Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Experientia’s partner in charge of user research, Michele Visciola, will be one of the speakers at the EPIC Europe one-day meeting at the Elisava Design School in Barcelona next week, on 11 May 2012. The European meeting is the first of its kind for EPIC…
Businesses now sit on data goldmines, but very few leverage the data to improve customer service. Ziba’s creative director Sean Madden suggests three ways forward. “Big Data has gotten a lot of attention over the past 18 months as retail, manufacturing, and technology companies realize…
Social TV is a major disruption in the rapidly changing television industry. In the free report “Social TV and the second screen“, Stowe Boyd, acclaimed futurist, managing director of World Talk Research, and a researcher-at-large at The Futures Agency, characterizes the forces at work in…
When companies don’t care about user experience, it is clearly reflected in the products they create. Although everyone can agree that software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, many managers aren’t willing to invest the time and resources it takes to build something compelling.…
When we talk about social media we are really only talking about tools that we can use to help us and the people we engage to achieve a task. To make a success in social media we need to understand online communities, argues Matt Rhodes.…
As ethnographic practice has spilled out into the broader world of design and policy-making, business strategy and marketing, the monograph has not remained the singular format for presenting ethnographic work. In the design community and high-tech industry, it is the conference paper (see EPIC, DIS,…
Tim Todish provides some good examples of companies extending the (user) experience beyond the device as a good way to differentiate from the competition. “Most of the time when we think about UX, we are thinking within the confines of the digital world. What I’m…
Of all the conferences that are dedicated to discussions on technology and society, there’s one that has continued to consistently curate an amazing line of up speakers while maintaining an intimate environment for meaningful exchanges without any elitist barriers to participation – Lift, writes Tricia…
“While technology can help strengthen relationships with people you barely know, it can damage relationships with the people that are close to you, like family,†says Team Gantt co-founder Nathan Gilmore. Read article
In his last article Simon Norris, founder and CEO of Nomensa, outlined a simple model ‘the meaning dimension‘ to help consider how we can understand the significance of meaning. The aim of the article was to introduce the meaning dimension as a scale that could…
In this long article, Peter Steen Høgenhaug explores how and when to use gamification to improve the user experience of websites and apps, and also when not to use it. Using game theories in areas not otherwise associated with games is often referred to as…
Do people want touch on laptop screens? Daria Loi, user experience manager at Intel, did some research on the matter and the answer is a clear yes: people want a single device with a keyboard that opens, closes and is touch enabled. In user experience…
John Dilworth and Matt Miller of LDS Church provide an overall framework to communicate the value of UX within businesses, that directly associates the value proposition of UX with key business objectives. “It is the job of the UX designer to demonstrate the value that…
Some interesting data by Tamara J. Erickson on what she calls the “Re-Generation”: individuals at the formative ages of 11 to 13, those born after about 1995 [which, by the way, has a gap of three years]. “My interest is how swimming in this digital…
The UK Design Council, in partnership with the UK Department of Health, ran a national competition to find teams of designers and experts who could develop new ideas to help improve the lives of those affected by dementia, reports Dexigner. Guided by in-depth research and…
The first campaign to break the 1-million-dollar barrier in this revolutionary crowd-funding platform was an industrial design project. Could Kickstarter transform the design industry as we know it? A design report from New York by Joseph Grima on FastCo.Design. “Put simply, Kickstarter allows anyone with…
In an article for UX Magazine, Catalina Naranjo-Bock provides a solid general description of co-designing processes: “The practice of co-design allows users to become an active part of the creative development of a product by interacting directly with design and research teams. It is grounded…
Social media in particular has inexorably changed the world, driving openness and fear – but it is not beyond our control, argues Danah Boyd in a long essay for The Guardian. “Most technology designers engage in their trade to make the world a better place.…
Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T., says we use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right: the Goldilocks effect. “Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and…
Saar Gur, general partner at Charles River Ventures, discusses a new generation of smart mobile services, which provide user information in the background to make accurate predictions around real-time user intention and will offer suggestions, results and different user interfaces/interactions based on their prediction of…
