‘mobile world’ Her argument is that mobile technology, and what we do with it, is now at the center of our family and social life, like the…
An older post, but I missed it. So here it is, more than two years after it was published by Stowe Boyd: “A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web. So,…
In a blog post (which is itself a paraphrased transcript of his talk at the Polish IA Summit 2012), Peter Bogaards talks about the relationship between user experience and customer experience, and how user experience designers can extend their influence in businesses. “A customer-obsessed company…
Peter Merholz, VP of experience design at Inflection (and founder of Adaptive Path), thinks there is no such thing as a UX design profession. User experience is a strategic framework, he says, a mindset for approaching product and service challenges. “The practice of user experience…