Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
InfoDesign alerts us to a well-thought through post by Irving Wladawsky-Berger of IBM on experience and systems: “But, socio-technical systems are oriented toward people and services. While product excellence and competitive costs are also important to services, they are not enough. The service sector is…
When the Pew Internet Project first began writing about the role of the internet in American life in 2000, there were stark differences between those who were using the internet and those who were not.1 Today, differences in internet access still exist among different demographic…
The “Internet of Things” (IoT) is a future in which everyday objects such as phones, cars, household appliances, clothes and even food are wirelessly connected to the Internet through smart chips, and can collect and share data. The European Commission wants to know what framework…
A high-tech kitchen and an instant classic, designed by Experientia, for Toncelli kitchens Minimalist design in a high-tech kitchen Experientia is taking part in the Salone del Mobile in Milan this year, with its brand new kitchen design, the Prisma, designed for Tuscan company Toncelli…
Fingers and thumbs turn desktop conventions on their head. Interaction designer Josh Clark explains what you need to keep in mind when designing for mobile touchscreens and compares finger-friendly touch interfaces for iPhone, iPad and Android. “Great mobile designs do more than shoehorn themselves into…
With its Citizens Connect app, Boston is showing how to use technology to empower citizens and involve them in the inner workings of the city. Hana Schank reports on FastCo.Exist. “Some cities seem to take an approach to digital that either involves throwing a bunch…
Over 250 business leaders from across Europe descended on London’s Inmarsat Conference Centre for Technology Frontiers, two days of thought provoking sessions and networking. Led by The Economist’s Digital Editor, Tom Standage, the event explored how advances in technology will transform our work, our lives,…
Kim-Mai Cutler writes in TechCrunch how a radical UX focus was Instagram’s secret ingredient to success: “With their UX skills, Krieger and Systrom refined Instagram to require as few actions as possible. Unlike the original version of Path, Instagram didn’t force users to add tags…
James Temple of the San Francisco Chronicle profiles Daniel Russell (video), Google’s search scientist (or as he calls it “search anthropologist”). “About four years after forming, Google came to realise it needed human insights to infuse that information with context and meaning. The company began…
Olga Morawczysnki, project Manager of Grameen Foundation’s AppLab Money Incubator (a CGAP-sponsored new initiative that develops mobile financial products for the poor) and Jan Chipchase, executive creative director of global insights at frog, argue that large scale adoption of (mobile) financial services by the poor…
The first ever World Happiness Report has been made public and states that our best chance at a contented life is to pack up and move to Scandinavia, writes Wired UK. Published by The Earth Institute at Columbia University and co-edited by its director, the…
All our global institutions — from the United Nations to the World Trade Organization to the International Monetary Fund to the G20 to the G8 — are broken, according to Don Tapscott, the best-selling author of Macrowikinomics. In an 8 minute video interview on TechCrunch…
Chris Ziegler of The Verge had a chance recently to chat with Ambient co-founder and CEO Pritesh Gandhi to hear about the company’s past, present, and future. “We’re perpetually bombarded with information, 24 hours a day. That’s just our connected reality now, and there’s very…
Jan Chipchase, Frog Design’s Executive Creative Director for Global Insights, continues his argumentation on the importance of corporate design research. After a somewhat confusing introduction (it’s very much for insiders), Chipchase focuses on the core issue: a backgrounder on the role of design research /…
Google released a YouTube video Wednesday showing the everyday uses of “Project Glass,” wrap-around virtual reality glasses with all the qualities of a smartphone – and much more. “Google has once again unveiled a project mock-up that, if realized, would turn the technology industry on…
Experientia is partnering with the Centre Scientifique et Technique du Bâtiment (CSTB) of Nice, France and a series of other agencies on Ecofamilies, a project aimed at the enhancement and promotion of eco-responsible behaviours in family homes. Starting from March 2012, and continuing until June,…
The UK Government has published an alpha release of its digital design principles with examples of how they have been used so far. 1. Start with needs 2. Do less 3. Design with data 4. Do the hard work to make it simple 5. Iterate.…
Petter Silfver, an interaction designer from Stockholm (Sweden), has published an article on Smashing Magazine on “the tiniest of details that goes into creating the main centerpiece of your digital product—the construction of the elements of your navigation”. “When users look for information, they have…
Opower [is a company] that blends behavioral science and data analysis to find ways to help utilities get their customers to use less electricity. [Their] thinking is that it’s not so much factual information that motivates behavioral change — knowing that smoking is bad for…
Jim Ross, Principal of Design Research at Electronic Ink, provides a good technical overview on the methods of capturing information during user research.
