Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
In September 2011, researcher Anna Snel defended her Ph.D thesis, entitled “For the love of experience: Changing the experience economy discourse“, at the University of Amsterdam. It is now available for download. The attention for experiences as economic offerings has increased enormously in the last…
Experience designers investigate the motivations behind users’ behaviors to develop skill in predicting and guiding those behaviors. A short article by designer Sorin Pintilie. “So, yes, experience can be designed— not all experiences, but certainly some experiences. And with time, experience designers will continue to…
Chip maker and technology group Intel says that women are emerging as the dominant users of technology and if it continues to enhance its ease of use, the fairer sex will continue to dominate the adoption of technology. This is the opinion of Genevieve Bell,…
Chapter eleven of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview. It was written by Dag Svanaes, Professor at the Department of Computer and Information Science at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (and former professor at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea) and deals with…
Homesense was a research project that looked at how we might design smart homes from the bottom up, in an environment of open innovation. Using open source tools Homesense brings the open collaboration methods of online communities to physical infrastructures in the home. “The Homesense…
Information Marketplaces: The new economics of cities Author: Arup, The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of Nottingham Publication date: 28 November 2011 The technology-enabled city is an untapped source of sustainable growth. “Written in partnership with The Climate Group, Accenture and Horizon, University of…
Rohan Gunatillake, the lead producer of festivalslab (the Edinburgh Festival Innovations Lab) gives four reasons why new thinking and tools can produce better experiences. “Here at the Edinburgh Festivals Innovation Lab, we explore how to best use new thinking and new tools to make the…
Simon Jenkins writes in The Guardian that the “smart money is moving from online towards ‘live experience’.” “The new magnetism of congregation seems universal. Every online service or forum promotes an event, an invitation, a club night, something for which subscribers will pay, much as…
“Homage to Catalonia II” is a documentary, a research project, a story of stories about the construction of a sustainable, solidary and decentralized economy. The video, which is a project of Joana Conill, Manuel Castells and Àlex Ruiz of IN 3, the High School Institute…
Chris Risdon expands on what constitutes a good experience map in a long and highly commendable article on the Adaptive Path blog. “The experience map highlighted [on the left – click to enlarge] was part of an overall initiative for Rail Europe, Inc., a US…
Chapter ten of the interaction-design.org resource is now available in preview and deals with end-user development. Computer users have rapidly increased in both number and diversity. They include managers, accountants, engineers, home makers, teachers, scientists, health care workers, insurance adjusters, salesmen, and administrative assistants. Many…
Aileen Lee, partner at venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, believes that the best way to cost-effectively attract valuable users is harnessing a concept called social proof. “What is social proof? Put simply, it’s the positive influence created when someone finds out that others…
The concept of of social labelling could lead to a subconscious change in behaviour, Guy Champniss writes in The Guardian. “By social labelling, we’re referring to the tag society gives a particular behaviour in order to make sense of it. In other words, society interprets…
Five Levers for Change: inspiring consumers to adopt sustainable behaviour is fundamental to achieving Unilever’s Sustainable Living Plan. Unilever’s Five Levers for Change is a coherent set of principles, which, if applied consistently to behaviour change interventions, will increase the likelihood of having a lasting…
On Tuesday 22 November, NESTA in London organised an event that looked at the challenges of designing for an Internet of Things. The speakers: pioneers Usman Haque, founder of Pachube, and Matt Jones, formerly at the BBC, Dopplr and Nokia, and now a principal at…
Cliff Kuang, editor of Co.Design, used the Jawbone UP for a week, and can’t recommend it. “The wristband itself is superbly designed: The slight oval shape and rubberized case mean that it hews to your wrist without bouncing around, which would have made it into…
The best products don’t focus on features, they focus on clarity, argues Jon Bolt. “Problems should be fixed through simple solutions, something you don’t have to configure, maintain, control. The perfect solution needs to be so simple and transparent you forget it’s even there. However,…
A long essay by Dave Gray, founder of the XPLANE/Dachis Group, explores the topic of the service economy from a user experience point of view. Make sure you read his thinking of the product as a service avatar. “The emerging service economy will require business…
Fjord, the digital design consultancy, has just completed a white paper called “Design for Context: Understanding How User Context is Evolving”, looking at the background to context-sensitive design and current approaches, as well as providing high-level design recommendations for using context effectively and profitably. The…
Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal posted excerpts from a debate between Danah Boyd, Stewart Baker, Jeff Jarvis, and Chris Soghoian on privacy: “Privacy in the digital age means a lot of things to a lot of people. Some people fret about the privacy…
