Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Over the last months Experientia collaborator Irene Cassarino has been working intensively on the preparation of Experientia’s Low2No project in Helsinki, Finland (see project site and submission summary) — where our focus is specifically on enabling positive behavioural change towards more sustainable lifestyles. Write-ups on…
Microsoft Corp. is counting on Ms. Larson-Green, its head of Windows Experience, to deliver an operating system that delights the world’s PC users as much as its last effort, Vista, disappointed them. “She’s in charge of a wide swath of the system, from the way…
Nokia’s senior design specialists are touring India to discover how Indians use cellphones. Leslie D’Monte reports for New Delhi’s Business Standard. Jhanvi Madan (not her real name), who lives in Mumbai , has been talking on her cellphone. Unknown to her, a stranger on the…
Experientia collaborator Irene Cassarino went yesterday to the international “The social dimension of environmental sustainability†conference, organised at Turin’s Environment Park with the support of the City of Turin. The event, which focused on the importance of social aspects in achieving environmental sustainability, took place…
The Singapore Design Festival, running November 20-30, now themed “Design 2050: Possibilities for Tomorrow,” , is also continuing its quest to improve people’s surroundings through good design for a better quality of life. As already written up on this blog nearly three years ago, 10TouchPoints…
Matt Webb of Berg was one of the speakers at UX Week 2009, a conference in San Francisco organised by Adapative Path. In his presentation “Design Is In Your Hands,” Matt talked about developing products and learning from mistakes, and shared the lessons that his…
To celebrate World Usability Day 2009, System Concepts has put together a video podcast exploring how different stakeholders can enhance the user experience of their designs by including sustainability as a key requirement. The interviewees include: – Professor Ben Shneiderman – User Interface guru from…
Institute for the Future just released its latest research report, Knowledge Tools of the Future, written by Alex Pang and Mike Love. The report takes an in-depth look at signals, drivers, and trends shaping how organizations will utilize knowledge management in the future, particularly how…
The third edition of Nokia’s The Way We Live Next conference took place yesterday and today in Espoo, Finland. Nokia’s blog, Nokia Conversations, reports on a few of the keynote presentations: Nokia’s vision of the future by Heikki Norta, Nokia’s Head of Corporate Strategy Smart…
Bonny Colville-Hyde of CX Partners has written a good introductory article on the value of ethnographic research. How can you ensure your service stands out from its competitors in the marketplace as the one people want to use? One way is to uncover how your…
Consumer electronics companies must rethink the old technology-driven approach to innovation because industry convergence has made this model obsolete, claims a study by Accenture. In the converging world, “high-performance businesses in the CE industry have begun to embrace a consumer-engagement-driven model of innovation,” but many…
Andrew Maier of UXBooth reflects on how to cultivate (or dissolve) a community, or in other words how to create a long-tail user experience. Websites are social creatures. Or rather, their users are. In turn, the websites you visit are tempered by the users that…
Collaborative design methods play a key role in aligning team members towards a shared and strategic project vision. In this article Penny Hagen and Michelle Gilmore describe how user stories stimulate and facilitate discussion and decision making with clients in the development of a User…
Hanging Out, Messing Around, and Geeking Out Kids Living and Learning with New Media (John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning) An examination of young people’s everyday new media practices—including video-game playing, text-messaging, digital media production, and social media…
Check out Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels’s superb appearance on CNN’s Christiane Amanpour show yesterday… vividly describing how as an opposition member, he was among the first East Germans to cross into West Berlin for the first time when the Germans messed up their plans, and…
NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts, has published a 45-page discussion paper on how transforming healthcare to involve the public, i.e. the creation of people-powered public services, can save money and save lives. The National Health Service (NHS) needs to…
Nokia user researcher Jan Chipchase has posted an in-depth presentation and paper on designing mobile money services for emerging markets: “Hang around a telecoms industry conference long enough and you start to get big-number fatigue – as one stack of seemingly impressive statistic blurs into…
Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. Yet, argues Ben Macintyre, writer at large for The Times (UK), they are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information. “The internet, while it communicates so much information so very effectively, does…
The November 2009 edition of Mobile Money Africa, “Africa’s leading online resource for mobile financial inclusion”, is entitled “Banking the unbanked Africans” and is entirely available for download. The December edition will focus on Mobile Money and Payment technologies for Africa. Download magazine (November 2009)…
Wired UK asked Bill Moggridge and his IDEO team to tackle the urban rage problem that is rendering the UK cityscapes ever more aggressive. “Design thinking defines the practical way in which IDEO approaches its problems, but as a phrase it also allows design to…