Markus Latzina, SAP AG, and Joerg Beringer, SAP Labs, LLC. have republished an article they have written for Interactions Magazine on the Transformative User Experience. “Instead of designing for many discrete applications, the Transformative User Experience approach aims to natively support a larger variety of…
Cross-Cultural Technology Design Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users by Huatong Sun Hardback, 352 pages Oxford University Press – Feb 2012 [Amazon link] The demand and opportunity for cross-cultural technology design is rapidly rising due to globalization. However, all too often resulting technologies are technically…
James Oliver Senior and Adam Dole, resp. designer and business planner at Mayo Clinic, argue that health-related apps often fail to take into account any understanding of medicine. “At Mayo Clinic, we work on inter-disciplinary product teams that include designers, strategists, health care professionals, technology…
Anna Meroni, PhD, is a scholar and professor in Service and Strategic Design at Politecnico di Milano. She works on design activism, social innovation and sustainability, with a specific focus on food and housing systems. In her two-hour lecture, given to design students at Malmö…
Laurence McCahill, design lead and co-founder of Spook Studio, explores for .net magazine the Lean Startup and Lean UX movements, which bring a groundbreaking approach to product development, and what it means for designers, developers and clients. “If there’s one thing the Japanese know a…
What happens when designers & manufacturers discuss the workplace & social media? Dexigner reports that IIDA has published a whitepaper summary of the IIDA Industry Roundtable 15, focused on the changes in the industry, and in the world, their experience of the evolution of the…
Our tech saturation has reached such a critical point that some experts say it’s rewiring our brains. Research psychologist and computer educator Larry Rosen of California State University, Dominguez Hills, suggests that being so hyperconnected can make us behave as if we have real psychological…
Who are these companies and what do they want from me? Alexis Madrigal’s voyage into the invisible business that funds the web. “This morning, if you opened your browser and went to NYTimes.com, an amazing thing happened in the milliseconds between your click and when…
Samsung’s 2012 top-of-the-line plasmas and LED HDTVs offer new features never before available within a television including a built-in, internally wired HD camera, twin microphones, face tracking and speech recognition, writes HD Guru. While these features give you unprecedented control over an HDTV, the devices…
Nir Eyal’s third Techcrunch article on behavioural engineering, delves into the topic of “desire engines”. “Desire engines go beyond reinforcing behavior; they create habits, spurring users to act on their own, without the need for expensive external stimuli like advertising. Desire engines are at the…
The “mBCC Field Guide: A Resource for Developing Mobile Behavior Change Communication Programs,†is a new tool that helps users guide the design of mobile applications for health and provides insights about what works in mobile behavior change communication is now available. Compiled by Abt…
FutureScapes, an open collaboration project by Sony and Forum for the Future, aims to bring together a range of expert thinkers, designers, futurologists, writers (including those from The Economist’s Intelligence Unit and Wired Magazine) and you – the public – to explore the opportunities and…
Helsinki Street Eats: a book about everyday food By Bryan Boyer and Dan Hill, with contributions from Ville Tikka, Nuppu Gävert, Tea Tonnov, and Kaarle Hurtig. Sitra / Low2No Street food describes systems of everyday life. In its sheer everydayness we discover attitudes to public…
Design is becoming an applied behavioral science, and your art school background is no longer sufficient, says Jason Hreha, behavior designer and UX advisor. “Fields like neuroscience are starting to come of age, and are beginning to give us insights into human decision making. Companies…
Donald A. Norman (of the Nielsen Norman Group) and Roberto Verganti (Politecnico di Milano) have jointly published a paper entitled “Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus Technology and Meaning Change“, based on a talk presented at the Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces conference in…
In a TechCrunch guest post by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple, outlines how he came to the conclusion that there’s nothing more important for a startup than the ability to clearly understand what it builds and then relentlessly focus on it –…
Four new chapters of the interaction-design.org resource are now available: Requirements Engineering from an HCI Perspective by Alistair G. Sutcliffe The chapter is structured in six sections. In the section 13.1, the Requirements Engineering process is described. This is followed in section 13.2 by a…
BOOMERANG, death by gadget : the mobile phone, a new kind of documentary presented by Diego Buñuel, March 21th , 8:55pm on CANAL+ BOOMERANG is a 90-minute French documentary that decodes a globalized world, a world in which our actions as consumers can have unsuspected…
Bruce Sterling, the celebrated science fiction writer and author of Tomorrow Now, explains why you don’t need to be clairvoyant to predict the future. The article is part of the Futurism series in Smithsonian Magazine. “The fifth and final method [to forecast the future] is…
What does it take to introduce e-books and e-readers into communities in low income countries — and is this a good idea, asks Michael Trucano on EduTech, a World Bank blog on ICT in education. “Judging by the increasing number of inquiries we receive here…