Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Adobe’s decision to cease development of the mobile Flash platform and increase their investment in HTML5-related efforts created perhaps the final piece of conclusive evidence that HTML5 is the current go-to technology for creating ubiquitous user experiences regardless of device. A reflection by SuAnne Hall,…
Increasing privacy infringement on the Internet has set off a campaign to uphold the “right to be forgotten,†which allows users to demand information about them be deleted by social networking websites. Si-Soo Park provides an Asian angle on the matter in the Korea Times,…
Behavioural change researcher Dan Lockton discusses an approach which has emerged out of some of the ethnographic work he has been doing for the Empower project, working on CarbonCulture with More Associates, where asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways…
User Interface (UI) is the next battlefield in consumer electronics and, as products mature, the race to differentiate based on the UI will accelerate. Rather than compare minor differences in features sets, consumers will increasingly make purchases based on ease of use and access of…
Ciara Taylor was also at Interaction 12 in Dublin and reports on the keynote talk by Anthony Dunne for Core77. “Interaction design and designing interactions… are they the same concept? Anthony Dunne, partner at Dunne and Raby and professor at Royal College of Arts in…
There was magic in the air on the final day of the Interactions 12 conference in Dublin, as a number of speakers drew the connections between magic and design, whether it be electric faeries, having childhood dreams of being a magician, or actually being one…
It is a constant complaint: We’re choking on information. The flood of data on the Web has reached mind boggling proportions, and it shows no signs of stopping. But wait, says Harvard professor Ann Blair in an NPR radio program — this is not a…
McKinsey’s John DeVine, Shyam Lal, and Michael Zea write that businesses ought to focus on the human side of customer service to make it psychologically savvy, economically sound, and easier to scale. “Some organizations are making strides in the design and delivery of services. By…
Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor continue their coverage of the Interactions conference in Dublin. In this long article, they report on the presentations by Jonas Löwgren (School of Arts & Communication at Malmö University), Scott Nazarian (frog), Ariel Waldman (Spacehack.org), Dustin DiTomasso (Mad*Pow), Julie Baher…
Dublin – and even its Lord Mayor – welcomed a record 750 attendees to the opening of Interaction 12. The day would unfold with Hitchcock, healthcare, and hearing the question :what if?”. Vicky Teinaki and Louise Taylor report on the presentations by Luke Williams (frog…
Tricia Wang of UCSD’s Department of Sociology and Barry Brown of the Mobile Life VINN Excellence Center Stockholm presented the paper “Ethnography of the telephone: Changing uses of communication technology in village life” at MobileHCI 2011. Abstract While mobile HCI has encompassed a range of…
The Norwegian Design Council has published a new resource site about inclusive design, to inform and communicate how this approach can be used as a strategy for innovation and development of more user-friendly products and services for the mainstream market. Note also that the Council…
Heather Ford spoke with Stuart Geiger, PhD student at the UC Berkeley School of Information, about his emerging ideas about the ethnography of robots. “Not the ethnography of robotics (e.g. examining the humans who design, build, program, and otherwise interact with robots, which I and…
In this first piece, Sam Ladner examines the different temporal conceptions of ethnographic fieldwork in industry and academia: “Academics frequently criticize corporate ethnography simply as “too short.†But this is just as shallow an insight as is the idea that culture=consumerism. Academics, of all people,…
In anticipation of the upcoming IxDA Interaction12 Conference taking place in Dublin, Ireland February 1–4, Core77 is bringing us a preview of this year’s event, including this guest post by David Malouf, professor of Interaction Design in the Industrial Design Department at the Savannah College…
As more and more devices in your home get connected to the Internet, the user experience becomes increasingly important. The people at ReadWriteWeb announce that over the coming months they will be exploring the world of User Experience design, by interviewing UX experts and reviewing…
On 23 January 2012, Martijn de Waal defended his Ph.D. thesis ‘The city as interface’ at the Philosophy Department of the University of Groningen. Abstract: The main concern of the study ‘The City as Interface’ is the future of the urban public sphere. It investigates…
All human societies are alive with the battle for influence. Every single day each of us is subject to innumerable persuasion attempts from corporations, interest groups, political parties and other organisations. Each trying to persuade us that their product, idea or innovation is what we…
Two interesting posts by Danish photographer and visual ethnographer Jacob Langvad Nilsson: Business ethnography as a key strategy for international brands When penetrating new markets, two critical mistakes seem to repeat themselves. The first mistake involves thinking that because it is already a big and…
Applying Anthropology in the Global Village Edited by Christina Wasson, Mary Odell Butler and Jacqueline Copeland-Carson Left Coast Press – November 2011 – 326 pp. Hardback (978-1-61132-085-5) Paperback (978-1-61132-086-2) The realities of the globalized world have revolutionized traditional concepts of culture, community, and identity—so how…