On 12 to 17 December, the people of Better Nouveau plan Dataviz, an in-depth workshop on the visual representation of large datasets. Better Nouveau is an independent design label and an innovation project initiated in June 2011 by ToDo, an Italian interaction design studio with…
As the first baby boomers turn 65 this year, high-tech is gradually making its way into the lives – and homes – of older folks. French newspaper Le Monde looks at the tablets, sensors, foot boards and other gadgets seniors can use to get caught…
Tricia Wang reflects on the fact that ethnographic work is often invisible. One way to overcome this, she argues, is for ethnographers to find ways to visualize their work. Visuals make recommendations tangible and demonstrate the ethnographer’s value. This is one of the reasons why…
The Interaction-Design.org Foundation is a labour of love founded by Mads Soegaard in 2002, and in 2010, his wife, Rikke Dam, joined the project (and their exotic office on a semi-deserted island in Thailand). Apart from Rikke and Mads, hundreds of people have helped out…
Richard Anderson has interviewed many people on stage, but, he says, the best of these, for multiple reasons (some very personal), might have been the most recent: a “conversation” with Don Norman and Jon Kolko, which took place at the Academy of Art University (AAU)…
The term co-design refers to a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle. Codesign builds on the methods and principles of Participatory Design which assumes ‘users’ are the experts of their own domain and should be actively involved in…
This past Monday evening, on an unseasonably warm night in Chicago, sustainability expert Ezio Manzini gave a thought-provoking lecture at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Mr Manzini is a Professor of Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Milano, and is a renowned…
Recently Dianna Miller had a chance to talk to Genevieve Bell, anthropologist and researcher, and the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research. Genevieve Bell will be one of the keynote speakers at Interaction 12. Dianna talked with her about social research, myths, design…
The RSA’s latest report, Transforming Behaviour Change: Beyond Nudge and Neuromania, argues for a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between our social challenges, our behaviours and our brains. Abstract The Government is taking behavioural science very seriously, but existing nudge-based approaches to behaviour change…
John Kolko reflects on design education and the importance of craftmanship in an article for Interactions Magazine. “Based on my experience reviewing portfolios from recent business school graduates, I would argue that one of the most fundamental failings of “design thinking” education is the…
Nokia releases a new phone concept – Gem – which “revolutionizes mobile design by turning the entire handset into a touchscreen”. Launched on the 25th anniversary of the Nokia Research Centre, the GEM device changes appearance from camera to phone or map according to the…
Instead of augmenting reality, we should make technology more aware, argues Christopher Butler in this article for Print Magazine. “Though an initial AR [Augmented Reality] experience can be thrilling, it quickly becomes clear, especially to visual thinkers, that AR is a misapplication of the technology…
Dirk Knemeyer has published a call to rely on foundational science(s) to better understand users. “The preponderance of research and publications on user studies deal more with principals and practices of the discipline and less with understanding the users themselves, much less in a deep,…
Interaction designer Bret Victor has published his “brief rant on the future of interaction design“. “To me, claiming that Pictures Under Glass [as in touch screens] is the future of interaction is like claiming that black-and-white is the future of photography. It’s obviously a transitional…
Larry Dignan discusses – in a conversation with David Ginsberg, director of insights and market research at Intel, and Tony Salvador, senior principle engineer of the Experience Insight Lab at the company – how Intel is boning up on its soft sciences to divine…
Greg Laugero writes about two trends that have recently entered the realm of digital product development. First is the incorporation of gaming concepts into products that seemingly have nothing to do with gaming. Second, the importance of designing products that are not only easy to…
Priced at $100, the device is a leap for Jawbone. And its aimed at nothing less than making its wearers happier and healthier. Fastco Design reports. “The UP wristband is meant to be worn 24 hours a day. When you’re awake, its accelerometer monitors your…
The Lure of the City: From Slums to Suburbs [Paperback] Edited by Austin Williams and Alastair Donald Pluto Press, September 2011 224 pages Review by Spiked: A new collection of essays challenges both pessimists who see urbanisation as a human disaster and eco-footprint obsessives who…
A viral clip produced by Microsoft is–like almost every video on this subject–amazingly polished. It’s also inane and completely lifeless, says FastCo Design. “Futuristic interfaces are supposed to solve problems and make life easier. What good are they–besides being eye candy–if the future around them…
Researchers are using innovative tools to perform psychological experiments a lot faster than they used to. Experts believe the number of smartphone users worldwide will top the 1 billion mark by 2013. Now an international team of scientists has taken advantage of smartphone technology to…