UX consultant Harry Brignull spoke at UX London 2012 about the design of The Week magazine’s iPad app, telling the story of the project from the initial sketches through to its launch in Apple’s Newsstand. In a long blog post on 90 percent of everything,…
Henry Alford, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, wonders when in the digital age, did privacy become a choice rather than a given. “When Facebook bought Instagram, the social photo app for iPhone and Android devices, on April 9, a chorus of concern emanated from the…
Even within the technology community, 33% agreed with the below statement: “People will not trust the use of near-field communications devices and there will not be major conversion of money to an all-digital, all-the-time format. By 2020, payments through the use of mobile devices will…
In an editorial, The Guardian argues for an open web: “To protect the web’s founding principle is a matter of what Tim Berners-Lee would call citizen vigilance, of restraining by openness itself the continual pressure for a closed-down, privately owned cyberspace that is the inevitable…
In his book “Wicked problems: Problems worth solving“, author John Kolko (founder and director of Austin Center for Design) argues that involving end users in the entire design process ensures a humane design solution. He now summarises his argument in this article for FastCo.Design. “Cultural…
IKEA’s new Uppleva Smart TV-furniture unit was extensively shown at the Milan Design Week (which ends today), and on Core77 I wrote more about the interface design, but here some more about the user research that went into the product. The user research consisted of…
Chris Risdon, senior experience designer at Adaptive Path, looks at the explosion of smart products, which passively collect data about you and your specific behavior, and tell you a story which is designed to directly influence you, and argues that their very value proposition lies…
Austin Brown, UX designer at EffectiveUI, and his colleague Lindsay Moore wondered if there was a way to design better, by combinubg the best aspects of interaction design and product design, as well as a little service design. They hoped that this would allow to…
Brains, Behavior and Design is a group of IIT Institute of Design students appling findings from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics to the design process. It is not clear to what extent the group is still active now, but the site is…
Artefact is, like Experientia, a UX design consultancy that is strongly inspired by cognitive and behavioral modeling, and uses all kinds of inputs from cognitive and social science to enrich their design work: “At Artefact, we’re becoming increasingly aware of the fact that regardless of…
Tricia Wang is a cultural sociologist interested in understanding how people use digital tools in their day to day lives. In her talk at the Lift 12 conference, she focuses on a story you may have heard of, concerning a student who ended up making…
Richard MacManus writes on ReadWriteWeb that the next generation of in-car apps will be about providing “smart” services, such as taking some of the cognitive load off the driver – including making the car autonomous in some ways. And he provides Audi (which just bought…
In an extensive article by Charles Arthur, technology editor of The Guardian, on the rise of walled gardens (apps, social networks) on the net, we read this quote by John Battelle of Federated Media: “The open web is full of spam, shady operators and blatant…
I enjoyed the final paragraph of the Fast.CoDesign article on the second generation Nest Thermostat: “Here’s a sense in which the Nest seems almost over-designed–all of this care for a one-time experience of screwing it in might seem excessive. But the fact is that user-focused…
Within the next decade, smart-device swiping will have gained mainstream acceptance as a method of payment and could largely replace cash and credit cards for most online and in-store purchases by smartphone and tablet owners, according to a new survey of technology experts and stakeholders.…
Wired UK has published a guest post by Usman Haque, founder of Pachube.com and director at Haque Design + Research and CEO of Connected Environments, where he argues that current Smart Cities initiatives are looking for a one-size fits all, top-down strategic approach to sustainability,…
Wearable devices, or “wearables†for short, have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media. In a new report out today, Forrester argues that wearables will move mainstream once they get serious investment from the “big five†platforms —…
Wolff Olins’s Mary Ellen Muckerman explores what a focus on user experience could mean for business. “The principles and theories of UX have created a new normal in terms of brand delivery and interaction. They state that how people actually use your product is much…
People Powered Health is a programme from NESTA, the UK innovation charity, to support the design and delivery of innovative services for people that are living with long term health conditions. The programme focuses on co-production – that people’s needs are better met when they…
Avi Itzkovitch argues that the experience of interactive eBooks should not be confined to animations based on touch-and-response interaction, or merely flipping the page; when designing these Books one must ask what is the enhanced experience — why to move from print to digital, and…