Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Meta Products is a fairly new blog (started in September 2009) related to developments on the Internet of Things. It is run by Wimer Hazenberg and Menno Huisman, both managing partners at Dutch design studio Booreiland. “Meta Products are the next generation consumer products. These…
Let’s face it, says Bright Simons, Director at IMANI-Ghana and President of the mPedigree Network, Africa is on the downward slope to perdition as far as technology is concerned. “Many people who are not directly confronted with this reality on the continent are usually lured…
Experientia participates in the exhibition “Design Of The Other Things” at the Triennale Design Museum in Milan. Stefano Maffei is the curator of the exhibition, which explores the ways in which the world of design is changing, becoming transversal and interfacing increasingly with other fields,…
Experience Design: Technology for All the Right Reasons Marc Hassenzahl Morgan & Claypool, 2010 In his In the blink of an eye, Walter Murch, the Oscar-awarded editor of The English Patient, Apocalypse Now, and many other outstanding movies, devises the Rule of Six — six…
Last year, Mark Blythe, Effie Law and Marc Hassenzahl edited a special issue on Experience Design in the New Review of Hypermedia and Multimedia. It features a more designerly perspective on and some reflections about Experience Design itself and its relation to common approaches and…
Dr. Susan Weinschenk is a psychologist by training and education. She has been applying psychology to the design of technology for 30 years and is the author of Neuro Web Design: What makes them click?. She is Chief of User Experience Strategy, Americas, at Human…
BeAware, an EU-supported research project, has created a solution to motivate and empower citizens to become active energy consumers, by offering them the opportunity to raise awareness of their own power consumption in real time. Energy Life includes a mobile phone application and an ambient…
Anthropologist Simon Roberts, who manages the social science research and design research team for Digital Health Group at Intel in Ireland, spoke last week at an RSA event on Embedding Design in London, UK, on the role of anthropology within large organisations. “I would argue…
UX Matters is another one of these great resources for the user experience community. Here three recent articles: Designing user experiences for children By Heather Nam (Mediabarn) Creating a great experience for Web site users should always take the users’ perspectives into consideration. While a…
Nick Marsh recently published an article with Dan Lockton in the fourth edition of Touchpoint, the Service Design Network journal. The issue is completely focused on the relationship between service design and behaviour change, but unfortunately the content is not available online. Marsh published his…
UX Magazine keeps to its high standards with these three well written contributions: Curators of the Real-Time Web: Distilling the chatter to relevant, actionable information By Jonathan Gosier (Appfrica) “Information wants to flow and it wants to flow freely and torrentially. Twitter, SMS, email, and…
Is there an alternative to the seemingly inevitable cuts to public services? Hilary Cottam of Participle poses the question. “The scale of the challenge to our public services is clear. The mainstream debate is all about cuts – how fast and how deep. At Participle,…
Microsoft researcher Danah Boyd doesn’t need much introduction as her outspoken and well-developed analysis is frequently quoted on this blog. Two long articles — each with many comments — react to the current Facebook privacy discussion: Facebook and “radical transparency†(a rant) (14 May) The…
Wired UK has published a long article on P2P money-lending in its June issue: The article devotes particular attention to Kiva.org, a San Francisco-based peer-to-peer (P2P) non-profit, which uses the principles of social networking to connect individual or group lenders to entrepreneurs via microfinance institutions…
Mike Gualtieri and Mary Gerush of Forrester Research have just published a paper entitled Business Analysts: Seize the opportunity to deliver compelling user experiences – Make a big difference to your organization by focusing on its customers. Abstract: Is anything more important than how…
Research scientists Cameron Marlow (Facebook Inc.) and D.J. Patil (LinkedIn Corp.) have access to the interactions of groups of people that outnumber populations of whole countries and therefore unprecedented windows into the social interactions of people around the world. During recent interviews with the…
As Nokia’s senior vice president of design and user experience, Marko Ahtisaari is the man charged with leading the software and hardware designers who must craft the challenger to the iPhone, BlackBerry and Android devices that the Finns have so far lacked, reports the FT’s…
Adrian Chan has written a thoughtful post about “teasing apart the objective and subjective dimensions of social media, to examine what’s behind the relational economy we now live in, and its particular mode of production.” “All commerce and much personal and social utlity implied by…
The Spring 2010 issue of Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, is dedicated to the Future of News. Front Matter Introduction Loren Ghiglione, Professor of Media Ethics at the Medill School of Journalism at Northwestern University News & the news…
The latest issue of new value by design, the Philips Design newsletter, contains three short articles that sit closely to what we cover in this blog: Self Health – Philips Design’s exploration into reconnecting people with their bodies The latest Philips Design Probe, Self Health,…
