Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Ludinno, a hands-on user-driven innovation-project, has provided new concepts, ideas and knowledge for businesses, and a platform for a Nordic research cooperation in the field of merging design and user-driven innovation (UDI) processes. In the project students supported by academics and trained professionals cooperated with…
As part of its “Future By Design” series, Forbes Magazine interviewed Jon Kolko, associate creative director at Frog Design and founder of the Austin Center for Design, on how a “well-crafted product can make the world a better place.” Forbes: What do you think constitutes…
Rachel Botsman, co-author with Roo Rogers of the upcoming book “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumptionâ€, was one of the speakers at TEDx Sydney, the conference which featured a selection of Australia’s leading visionaries and storytellers on May 22nd. The book Collaborative…
The Swedish International Development Corporation Agency (SIDA) has published a report by Johan Hellström (blog) that gives an overview of the current state of mobile phone use and services in East Africa. The report outlines major trends and main obstacles for increased use as well…
In his talk “‘Improving patient safety by user-driven design of decision support” at the IIT Institute of Design, Christian Nøhr of Aalborg University described the ethnographic and participatory work conducted with doctors, nurses and patients in Denmark, as part of the PSIP European research project.…
Will Evans (Director, Experience Design for Semantic Foundry) and Daniel Szuc (Principal Usability Consultant at Apogee) have created UX Leadership, a new publication and forum to discuss leadership in the context of the UX community, and “to start a user experience revolution”. Their vision: “We…
Here are some of the CHI 2010 papers we like: On cross-cultural HCI Postcolonial computing: a lens on design and development Lilly Irani, Janet Vertesi and Paul Dourish, Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine; Kavita Philip, Department of Women’s Studies, University of California, Irvine;…
Alice Rawsthorn, design critic of The New York Times, reports on Loops, an experimental project created by Participle, the British social design group, that aims to help young people to become more confident, ambitious and resourceful. “[Hilary] Cottam [, co-founder of Participle,] and her colleagues…
Screen Future The Future of Entertainment, Computing, and the Devices We Love By Brian David Johnson June 30th 2010 will see the publication of the book, Screen Future: The Future of Entertainment, Computing and the Devices We Love, by Brian David Johnson, customer experience architect…
BoingBoing reports that Professor William J. Mitchell, pioneer of urban computing, has passed away. Professor William J. Mitchell, director of MIT’s Design Laboratory and pioneering Smart Cities research group, died yesterday after a battle with cancer. Professor Mitchell was a brilliant and big thinker who…
The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps,…
There is a lively discussion and some concern that computers, the Internet and multitasking are extracting a mental price, writes Nick Bilton in the New York Times’ “Bits” blog. Yet, Bilton says, “there are some who argue that not only are our brains just fine…
Whitney Quesenbery and Kevin Brooks, authors of the book “Storytelling for User Experience: Crafting Stories for Better Design”, describe how storytelling can help you collect, analyze and share user research information. “Stories can help you collect, analyze and share qualitative information from user research and…
Smart meters represent a fork in the road for energy suppliers; engage with customers now and build value-added experiences that re-energise the supplier-consumer relationship, or do nothing and run the risk of third parties exploiting customer data and further eroding brand loyalty. This white paper…
Clay Shirky’s second book, The Cognitive Surplus, “picks up where his stellar debut, Here Comes Everybody left off,” writes Cory Doctorow in his Boing Boing book review, “explaining how the net’s lowered costs for group activity allow us to be creative and even generous in…
This weekend the new issue of OPEN will be launched at the Berlin Biennial. “Privacy†is the main theme, and the focus is “not so much on deploring the loss of privacy but on taking the present situation of ‘post-privacy’ for what it is and…
After 15 years as the net’s publishing platform of choice, a movement is growing that wants to put the web back in its box. “After the desktop OS and browser wars of the late 90s settled down in to uniform web standards, many of us…
John Zeratsky, senior designer at YouTube, and Matt Shobe, staff user experience designer at Google, gave a talk at Google I/O, the annual web developer conference, on “creating positive user experiences”. “Good user experience isn’t just about good design. Learn how to create a positive…
Handbook of Global User Research by Robert Schumacher (editor) Morgan Kaufmann October, 2009 336 pages User research is global – yet despite its pervasiveness, practitioners are not all well equipped to work globally. What may have worked in Nigeria may not be accepted in Russia,…
I finally had a chance to listen to the two excellent keynotes of Design Everything, the futures conference that took place last month in Manchester, UK. Keynote: Ben Cerveny Ben Cerveny‘s keynote explored how, as newly-emerging urban-scale technology infrastructures are implemented, citizens will begin to…
