Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Le Monde newspaper published (Google translation) today a summary of an ethnographic research project on smartphone use by young adult, presented yesterday at a Virgin Mobile press conference in Paris. The research was conducted by Olivier Aem of the Celsa Graduate School, Laurence Allard of…
The City of Dublin and the Institute of Art, Design & Technology (IADT) will act as co-hosts for Interaction 12, the annual conference of the Interaction Design Association (IxDA) which will take place for the first time in Europe in 2012. The other submissions came…
Martin Kettle thinks the UK has lost sight of next door Europe, trapped as Brits are in their Anglo-centric internet. “It is hard to recall a time when the national, not just the London, mind was less informed about or engaged with Europe than…
The 2010 Finnish National Innovation Strategy contains an important section on demand and user-driven innovation, with user-driven innovation being described as: “User-driven innovation makes use of information on customers, user communities and customer companies. It engages users as active participants in innovation activity. The key…
This week Google’s Eric Schmidt suggested we may need to invent new identities to escape embarrassing online pasts – while Facebook launched a tool to share users’ locations. So does technology pose a threat to private life? Jemima Kiss reports in The Guardian: “From the…
Younghee Jung, manager and design researcher at the Nokia Research Centre in Bangalore, India, has been profiled again on the Nokia Conversations blog through a long interview: One of [Younghee’s] most recent projects was Nokia Open Studios. It’s a project that was conducted in three…
The people at frogdesign have posted two long articles (the first one is really an essay) that we consider a recommended read: Openness or how do you design for the loss of control? Openness is the mega-trend for innovation in the 21st century, and it…
Imon Deshmukh of Cooper thinks that interfaces can be more closely integrated with the environment in which they operate. In an article on the Cooper blog, he shares some of what he heas learned from the universe of video games and how it might be…
In our urge to create great products online, we should focus on making experiences happen that plant memories in people’s heads, argues Dmitry Dragilev, lead marketer at ZURB, in a guest contribution on Techcrunch. “Everyone gets caught up thinking it’s user experience they need to…
On August 12, at noon, ZDNet Australia organised a live broadcast on the future of email. The discussion delved into the issues and challenges facing email in its current state, and looked at how social media is changing the way we exchange information. The panel…
Frank Spillers thinks the User Experience community has not fully tapped the potential of gender-specific design aka Woman-centered Design. According to Spillers, gender as an audience sensitive criteria (differentiation) is barely present in North American technology product design (where it is much easier to do)…
There has been growing concern that computers have failed to live up to the promise of improving learning for school kids. The New York Times, The Washington Post, and PBS have all done stories recently calling into question the benefits of computers in schools. But,…
In America and Britain governments hope that a partnership with “social entrepreneurs†can solve some of society’s most intractable problem. The Economist reports in a long article. “Social innovation†is the increasingly common shorthand for this approach to public-private partnerships. It differs from the fashion…
In Making Do: Innovation in Kenya’s Informal Economy, Steve Daniels of Brown University illuminates the dynamics of Africa’s informal economy to enhance our understanding of emerging systems of innovation. “Wandering through winding alleys dotted with makeshift worksheds, one can’t help but feel clouded by the…
In this review of the book Over the holidays, I read Clay Shirky’s new book Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age and found it quite wanting. In an excellent review of the book, researcher and author Evgeny Morozov explains what is wrong…
In this review of the book 50 Ways to Make Google Love Your Website, published by The Hindu, the author emphasises very strongly the importance of usefulness. “Create your website for your users, advise Steve Johnston and Liam McGee in “50 Ways to Make Google…
Companies spend so much money on free services because of online advertising that trades in personal information. If Web users supply less information, the Web will supply less information to them, says Jim Harper in the Wall Street Journal. “If Web users supply less information…
Stephanie Rosenbloom writes in the New York Times on what will make us happy. “The practices that consumers have adopted in response to the economic crisis ultimately could — as a raft of new research suggests — make them happier. New studies of consumption and…
In an article for UX Mag designer Francisco Inchauste examines some of the many faces of complexity and explores the balance we need to find for successful solutions. Simplicity for its own sake should not be the goal. Balancing the amount of complexity that we…
Emerging findings from the first annual report of a major three-year study into the information seeking behaviour of Generation Y doctoral students show that there are striking similarities between students born between 1982 and 1994 and older age groups. The first annual report of this…