Members of the under 30 tell-all generation are rethinking what it means to live out loud. “The conventional wisdom suggests that everyone under 30 is comfortable revealing every facet of their lives online, from their favorite pizza to most frequent sexual partners. But many members…
Tinker London (the team promoting the use of Arduino in design) started a collaboration with EDF R&D on Homesense, an open user-centered research project investigating the use of smart and networked technologies in the home. Homesense will bring the open collaboration methods of online communities…
Every year, Ferrari fields a team in the Formula One championship, and dumps around $400 million into developing and racing the car. So, says Cliff Kuang in Fast Company, you’d think that the steering wheel–perhaps the car’s most crucial point of contact, where a human…
Nick Marsh has been organising several service design ‘Thinks’ events in London: ‘Service Design at Scale’ (November 2009) and ‘Service Design from Scratch’ (March 2010). Service Design at Scale featured presentations by Steven Baker, about the design of the M-Pesa mobile banking service for Vodafone/Safaricom,…
The founder & president of Adaptive Path explains why they’re shifting away from “user experience†and towards “experience design.†He celebrates 360 design strategies through successful “customer journeys†by Apple and Southwest Airlines and advocates for marketing and advertisement becoming the first touchpoint of such.…
Bill Moggridge, the legendary industrial and interaction designer, IDEO co-founder and now director of the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, started his own blog, Bill’s blog. It reads like his working notes, though very well written, and gives you a fascinating insight into the thought process…
Interacting with a mobile device is very different from our interaction with desktop devices. But what does that mean precisely? In a long article for the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces, Luca Chittaro of the HCI Lab at the University of Udine proposes five types…
Sven Birkerts wites in the American Scholar on why the novel and the Internet are opposites, and why the latter both undermines the former and makes it more necessary. “My real worry has less to do with the overthrow of human intelligence by Google-powered artificial…
Stijn Debrouwere, a Belgian information architect, has published a long Peter Morville-inspired post on findability related issues. “The majority of people visiting a news website don’t care about the front page. They might have reached your site from Google while searching for a very…
After posting the first chapter of his new book Smart Things: Ubiquitous Computing User Experience Design (see also this earlier post), Mike Kuniavsky is now doing the same with chapter three and six. The final book, he says, will be different and this is no…
The concept of social objects is pretty widely used in social interaction design, but we’re missing a solid definition of what social objects are, says social media expert Adrian Chan on Johnny Holland. Or, whether they really even exist. The most common use of the…
Experientia is an international experience design consultancy helping companies and organisations to innovate their products, services and processes by putting people and their experiences first. Our dynamic and enthusiastic team, based in Torino, Italy, includes experts in strategy, design, usability, communications, cognitive and social psychology,…
Storytelling for User Experience – Crafting Stories for Better Design By Whitney Quesenbery & Kevin Brooks Rosenfeld Media April 2010 Availability: Paperback + PDF We all tell stories. It’s one of the most natural ways to share information, as old as the human race. This…
A Canadian article about Canada’s most important technology company, Research in Motion (the makers of the Blackberry), is always worth delving into. “RIM captured boardrooms by reinventing business communication. Now it faces a balancing act between keeping those customers and wooing tech-savvy consumers. […] This…
The folks at Johnny Holland have published reviews on no less than four UX related books: Beyond the Usability Lab Authors: Bill Albert, Donna Tedesco, Thomas Tullis Publishers: Morgan Kaufman [Companion website – Amazon] User Experience Re-Mastered Authors: Chauncey Wilson (editor) Publishers: Morgan Kaufman [Elsevier…
Flanders InShape, the Flemish/Belgian competence centre for product development and industrial design, is supporting a new research project on the development of a requirements programme for future prison design in Belgium. On 25 March Flanders InShape organised the “Towards a 21st Century Prison†conference in…
Sitra, the Finnish Innovation Fund [disclaimer: and Experientia client] has launched a new book, After the Crisis, and a report, Finland: Wellsprings for a Vital Future, that shed light on the fundamental change Finland is going through. “For decades, Finland’s wealth has been underpinned by…
This week’s Economist contains a special report on television. The leader article presents television as the great survivor, which has coped well with technological change: “It helps that TV is an inherently lazy form of entertainment. The much-repeated prediction that people will cancel their pay-TV…
Gary Wolf reflects in the upcoming New York Times Magazine on what happens when technology can analyze “every quotidian thing that happened to you today.” “Numbers make problems less resonant emotionally but more tractable intellectually. In science, in business and in the more reasonable sectors…
Timo Arnall, the acclaimed interaction designer, alerts us to the fact that Touch project PhD researcher Kjetil Nordby has just published two journal articles on interactions with RFID and NFC. “These articles pull together concepts from ubiquitous computing and HCI, integrated with high-level interaction design…