Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
A group of young designers are making their mark on Nicosia’s urban scene by creatively redesigning “misused public spacesâ€. “Our goal is to give solutions on how these spaces could be used,†said designer Marina Hadjilouca, one of the founders and designers of Schedia, organisers…
Using your mobile phone to do your banking and to buy goods and services is becoming more common, with the rise of the smartphone. In developing world countries like Kenya, the technology to do this has been around for several years – and you do…
Matt Richtel reflects in a long New York Times article on the impact of growing up digital. The constant stream of stimuli offered by new technology, he says, poses a profound new challenge to focusing and learning. “Students have always faced distractions and time-wasters. But…
The essays featured here stem from talks given at the Focusing on the User Experience session of this year’s Reference Renaissance conference, a biennial gathering of reference and user services librarians put on by the BCR consortium in Colorado. The following four essays address the…
The current issue of Interactions Magazine is the last issue of editors Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson, who reflect on the results achieved. Also Don Norman reflects in his column, and raises some pointed criticism of Interactions Magazine publisher ACM, that I endorse completely: “I…
“We need to place anthropology before technology,” said Richard Seymour, Co-founder, Seymourpowell, at the sixth annual meeting of the International Advisory Panel (IAP) of the DesignSingapore Council, that came together to recommended ways to use design to boost productivity in Singapore. The panel, chaired by…
Last week, Experientia was in Busan, South Korea, at the invitation of the Busan Design Center. As part of its first Design Week, the Center organised two international conferences: one – the Busan International Design Congress – had “Digital Energy” as its main theme and…
Project Information Literacy (PIL) is ongoing research project, based in the University of Washington’s Information School, that collects data from early adults enrolled in US colleges and universities, to understand how they conceptualize and operationalize research activities for course work and “everyday life” use and…
ITID (Information Technologies & International Development) has come out with a special issue devoted to papers emerging from the second Harvard Forum on ICTs, Human Development, Growth and Poverty Reduction (audio cast). The two-day Harvard Forum II was sponsored by Canada’s International Development Research Centre…
Can technology erode something that doesn’t exist? That’s the question that journalist Virginia Heffernan raises in an article for the New York TImes Magazine. “Whether the Web is making us smarter or dumber, isn’t there something just unconvincing about the idea that an occult “span 
Peter Merholz, president of Adaptive Path, has written a long and eloquent rant against advertising and marketing agencies proclaiming to do user experience design. These agencies, he says, do not come at user experience from an honest place. “Ad agencies, in particular, are soulless holes,…
Michele Visciola, Experientia partner, gave a talk this week on online healthcare information at the 16th IFHRO (International Federation of Health Records Organizations) Congress in Milan, Italy. The International Federation of Health Records Organizations (IFHRO) serves as a forum for the exchange of information relating…
Data use and smart human-centric data visualisations are becoming the “next big thing” in UX design. A number of posts this week delve into the matter: Data for a better planet Now that more people have location-aware smartphones and the Web has made data easy…
The newest billion people to venture online are doing so in developing countries rather than North America or Europe, writes Erik German in Globalpost, and they are changing the culture of the internet itself. “Researchers say the web as it was originally, if idealistically, conceived…
Continuum launched of a new division within its organization, known as Continuum Advanced Systems. Focused on the intersection of technology, systems and human-centered design, Continuum Advanced Systems works with companies and entrepreneurs in the health, medical, government, industrial and consumer categories to rapidly turn existing…
In a very general overview article published in Newsweek, Ravi Somaiya reports on how the impact of the ubiquitous device extends from politics to business, medicine, and war. “More than 4 billion of the 6 billion people on earth now have a cell phone, with…
In a long blog post, designer and developer Alexander Dawson discusses some important privacy-related concerns — in particular, how asking for too much information can degrade the overall user experience. “A user’s experience of a business and its services will only be as pleasant as…
James Glasnapp, who manages PARC‘s Workscapes and Organization team, has written his second article in a series on ethnography (you can read the first one here), where he provides an overview of data collection methods (and methodologies) that ethnographers use to understand a particular population…
Bo Begole, principal scientist and manager of PARC‘s (formerly Xerox PARC) Ubiquitous Computing Area, showed Richard MacManus of ReadWriteWeb an app that brings the concept of ‘ubicomp’ to a commercial reality. “Magitti is a next generation location-based mobile app, currently in commercial trials in Japan.…