Architectural historian Mitchell Schwarzer has published a two-part essay that explores how technology — especially the real-time, mediating imageries of augmented reality — influences how we perceive and inhabit place. “We’re in the first stage of a transformation of our sense of place,” he writes,…
Mark Baskinger, associate professor at the School of Design of Carnegie Mellon University, reflects in UX Magazine on the heritage and evolving role of experience-driven design. Experience-driven design, he says, has made “experience” the new hot buzzword. But is it really new? “In this article,…
On 10-11 May, UNICEF New York organised the Design Days, where they invited designers and engineers who have worked with UNICEF to discuss the organisation, the (rapid prototyping) design process, and recommendations for future design collaborations. They have now produced a video that is a…
Keynote videos from The Web and Beyond, the bi-annual daylong conference organised by Chi Nederland and IOP-MMI for the user experience and interaction design community, are available on Vimeo: Michael Meyer CEO, Adaptive Path Proximus Maximus: design imperatives from the Roman Empire to the NASA…
The debate continues: scientists say our ability to focus is being undermined by bursts of information from e-mail and other interruptions. The New York Times reports. “Scientists say juggling e-mail, phone calls and other incoming information can change how people think and behave. They say…
UX Matters has again published a couple of great articles: So, you want to do user research: characteristics of great researchers By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain (Metric Lab) “One of the best things about user research is that anyone can do it. On the…
DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education by Anya Kamenetz Chelsea Green, 2010 Anya Kamenetz’s new book, DIY U, explores whether the university should embrace digital technologies, or resist. “In a world being radically altered by new media technologies, should the…
UX design consultant Hunter Whitney has written an excellent article in UX Magazine on the role of user experience design in data visualisaton. “Much of the vast sea of data flowing around the world every day is left unexplored because the existing tools and charts…
Clay Shirky and Nicholas Carr post contrasting video’s in the Saturday Essay of the Wall Street Journal Amid the silly videos and spam are the roots of a new reading and writing culture, says Clay Shirky. “The case for digitally-driven stupidity assumes we’ll fail to…
Filmmaker Declan McCormack looks at how mobile phones and the internet are changing lives in east Africa. McCormack is a filmmaker who has spent much of the last five years documenting the successes and failures of business-oriented development projects in developing countries. Reports from various…
Andrew Maier writes on uxbooth.com on the conundrum of user-centred design: willful ignorance to the benefits of design research. “Interestingly, the conundrum always starts the same way: those who budget a project’s time, materials, etc. believe that incorporating user research into the design process could…
In a recently published study, Sarah Kaplan of the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto decided to take a deeper look into how PowerPoint is mobilised in a company’s strategy by doing an ethnographic study of one organisation (CommCorp). “PowerPoint…
Neelie Kroes, Vice-President of the European Commission responsible for the Digital Agenda, addressed yesterday’s 2nd Annual Internet of Things Conference in Brussels, with a speech entitled “Bringing European values to the Internet of Things”. “Our citizens may not always want to use the technology in…
Videos of the recent IIT Design Research Conference are currently being uploaded. Here is the list of the presentations (alphabetical by speaker’s last name), with video links (where available): Tim Brown | IDEO (conference bio) We’re all design researchers now (34:15) Solving some of society’s…
Lorraine Paterson and Boon Low of the UK National e-Science Centre at the University of Edinburgh highlight findings from the usability inspection report they conducted for the JISC-funded research project, Usability and Contemporary User Experience in Digital Libraries (UX2.0). The article was published in Ariadne,…
Tara Mullaney (and not Allan Chochinov as erroneously reported earlier) has published her reflections on IIT’s 2010 Design Research conference on Core77. Although there were about 30 speakers, Mullaney focuses on the contributions by Donald Norman, Rick Robinson (Elab), Doug Look (AutoDesk), Tim Brown (IDEO),…
Jan Chipchase (frog design and until recently an acclaimed user researcher/anthropologist at Nokia) reflects on the topic of technical and textual illiteracy in the context of mobile banking, and the role of privacy within the mediated use illiterate people often need to rely on. “Textual…
In Growing Up Online, the American public affairs series FRONTLINE takes viewers inside the very public private worlds that kids are creating online, raising important questions about how the Internet is transforming childhood. “The Internet and the digital world was something that belonged to adults,…
Why do share prices, skirt lengths, even the state of the European Union, fluctuate so wildly? It’s down to social mood, says John Casti, and we must heed its messages. “No collective human activities or actions, such as globalisation or, for that matter, trends in…
On 20 May 2010 an event known as “Digital Death Day” brought together the businesses of social networking, data management and death care. One of its organisers, Jennifer Holmes, says: “We have reached a critical mass of personal data online.” She is referring to the…