Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Marketing Management is a bi-monthly strategic marketing magazine published by the American Marketing Association. The Jan-Feb issue contained a very strong piece by Lance A. Bettencourt on giving customers the proper role in the innovation process by forming correct beliefs about their needs. “Vague, solution-tainted…
Bruce Sterling and Jasmina Tesanovic need your help. Despite the fact that U.S. citizen Bruce Sterling and Serbian citizen Jasmina Tesanovic have been married for nearly five years, and for all I can tell still very much in love, US Immigrations doesn’t believe so. Read…
Information Technologies and International Development, a quarterly peer-reviewed journal that focuses on the intersection of information and communication technologies (ICT) with economic and social development, is a gem. And the entire contents are available for free online. Here are some of the recent contributions: –…
If you ever need a solid case on why ethnographic research can provide strategic value to companies, yesterday’s announcement of the $250 million Intel/GE healthcare alliance provides you with a great one. Intel has for years heavily invested in on-the-ground observation and ethnography. Its focus…
I just posted three videos of the recent Interaction09 conference on Core77: Dan Saffer – Attention Awareness for Interaction Designers 2009 Dan Saffer calls out the Interaction Design community for allowing distracting topics to consume our attention, and for paying too little attention to “moonwalking…
Microsoft Research Principal Scientist Bill Buxton argues that “by thinking outside the parameters imposed by technology, executives and designers can build businesses by creating an experience that truly resonates”. “User-centered design commonly tries to take into account different canonical user types through the use of…
The Wall Street Journal reports on work done by Intel’s Digital Home Group on people’s tendency to lie online and what the implications of lying are on the design of new technologies. “[Ethnographer Francoise] Bourdonnec, for example, works for Intel’s digital home group, which has…
Nathan Shedroff‘s latest book, Design is the Problem: The Future of Design Must Be Sustainable, has just been published by Rosenfeld Media, and is likely to become one of the most important books for designers on the subject of design, design practice, and sustainability. Filled…
Ben Fullerton has an article out in the March/April issue of Interactions magazine on Co-creation in Service Design. It focuses on the “Make It Work†project for the Sunderland City Council and live|work’s efforts to collaborate on the design of a program for the long-term…
Yesterday I was in Lille, France, to speak at a small conference on service design organised by Philippe Picaud, the highly dynamic design director of Oxylane-Decathlon. Decathlon is an international private sports retailer that many may know, since it is active in fifteen countries. Oxylane…
Two new interviews on Nokia’s IdeasProject: Cheap sensors are transformative Monitor Networks CEO Chris Meyer sees tremendous possibilities in the observation and data gathering capabilities of cheap sensors. The universal and consistent nature of the feedback that is possible on everything from micro behaviors to…
Dave Zuvernik, senior user research specialist on Adobe XD’s Mobile and Devices team proposes a model with five dimensions – core, social, contextual, cloud and multi-screen – to create compelling mobile experiences: “Have you ever used a mobile application that just made you say “Wow?”…
Fast Company’s Chris Dannen reflects on why Americans don’t use mobile banking. “Obopay is an payment system that works on your cell phone–kind of like a mobile PayPal. The service is cheap, easy to use, and fantastically convenient. Not only that, it’s well-backed; today Nokia…
Informal networks are the links and exchanges that bind people together, explains Dr Karen Stephenson, a corporate anthropologist and an expert on social networks in business. She describes the challenge of creating a new transparent networked economy as, “a gargantuan problem” – and says that…
More than a month before Business Week published an article about ‘trickle-up innovation’ (that I reported on earlier this week), Fast Company had already delved into the issue of how innovation now trickles up from emerging to advanced economies. “So why is Nokia looking to…
The website of Microsoft Research seemed to have been redesigned recently and contains some nice interviews: Buxton putting design into MIX Bill Buxton of Microsoft Research, who delivered a keynote address in Las Vegas on March 18 during MIX09, the Web Design and Development Conference,…
The Washington Post reports on how homeless people in Washington DC use mobile phone, blogs and e-mail to stay on top of things. “Today, it’s not unusual for the homeless to whip out Nokia 6085 GoPhones (with optional Bluetooth and USB connectivity), stop at a…
A few weeks ago the Sonos Multi-Room Music System, a wireless music system, which allows music-lovers to play all the music they want, was honoured with the international iF product design gold award 2009 because of its people-centred innovation, and the Sonos people contacted me…
Dotmocracy: Crowdsourcing, Mashups, and Social Change by Lisa Campbell Free download As San Francisco braces itself to be the first major American city to not have a daily newspaper, the canary has sung as the death of print looks eminent. But what new frontiers do…
