Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
As mobile penetration increases across the developing world, the entry of mobile phones in the hands of women causes reactions. In many cases, mobile phone ownership empowers women in myriad ways: economic gains, increased access to information, greater autonomy and social empowerment, and a greater…
In his paper “MacroDesign for Nation Building“, Uday Dandavate, founder and CEO of SonicRim Ltd., elaborates on the concept of MacroDesign, a public policy perspective in understanding the role of design and design thinking. This article is written with the purpose of drawing the attention…
Frederick S. Leichter, chief customer experience officer at Fidelity Investments, reports in the Harvard Business Review on how design thinking practices have helped Fidelity gain important insight into meeting customer needs. “In a matter of weeks, [Stanford University d.school] student teams conducted research, created prototypes…
In his book The Human Factor, Kim Vicente presents the Human-Tech Ladder, which categorizes human and societal needs according to five factors: physical, psychological, team, organizational, and political. Many UX professionals are familiar with usability testing, which focuses on the first two rungs of this…
August de los Reyes, design director of Artefact Group (formerly of Microsoft Surface), was one of the speakers at MIX11, a Microsoft organised gathering of developers, designers, UX experts and business professionals “creating the most innovative and profitable consumer sites on the web”. In his…
Neil Savage reports in the MIT Technology Review how, by studying customers and rethinking the user interface, designers find ways to make online banking more enjoyable. “To design the experience, [the BankSimple designers] looked for insights from behavioral economics, which relies on psychology to understand…
Tish Shute of Ugotrade interviews Bruce Sterling ahead of the Augmented Reality Event, where Bruce is a keynote speaker. As Bruce Sterling points out, Augmented Reality is “truly a child of the twenty-teens, a genuine digital native,†and one visible indication that …the Internet really…
Social currency is shared information that encourages further social encounters. It’s not a new concept, but the social web increases its prevalence. In the web-based collaboration software platform called Rypple, a simple act of thanking someone on a team and using a badge as a…
Your photos, status updates and tweets will fascinate future historians. Will these online remains last forever? In this special report, newscientist.com editor Sumit Paul-Choudhury reports on life, loss, memory and forgetting in the internet age. The fate of your online soul We are the first…
As a follow-up to the previous post, Intel’s user experience discourse is further elaborated on by Genevieve Bell, Intel Fellow and the company’s Director of Interaction and Experience Research. Bell’s main job is to look at what motivates people, and in turn understand how they…
Justin Rattner, Intel’s chief technology officer, spoke at Intel’s Tech Fest — an event where Intel gathered in Oregon more than 1,000 of its top engineers and scientists from around the world to show off its latest innovations — about the importance of creating compelling…
Mark Schatzker of Condé Nast Traveler tested the latest – and supposedly, greatest – of Augmented Reality apps in Rome, Italy, and was anything but impressed. “Can a $5 or $10 app really make visiting cities like Paris, Tokyo, or Moscow a breeze? To find…
At the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco in September last year, Justin Rattner, the director of Intel Labs, announced a new research division, called Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) and headed by Genevieve Bell, and also presented a new vision of context-aware computers and…
A few months back Rudy de Waele (m-trends) got in touch with Ken Banks (kiwanja | FrontlineSMS) and Eric Hersman (WhiteAfrican) about helping to curate a collaborative outlook on the mobile industry in Africa, called “Mobile Trends 2020 Africa“. Their task was to gather the…
Simple And Usable: Web, Mobile and Interaction Design by Giles Colborne New Riders, Sep 2010 Paperback, 208 pages In a complex world, products that are easy to use win favor with consumers. This is the first book on the topic of simplicity aimed specifically at…
Behaviour change techniques should be used to develop public services with citizens’ motivations at the heart of their design, says a leading [UK] thinktank. A report produced by the New Local Government Network argues that using citizen’s to design services using so-called nudge techniques can…
Thirty user experience (UX) researchers and practitioners participated in a three day seminar in Dagstuhl in order to bring clarity to the concept of user experience. The participants – who came from universities and corporations such as Logitech, Nokia, Philips and Sap – represented different…
User Experience designers have a unique opportunity to become the facilitators of holistic design and the advocates of innovation, argues Jake Truemper. By combining traditional user-centered activities with a greater emphasis on creating engaging designs we can bring usability into alignment with innovation in the…
Adrian Chan has posted what he calls a “big picture introduction” to the theory behind social interaction design. “I view social interaction design as a field that seeks user-centric descriptions of experiences and behaviors on social media, with an eye on emergent social practices. I…
PARC (Palo Alto Research Center, a Xerox Company), a premier center for commercial innovation, announced that Dr. Margaret Szymanski, Senior Researcher and interaction analyst on PARC’s Ethnography Services team and Dr. James Begole, Principal Scientist and manager of PARC’s Ubiquitous Computing/Context-aware Services team, have published…