Chapter twelve of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It deals with what HCI specialists call ‘affective computing’ and was written by Kristina Höök, professor in Human-Machine Interaction at Stockholm University. As Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Interaction Design moved from designing and evaluating…
During the Pop!Tech conference, well known design researcher Jan Chipchase gave a talk about his research work. In the panel session an audience member asked two questions relating to personal motivations of doing this kind of research and whether anyone has the moral right to…
Elizabeth Churchill, Principal Research Scientist at Yahoo! Research, was the speaker at the October 2011 Creative Mornings event in San Francisco. In her talk she discussed how we hide, reveal and misinterpret emotion online and off. Watch video (30 min)
Jan Chipchase thinks that 80 to 90% of current recruiting for design research/ethnographic studies (excluding focus groups) that is currently placed through recruiting agencies could from a skill and work-flow perspective, be carried out in-house through a clever use of social networks. “For researchers this…
Genevieve Bell, interaction and experience research director at Intel Labs, has published a guest post on the BBC website on how artificial intelligence will change our relationship with tech. “I think in 2012 we will start to see signs of change in our relationships with…
It’s increasingly clear that we live in collaborative times. Many of the most interesting innovations of recent years have at their heart ideas of sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting, gifting, exchanging or swapping. These are age-old concepts being reinvented through network technologies and a cultural…
Steven Portigal interviews Julian Bleecker about the near future, design fiction and storytelling. Julian Bleecker is a designer, technologist and researcher in the Advanced Projects studio at Nokia Design in Los Angeles and the Near Future Laboratory where he investigates emerging social practices around new…
In its new focus on products for girls, Lego is using quite a lot of ethnographic research: “To develop Lego Friends, Knudstorp relaunched the same extensive field research—more cultural anthropology than focus groups—that the company conducted in 2005 and 2006 to restore its brand. It…
The idea of sharing things instead of owning them goes against everything we’ve been taught as a consumeristic society. Those who have spent their lives “keeping up with the Jones’” may find it hard to suddenly relinquish their death-grip on idea that owning things is…
Reboot, a service design firm working in the fields of governance and international development, recently spent time with three marginalized groups in China — the rural poor, ethnic minorities, and migrant workers — to research the impacts of three decades of disruptive change, and to…
Brian Thomas Collins has made a career out of creating brand experiences, “a few of them great”. He writes: “A good brand experience is when a brand does what we expect of it. A great brand experience is something we tell someone else about. In…
Jared Spool explores the key differences between “Normals†(normal mainstream users) and tech early adopters. Instead of thinking about ‘early adopters’ and ‘normals’ as if they are two homogeneous groups, he thinks it’s better to look at the motivations that trigger someone to buy into…
Frog’s Robert Fabricant breaks down the themes from the 2011 Interaction Design Awards. “Technologies like cheap sensors and cloud computing are increasingly being used to augment our daily lives in both magical and mundane ways. Everything we do is an app in the making (a…
Far-flung families are increasingly using Skype, Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat to do things together that would otherwise require a plane ticket. “Though Skype is now eight years old, the software — and others like it, including Apple’s FaceTime and Google chat — has become…
NY Times technology reporter Steve Lohr writes on how consumer-based Internet technologies are morphing into new uses in energy conservation, transportation, health care, traffic management and food distribution. Low-cost sensors, clever software and advancing computer firepower are opening the door to new uses in energy…
With a harvest of data from a wired planet, computing has evolved from sensing local information to analyzing it to being able to control it. Larry Smarr, founding director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, explores what this means. “As Mike Liebhold…
As design becomes more sophisticated in influencing user behavior, it’s important that we start to think critically about the ethical boundary between persuasion and outright manipulation, argues Stephen P. Anderson. “You can’t discuss a topic like seduction or what motivates people without some awareness that,…
Incorporating wireless technology into its newest cars, Ford prepared to roll out vehicles capable of monitoring everything from pollen counts to glucose levels. “[Ford] started concentrating on the aging population in 1999, and a focus on health and wellness within the car is at the…
Sondre Ager-Wick, Nokia’s Head of Design Strategy and Foresight, discusses the evolution and future of mobile design. His new trends: – DIY design – Electronically enhanced senses – The smartification of everything – Less digital bling. More content first. – Getting serious about play Read…
In an article for DMLCentral Nishant Shah, founder and director of research for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, wants to explore new ways of thinking about the Digital Native. “Based on my research on young people in the Global South, I want to…