Jack Schofield of The Guardian has published a nice short story about the user experience of interacting with the Microsoft surface: “Microsoft was using a shallow pool as the “attract mode”, and the screen image looks and behaves like water, in a graphical way. Touch…
Adaptive Path organised a panel on service design yesterday. Panellists were Shelley Evenson (CMU), Robert Glushko (UC Berkeley), and Christi Zuber (Kaiser Permanente). No matter where the economy heads, one thing is certain: we’re living in a service economy. Approximately 70% of the U.S. GDP…
Gabriel White, interaction design director at Punchcut in San Francisco, affirmed context as king in the design of mobile and location-aware computing at Australia’s 4 day Web Directions South conference in September last year. I came across the presentation only now, so here it is…
Tish Shute’s UgoTrade website is quickly becoming one of the prime sites in the field. In the last months she interviewed Andy Stanford-Clark (IBM Master Inventor), Robert Rice (CEO of Neogence), Usman Haque (architect and director of Haque Design + Research and founder of Pachube),…
The monthly business magazine Condé Nast Portfolio explores what the future holds for shopping now that retailers are hurting and consumers are expected to keep spending tight for 2009. Portfolio.com takes a look at the phenomenon of “mass customization” — a way of making standard…
The Economist argues that the demise of a popular but unsustainable business model now seems inevitable: The idea that you can give things away online, and hope that advertising revenue will somehow materialise later on, undoubtedly appeals to users, who enjoy free services as a…
Rik Myslewski of The Register reports on augmented reality on mobile devices: Future phones will recognize buildings and people by sight and replace reality with something better. They’ll also have roll-out HD displays. Or projectors. Or they’ll dock with your PC’s display. At least, that’s…
The March issue of Metropolis is focused on products with the theme of Good Design. Several articles are fitting quite well with the topic of this blog: What is good design? By Peter Hall The 20th-century definition of “good design†was driven primarily by form.…
In a Q&A, user experience director Irene Au explains to Business Week how Google can manage design and consistency in its traditionally bottoms-up culture “As Google products proliferate beyond search, design decisions become more critical if the company wants a coherent brand image. That’s where…
Two-thirds of the world’s Internet population visit social networking or blogging sites, accounting for almost 10% of all internet time, according to a new Nielsen report “Global Faces and Networked Places.†If data captured from December 2007 through December 2008 is any indication, that percentage…
In a long post Roxanna Samii reports on her blog on the role of the mobile phone in developing countries, and more in particular on the Gash Barka region in Eritrea. Read full story
Julian Bleecker of Nokia calls it a “short essay”, but “Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction” is really a 97 page book. “Extending this idea that science fiction is implicated in the production of things like science fact, I wanted…
Darren Waters, technology editor at the BBC, reports from Austin, Texas on the future of touch: “The success of the iPhone has given rise to a new grammar of touch control while the advent of multi-touch in Windows 7 will further accelerate the evolution of…
Business Week reports on how some companies like General Electric, Nokia, and others are reversing the traditional process where products are created in rich nations and repackaged for emerging ones: “This month, General Electric’s (GE) health-care division will begin marketing a first-of-its-kind electrocardiograph machine in…
Over the last few months, Franco Papeschi and Tory Dunn of the Vodafone User Experience team have been doing work on a set of principles and guidelines to support the formation of ethical / sustainable social enterprise services. They were further inspired by the KashKlash…
“What is a sustainable lifestyle? What will our daily lives become if we agree to change some of our routines? How do we reduce our environmental impact without lowering our living standards?” A new book, edited by François Jégou and Ezio Manzini (with a chapter…
We live in the Global Location Age. “Where am I?†is being replaced by, “Where am I in relation to everything else?†Penn State Public Broadcasting is developing the Geospatial Revolution Project, an integrated public service media and outreach initiative on the brave new world…
Reena Jana of Business Week reports from SXSW on the activities of Moshe Tamssot, Kraft’s VP of New Services. “Formerly of American Express and G.E., Tamssot was hired about a year and a half ago to help Kraft “transform†itself by adding revenue-generating, Web-based services…
The Turin-based non-profit organisation Area, which supports families with disabled children, just launched its new website, developed with the intensive support of Experientia. The site, named Di.To (Disabilità a Torino), offers information and orientation to families of children with disabilities aged from 0-10 years. Experientia…
NESTA, the UK’s National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts, has set up The Lab, a new UK innovation structure that will bring together all the players across public service delivery to “come up with fresh ideas and radical thinking to deliver better public…