Italian social researcher Chiara Camponeschi has written a fascinating Creative-Commons licensed publication, The Enabling City: Place-Based Creative Problem-Solving and the Power of the Everyday (pdf), an innovative toolkit – also featured on a website – that showcases pioneering initiatives in urban sustainability and open governance.…
Social networks want to know your location. But it’s not clear if consumers will share that information — or at what price. Joshua Brustein reports in the New York Times. “Everything is in place for location-based social networking to be the next big thing. Tech…
Jeremy Baldwin, company director at Bright Blue Day, a full-service design and marketing agency in Dorset, UK, argues that we should stop talking about content strategy as if it only applies to the web design professional. The impact of content and user experience go far…
Alexander Negash, analytics and user experience manager at the American Cancer Society, discusses on UX Magazine how to adopt social technologies in user research to get rapid, up-to-date user information and feedback, and to drive UX design and product strategy. “Today, social technologies have made…
As the Internet and TV converge in living rooms, lots of folks, including the New York Times, have been drooling over the idea of smartphones as next-gen remotes. On the surface, this seems like a cool idea. After all, smart mobile devices have touch screens,…
The London Tinker people have published a nice informal write-up of where things are with the Homesense project they are working on. Homesense is an epic piece of open research that explores how people can build their own DIY smart homes using open hardware and…
How would a newsroom look if we could build it from scratch, current technologies in hand? A 4 year ethnograhic study of Global Voices brought Lokman Tsui, an Assistant Professor in Media and Communication at the City University of Hong Kong to the concept of…
Mike Kuniavsky, writer, designer, researcher and entrepreneur and co-founder of both ThingM, an electronic hardware design, development and manufacturing company, and Adaptive Path, has written a new book: “Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (already previously featured on Putting People First). In a post…
Last month the Information Architecture Institute, a non-profit volunteer organization dedicated to advancing and promoting information architecture, held its yearly conference IDEA where UX professionals can exchange insights and share perspectives for designing better experiences across physical and virtual information spaces. Videos of the first…
TV viewing habits are changing as more Internet and on-demand content — YouTube videos, streaming movies, shopping sites, Facebook photos — flows directly onto big screens, writes Joshua Brustein in the New York Times. Navigating all of that demands more action from the viewer, including…
An in-depth ethnographic study of the social media habits of Blacksburg, VA, the first internet wired town in the world, demonstrates the power of consumer endorsed goods and services on sales, according to a study by OgilvyOne, New York. As a town of early adopters,…
In a previous TechRepublic column, Debra Littlejohn Shinder stated that hardware design and features are some of the many criteria to consider when deciding which smartphone model is best for you. One aspect of hardware design is form factor, which refers to the size, weight,…
Jon Kolko has published on UXMatters a sample chapter of his forthcoming book, Exposing the Magic of Design: A Practitioner’s Guide to the Methods and Theory of Synthesis. Read chapter
Daniel Szuc spoke with Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks about their new book Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design. “Daniel: Why the book? Whitney: Because thinking about user experience as a form of storytelling and, more importantly, thinking of our own process…
Ravi Nessman reports from Mumbai, India. “The Mumbai slum of Rafiq Nagar has no clean water for its shacks made of ripped tarp and bamboo. No garbage pickup along the rocky, pocked earth that serves as a road. No power except from haphazard cables…
In a 2010 survey of U.S. consumers conducted by Buzzback Market Research, findings showed that 88 percent of shoppers are more likely to choose a company that gives them the ability to interact via online, mobile or self-service technologies. With the modern day consumer more…
At the recent European Information Architecture Summit in Paris, Oliver Reichenstein, who has done several web design projects for Swiss newspapers, talked about how the traditional layout of the paper was very much wedded to the technology of the time, writes Martin Belam, information architect…
The former design director for the New York Times has written a blog post giving his thoughts on magazine apps for the iPad (something he clearly gets asked about a lot), reports Mathew Ingram on GigaOm. The bottom line? He hates them. With a passion.…
Jonathan Birchall reports in the Financial Times on the challenges of creating a single customer experience both online and in stores: “Shoppers equipped with smartphones can now use tools from the online world in-store. They can check prices at rival stores and look for independent…
CNN has an interview up with Nigel Waller, the CEO of Movirtu Limited and the man behind their Cloud Phone, writes Core77. Waller dropped the surprising statistic that worldwide there are one billion people who use cell phones–but don’t own one; instead they share, borrow…
Last week I was in Seoul, South Korea. My third visit. And it struck me again how fast Asia, and South Korea in particular, is moving economically, and hence also in the design field. Being in Seoul, you don’t notice any crisis. Construction is everywhere.…