Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Tablet platforms break traditional paradigms of computer and mobile use, shows ethnographic and interview-based research conducted over the last year by UX research firm AnswerLab. “We have learned that although many people purchased iPads thinking they would be “big iPhones,†nearly everyone said the iPad…
Sarah Brooks of Shareable has just published the second part of her interview with the Italian design strategist Ezio Manzini, who is one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, and founder…
Design for Services Series: Design for Social Responsibility Authors: Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi Gower Publishing, August 2011, 298 pages In Design for Services, Anna Meroni and Daniela Sangiorgi articulate what Design is doing and can do for services, and how this connects to existing…
In a long post on reBoot, Panthea Lee has laid out some basic principles, approaches, and tools of design research so public institutions can better understand how it serves their work. As pointed out by Tricia Wang, the article is extremely helpful in its clear…
Michiel De Lange has published a very long and somewhat critical review of the book Divining a Digital Future: Mess and Mythology in Ubiquitous Computing by Paul Dourish and Genevieve Bell. “In Divining a Digital Future D&B reiterate many arguments made in earlier work, provide…
Successful PC and mobile experiences are built on fundamentally different conceptual models and leverage different psychological functions of the user, argues Rachel Hinman. Understanding these differences will help you create better experiences for both contexts. She delves into the matter in a longer article that…
The New York Times reviews Paola Antonelli’s “Talk to Me” show at the Museum of Modern Art. “At its best “Talk to Me†makes you aware of how our relationship to design has become more emotional and intuitive. Ms. Antonelli points out that “we now…
Liz Losh writes on DMLCentral on an inclusive and interdisciplinary approach to “digital literacy†that is more in keeping with the latest thinking about “digital fluency†in the field “Although “digital literacy†is often a phrase associated with programs that have utopian pedagogical visions, it…
Or, why did Google PowerMeter fail? In his latest post, James Landay questions whether over-analysis of data gets in the way of designing a product that truly understands the needs of its users. He provides several examples of when the data needs trumped design and…
Ezio Manzini is an Italian design strategist, one of the world’s leading experts on sustainable design, author of numerous design books, professor of Industrial Design at Milan Polytechnic, and founder of the DESIS (Design for Social Innovation towards Sustainability) network of university-based design labs. His…
Learning is a complex process with distinct stages, each with corresponding tasks and emotions. Understanding how users learn can help us design experiences that support the user throughout the entire process. “Most websites invest the majority of their effort into streamlining the very last stage…
New research findings from a global study of education systems suggest that the promise of a hi-tech, high-skills, high-wage future for kids is a fantasy. Does digital media and learning offer a better future, asks Ben Williamson on DMLCentral. “Since the 1980s there has been…
Jakob Nielsen has published a new report with 19 new case studies of enterprise portals. It finds slow growth in new features. The focus is instead on robust integration and formalizing governance. “The headline for our last intranet portal study was “Enterprise Portals Are…
Online security for regular people like you and me is a disaster. It’s a killer app waiting to be designed. When you have a smartphone with some apps and a computer, you easily have to manage 30 to 50 sites and apps that require passwords.…
John Thackara has been a juror on a series of sustainability and design competitions recently. And he has become a bit frustrated. Most of them, he says, miss their tremendous potential of stimulating fresh thinking, posing new questions, exploring new solutions, starting new conversations, bringing…
Rob Tannen argues that user interface design is the most original and influential design coming out of the United States today. “It is the emphasis on user-centered design that has made American interface design so successful and difficult to replicate or export outside of the…
(English translation of article published yesterday in La Stampa newspaper – author Andrea Rossi): Michigan delegation between the cabbages and the red peppers Who would have thought that the regeneration of a city can start from a market stand that sells fruits and vegetables, or…
The main conclusion of the Behaviour Change report, published today by the UK House of Lords Science and Technology Sub-Committee, is that ‘nudging’ on its own is unlikely to be successful in changing the population’s behaviour. The report – the culmination of a year-long investigation…
Interestingly, the badly designed user interface of the in-car telematics system was the primary gripe among Ford and Lincoln owners and lessees in the latest J.D. Power survey. “After steady year-on-year improvement, Ford has plunged from fifth position in 2010 to 23rd in the 2011…
Allison Arieff talks in her New York Times Opinionator blog about the design of work. Paraphrasing Nathan Shedroff, she states that furniture is not the problem. Instead, she says, “design itself is the problem because it is being used to solve the wrong ones —…