The Pew Internet Personal Networks and Community survey finds that Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal…
Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC News reports on how Google Wave is proving its worth in the scientific community, as one of the new collaboration tools which scientists are using to work together and conduct research. “The key to these sites is putting scientists in touch…
Phi-Hong D. Ha, an interaction design and strategy consultant, discusses discusses the viability of the new field of service design with Steven Heller of AIGA Voice. Isn’t all design a service to someone? Perhaps that can be debated. But currently the service design genre is…
Email, texting and Facebook let us hide behind our computer screens instead of talking to each other. Elizabeth Day asks in The Observer if we have the tyranny of technology to blame or ourselves? According to John Freeman, who is the new editor of…
Nokia Life Tools was designed to help improve the livelihood and lives of farmers, students and many people in more remote and rural areas in emerging market countries. It does this by offering easily accessible and up-to-date crop prices, education tools and entertainment packages, delivering…
Mike Kuniavsky of ThingM was invited to speak at Kimiko Ryokai’s Theory and Practice of Tangible User Interfaces class at UC Berkeley yesterday, where he discussed the relationship between products and services in a ubicomp environment, and presented a set of examples of device/service relationships…
Via the DMI November 2009 Newsletter, I came across a number of articles that are worthwhile exploring: What the Hell Have We Done to Design? (Really Thinking about Design Thinking) Brian Matt, Founder & CEO, Altitude, Inc. DMI News & Views, November 2009 The word,…
Mobile phones for development and profit: a win-win scenario Rohit Singh Overseas Development Institute, 2009 The number of mobile subscribers globally is estimated to have reached four billion in 2008 (ITU, 2008), with mobile penetration reaching 61%. Around 58% of subscribers are in developing countries,…
David Leggett provides on his UX Booth blog an overview of what the future of interface design has to offer. He covers various upcoming interface technologies such as heads up displays, gesture-based interfaces, spatial motion interfaces, augmented reality, other sensory-based interfaces, and smart surfaces. Read…
Harvard Business School professor Mikolaj Jan Piskorski has spent years studying users of online social networks (SN) and has developed surprising findings about the needs that they fulfill, how men and women use these services differently, and how Twitter—the newest kid on the block—is sharply…
On Friday 13 (!) November, Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be one of the speakers at Visualizar’09, an international seminar on public data visualisation, organised by Medialab-Prado in Madrid, Spain. The conference and workshop will be led by Ben Cerveny of Stamen, San Francisco. Jan-Christoph’s…
The New York Times interactive group creates an online encyclopedia of all their stunning inventions, reports Cliff Kuang on Fast Company. “The Times interactive team has been creating path-breaking experiments in infographics and interaction design. All of which are now collected in its terrific new…
MIT News reports on how MIT students are exploring innovative cellphone uses in the developing world. “Several startup business ventures spawned by MIT students, sometimes as class projects and sometimes as independent work, are exploring new ways to harness the increasingly ubiquitous devices. They are…
Chris Dannen writes in Fast Company that Augmented Reality is overblown, and doesn’t expect apps like Layar to drastically change the way we live our everyday lives. “Talk to the people doing AR research, and they seem to think that the awkwardness of using AR…
“As products become more interactive, the focus shifts to the psychological,” argues Gentry Underwood, who focuses on social media and collaborative software at IDEO, in a guest article for Core77. “And with the networking of devices together, we see yet another shift—this time towards the…
Italy is in the process of switching to digital TV, and the implementation is pretty much a disaster, as far as I can tell from the reactions in the region where I live (Piedmont). Many of the problems are technological, but not all. A volunteer…
The November-December edition of Interactions Magazine is online and some articles are available without subscription. Unfortunately, the main menu page doesn’t say which articles are publicly available (although without images) and which aren’t (what about ‘affordances’ in web design?), so I have selected the six…
Experientia partner Michele Visciola, who is also the president of Experientia, has written an article entitled “People-centered innovation or culture evolution?” that got published in the November-December edition of Interactions magazine. Here is the abstract: “The biological theory of evolution and its applications to cultural…
John Harris has written an excellent article on the BBC News site on the social and cultural consequences of music being always available online in free and seemingly unlimited quantities: “Not long ago, if you wanted music, you had to save up your pocket money,…
On 6 November Experientia partner Jan-Christoph Zoels will be speaking at the IxD Fall Summit 2009 organised by the Umeå Institute of Design. Other speakers are German Leon (Vodafone User Experience, Germany), David Rose (Vitality, USA), Karsten Schmidt (PostSpectacular, UK), Reto Wettach & André Knörig…