They may have been dubbed the “Internet generation,” but young people are more interested in their real-world friends than Facebook. New research shows that the majority of children and teenagers are not the Web-savvy digital natives of legend. Der Spiegel reports. “Young people primarily use…
Steve Baty, principal at Meld Studios and vice president of IxDA, argues in a long article on Core77 that interaction designers now have the opportunity to move their purview beyond the shallow plane of interaction into the design of systems, organisational capability and culture; to…
From April 12 through April 14, 2010, 22 designers, historians, curators, educators and journalists met at Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center on Lake Como, in Italy, to discuss the museum’s role in the 21st century in relation to design for social change. Participants (including Paolo Antonelli,…
A couple of years ago I wrote about Mobile Revolutions, a blog about mobile phones, youth and social change by Lisa Campbell Salazar. The blog also supported TakingITMobile, an international study on youth mobile communications that she completed as a part of her Master of…
In the modern digital age where seemingly everything and everyone is online, a new industry is emerging to “manage” the internet footprint that people and businesses leave online. “Reputation managers” can clean up and shape a person’s online history: burying the damaging stuff and promoting…
In 2009, Dr. Genevieve Bell, an Australian-born anthropologist and ethnographer, who is an Intel Fellow and heads Intel’s newly created Interaction and Experience Research (IXR) division, was selected as South Australia’s Thinker in Residence. In her assignment, she focused on the ways in which South…
Nalini Kotamraju, assistant professor at the University of Twente in the Netherlands, gave an excellent talk yesterday at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society on the lack of user centricity in e-government services. Individuals and institutions are slower to adopt e-government services due…
On the way to celebrating its 250th anniversary in 2014, the Hermitage museum in St. Petersburg (formerly the Winter Palace of the Russian czars) hired legendary architect Rem Koolhaas to modernize the art museum experience for visitors in a way that both respects the storied…
Cory Doctorow, the Canadian blogger, journalist and science-fiction author, argues in The Guardian that curated computing is no substitute for the personal and handmade. Although bespoke computing experiences promise a pipe dream of safety and beauty, the real delight, he says, lies in making your…
Who do you read and associate with online? Ethan Zuckerman argues in this Guardian video that cultural and linguistic barriers stand in the way of our using the internet to tackle global issues.
The conventional public services delivery model does not address underlying problems that lead many to rely on public services and thus carries the seeds of its own demise, argue David Boyle, Anna Coote, Chris Sherwood and Julia Slay in a new report by UK think-and-do-tank…
Indrani Medhi, associate researcher in the Technology For Emerging Markets Group at Microsoft Research India, was recently rated one of the “50 smartest people in technology†in 2010 by Fortune Magazine. In an interview with Arlene Chang of the India Real Time blog of the…
Legal scholars, technologists and cyberthinkers are wrestling with the first great existential crisis of the digital age: the impossibility of erasing your posted past, starving over, moving on. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, reports in The New York Times Magazine. “We’ve…
Facebook is about to celebrate its 500-millionth user, but the social media application has had wide consequences, even for those who have never signed on, writes the BBC. Many of the problems that are identified with Facebook are symptomatic of a company which only has…
Design consultant Martyn Perks thinks that a UK government-backed campaign to get the entire UK adult population online “threatens to make cyber slaves of us all.” “Is it not possible that some people simply don’t want to participate in this brave new digital world? After…
Experientia turns five years old today, 21 July! We’ve been busy in the last year. Apart from the great projects and fruitful collaborations with old and new clients, we’ve also completely redesigned our website, expanded our offices to include a new wing, and we keep…
I very much enjoyed the reflection of Lee Bryant (Headshift), following the launch of the UK Government’s Big Society initiative. In it, he argues that in the past, UK politics [and not just UK, I’d say] were dominated by two competing visions of the role…
Oscar Berg reflects on the changing role of intranets in knowledge-intensive businesses. “These intranets need to provide flexible access to both information and people by employing pull models for serving as many knowledge worker information needs as possible, including unanticipated information needs. Information supply needs…
Three new articles have been published on the UX Matters site: Design Is a Process, Not a Methodology By Pabini Gabriel-Petit In this installment of On Good Behavior, I’ll provide an overview of a product design process, then discuss some indispensable activities that are part…
Google attempts to return relevant search results in the blink of an eye. But in future it could go one better, delivering search results to its users even before they know that they want the information, writes Paul Marks in the New Scientist. “In future,…