Dan Lockton is publishing extracts from his Brunel University Ph.D thesis ‘Design with Intent: A design pattern toolkit for environmental & social behaviour change’ as blog posts over the next few weeks. The first post deals with the importance of behaviourism in design for behavioural…
On June 23, CHI Netherlands organised Chi Sparks, its bi-annual conference, and the keynote videos are now available. The theme of this year’s Chi Sparks conference was ‘HCI research, innovation and implementation’, and more in particular the very important contributions that good HCI research makes…
In her New York Times review of Talk to Me (online journal), the latest exhibition by Paola Antonelli at the MoMA, Alice Rawsthorn describes what could be considered the essence of interaction design: “Digital technology is enabling objects to become so complex and powerful that…
MeLa – European Museums and Libraries in/of the Age of Migrations – is a brand new four-year research project, funded by the European Commission under the Seventh Framework Programme, which aims to delineate new approaches for museums and libraries in a context characterized by the…
Izmo, the Italian association focused on participatory process, local development, architecture, design and ICT, organizes an International Summer School in Torino from September 5th to 14th 2011 that proposes the public space as its theme. The course is aimed at students, graduates, professionals and anyone…
The Summer 2011 edition of the RSA Journal explores the relationship between business and social change. Brand values As the social, political and commercial spheres become more intertwined, firms are increasingly finding incentives to look beyond the bottom line. Colin Crouch explores the strong moral…
The proliferation of powerful mobile phones could see control of the internet pass into the hands of corporations, positions John Naughton in The Observer today. “We are on the slippery slope towards a much more controlled, less open, internet. If these trends continue, then it…
Jacquelyn Krones, a Senior Product Manager from Microsoft, is in charge of an ongoing ethnographic research project on understanding search behavior. “I would say the other big insight for us was around knowledge creation, which is also called “sense-making†in the information science academic discipline.…
During the conference “An Event Apart” (AEA) in Boston, UX designer Whitney Hess gave a talk entitled “Create design principles and use them to establish a philosophy for the user experience.” Hess wants to create universal principals for user experience to communicate a shared understanding…
Greg Williams reports in Wired UK on the recent Frontiers of Interaction conference in Florence, Italy. “Few people need an excuse to spend time in Florence, so it speaks volumes for the organisers of Frontiers of Interaction, a two-day gathering focused on design and digital…
In a blog post, Justin Mifsud discuss the terms usability and user experience, highlighting their differences and more importantly the relationship that exists between them. “Usability is a narrower concept than user experience since it only focuses on goal achievement when using a web site.…
Sociologist Keith Hampton (University of Pennsylvania) believes technology and social networking affect our lives in some very positive ways “There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of social networking site use on people’s social lives, and much of it has centered…
The rise of Internet search engines like Google has changed the way our brain remembers information, according to research by Columbia University psychologist Betsy Sparrow published July 14 in Science. “Since the advent of search engines, we are reorganizing the way we remember things,†said…
Why is it that some technologies cause moral panic and others don’t? Why was the introduction of electricity seen as a terrible thing, while nobody cared much about the fountain pen? According to Genevieve Bell, the director of Intel Corporation’s Interaction and Experience Research, we…
Tammy Gur, Head of Design, BBC World Service Future Media, explains the work of the BBC’s user experience and design team which designs and develops news sites for the web and mobile devices in 27 languages, catering for audiences across world. “I liken the design…
Jawbone announces Up, a wearable wristband to track health, fight obesity. A combination of a sensor-infused wristband and a smartphone app will provide nudges for healthier living, based on your behavior. “Just an hour ago on stage at TED Global, Jawbone announced the grand project…
One of the most important relationships people have is with government. Cyd Harrell explores what this means for the user experience community. “One of the most important relationships people have is with government. Whether at a local or national level, citizens interact with their…
The Mobile Work Life Project is a Ryerson university-based research project funded by the Canadian Social Science and Humanities Research Council. Its aim is to add to our current understanding of the now-ubiquitous use of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets. The project is primarily…
Jim Whitehurst, chief executive and president of Red Hat Inc., the only publicly traded open-source software company, sees user collaboration as the wave of the future, not only for technology companies but for the business world at large. Mr. Whitehurst spoke to The Wall Street…
Design Flanders [“Design Vlaanderen”] and the Association of Flemish Cities and Municipalities (both in Belgium) have just published a bilingual Dutch-English booklet entitled “Service design, a strong strategy for local authorities” [Dutch title: “Service design, een sterke strategie voor het lokale bestuur”] – based on…