Stephen Turbek, Executive Director of User Experience at Morgan Stanley in New York, thinks the question whether users are smart or stupid, is really irrelevant, introduces the concept of Effective Intelligence instead, and explains how you can design for it. “It is an honest question:…
An interesting study of commuters in Boston and San Francisco found people are more willing to ride the bus or train when they have tools to manage their commutes effectively. The study asked 18 people to surrender their cars for one week. The participants found…
Rahul Sen believes that the interaction design community is witnessing an important revolution — an ‘IxD Bauhaus’ of sorts. Provokingly, he compares Apple and its skeuomorphic design guidelines to the pre-Bauhaus period, when the built environment had bloated in stimuli, caused by an excess of…
Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. Fast Company profiles Neal Gorenflo who, after quitting his job as strategist for a division of shipping giant DHL, started Shareable, a not-for-profit web hub that provides individuals and…
The European Union’s Working Party on Data Protection has issued five recommended requirements for the protection of personal privacy in a time of Smart Meters in the home (pdf), outlining what needs to happen in order to gain the benefits of Smart Metering data while…
The Washington Post describes the world and the impact of everyday hackers who use social networks, do-it-yourself-then-show-it-off Web sites, cheap parts from China, and blissfully simple microprocessors to modify or invent new electronic products for their houses, cars, offices and back yards. “Recent studies show…
L’École de design in Nantes, France, has just launched the second issue of their research journal CADI, which focuses on co-creation, cross-disciplining and knowledge transfer. The three core feature articles are: From art history to industrial design history Jocelyne Le Boeuf, design historian and director…
As one of the jury captains for the inaugural year of the Core77 Design Awards, I am calling upon all Putting People First readers to spread the news about the award and help us get as many strong entries as possible. The Core77 Design Awards…
Brave NUI World: Designing natural user interfaces for touch and gesture by Daniel Wigdor and Dennis Wixon Paperback, 264 pages Morgan Kaufmann, 2011 (Amazon link) Natural user interfaces (NUIs) have been hailed as next evolutionary step in human-computer interaction. As software companies struggle to catch…
A New Culture of Learning: Cultivating the Imagination for a World of Constant Change by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown Publisher: CreateSpace – January, 2011) Paperback, 140 pages (Amazon link) The 21st century is a world in constant change. In A New Culture of…
Tom Dair, CEO of Smart Design, speaks with Dave Cronin, Smart Design’s new director of interaction design, about how it might be possible to design apps that help us live healthier. “While the politicians, insurance companies, and health care providers debate the social and economic…
Sentient City: Ubiquitous Computing, Architecture, and the Future of Urban Space Edited by Mark Shepard Paperback, 200 pages, 2011 MIT Press in copublication with the Architectural League of New York (Amazon link) Abstract Our cities are “smart” and getting smarter as information processing capability is…
Irene Cassarino, Experientia’s senior open innovation expert, will be speaking on Designing for Sustainable Change at the Hub Milan on Friday, as part of the Hub’s Inspirational Conversations series at this year’s Fuorisalone in Milan. The conversations are part of a wider event, entitled Designing…
Hubert Guillaud of the French online magazine InternetActu interviewed Stefana Broadbent, anthropologist and digital ethnographer, who in the last 20 years has been investigating the evolution of digital activities both at home and in the workplace, and has now written a book about her insights:…
A convergence of historical circumstance and an increase in innovative mobile applications may make Africa the first post-PC continent. Low investment in wired telecommunication infrastructure has driven increased mobile penetration, creating a user base that supports a rise in mobile innovation and increased interest…
Two new articles on UX Matters: User research Is unnatural (but that’s okay), Part I by Jim Ross From the perspective of a participant, user research is not very natural. We ask participants to try to act naturally in the artificial environment of a lab,…
University industrial design programs are usually cloistered in schools of art or architecture, and students in such programs are rarely required to study science or technology. That bothers Don Norman, former head of research at Apple and an advocate of user-friendly design. Having traditional design…
The study “Storytelling and Destination Development” by the Nordic Innovation Centre set out to scrutinize the possibilities and drawbacks of using storytelling as a means of developing and marketing Nordic tourism destinations. On the basis of five selected Nordic cases, the study sheds light both…
UX designer Cennydd Bowles has posted the transcript of his closing plenary at the IA Summit 2011 in Denver, Colorado. “Although there’s still a substantial gap between aspiration and execution, business leaders are at least now talking about the right things: experience, prototyping, design strategy,…
Dr. Ralph-Christian Ohr, a Swiss product manager, reflects thoughtfully on the recent strong discussion on user-led innovation. “There has been quite a lot of discussion recently about a post by Jens Martin Skibsted and Rasmus Bech Hansen, titled “User-Led Innovation Can’t Create Breakthroughs; Just Ask…