Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Over the last months, Adaptive Path has been uploading videos of their latest UX Week that took place in August 2008. Donald Norman conversing with Adaptive Path president and founder Peter Merholz Author and co-founder of the Nielsen Norman Group Scott Griffith about the car…
The UK service design consultancy live|work has published an excellent manifesto on service thinking: “We have identified three key service imperatives that must be considered if we are to create great services that make things better for people, businesses and society. The first imperative is…
David Orban, founder & chief evangelist of WideTag, Inc. (OpenSpime) and advisor to the newly announced Singularity University, recently spoke at TechnoArk in Switzerland. His summary: When you set out to make into reality something that has been dreamed up by a science fiction writer,…
Matt Jones writes about a short project he worked on last November with the students on the Design Interactions course at the RCA in collaboration with Vodafone’s User Experience group. The brief was deliberately wide and intended to steer us all from thinking about mobile…
On April 1, IDEO founder David Kelley will be awarded the Edison Achievement Award by the Thomas Edison Papers at Rutgers University for his “pioneering contributions to the design of breakthrough products, services, and experiences for consumers, as well as his development of an innovative…
Audio interview with Jesse James Garrett, president and co-founder of Adaptive Path. Some describe it as making things easy and enjoyable to use. Others describe it as all the elements that impact someone’s perception of a product or system. Jesse James Garrett says it’s a…
The Reconstruction of Space and Time: Mobile Communication Practices By Rich Ling, Scott Campbell (editors) Published by Transaction Publishers, 2008 ISBN 141280809X, 9781412808095 304 pages Google preview Summary One of the most significant and obvious examples of how mobile communication influences our understanding of time…
Mobile Technologies – From Telecommunications to Media Editors: Gerard Goggin; Larissa Hjorth ISBN: 978-0-415-98986-2 (hardback) 978-0-203-88431-7 (electronic) Series: Routledge Research in Cultural and Media Studies Google preview Summary In light of emerging forms of software, interfaces, cultures of uses, and media practices associated with mobile…
African peasants paint their mobile phone number over their front doors. Indian slum dwellers buy SIM cards to use on friends’ handsets. Chinese students spend three months’ allowance on a phone they can use to surf the web. Once almost the exclusive domain of rich…
On Vimeo you can find no less than 35 videos of the Picnic conference. They are great. My personal favourites (quite a few): Jim Stolze: The virtual happiness project “Virtual Happiness” is a research project that aims to provide insights on the relationship between internet…
Reporting on PSFK’s Good Ideas Salon yesterday in London, Guardian writer Jemima Kiss highlights the presentation by Dopplr designer Matt Jones: He sees mobile as something of a super power device and described something he calls “bionic noticing” – obsessively recording curious things he sees…
A few weeks ago, W3C, the body in charge of global web standards directed by Tim Berners-Lee, organised a Workshop on the Future of Social Networking in Barcelona, with a high level goal of bringing together the world experts on social networking design, management and…
Clive Grinyer wrote a highly honest, yet optimistic post about his experience of working in a hardcore technology company (Cisco) as a user experience designer. It starts off with a very recognisable problem description: “In the conventional industrial product development process at that time, my…
Laurent Haug, an entrepreneur based in Geneva, Switzerland and founder of the LIFT conference, launches a new concept: publicy. “What happens with social networks is they publish information about you to the world. Two kinds of information: the ones you control, and the ones you…
Mike Kuniavsky (ThingM) is currently writing a ubicomp user experience design book. He just posted a few tidbits on service design: “There are two fundamental ways of looking at a service: from the perspective of the technology and from the user experience perspective. […] From…
Pachube is a web service that enables you to connect, tag and share real time sensor data from objects, devices, buildings and environments around the world. The key aim is to facilitate interaction between remote environments, both physical and virtual. Apart from enabling direct connections…
The entire contents of the January-February 2009 edition of Interactions Magazine are now available online. Enjoy. (via InfoDesign)
The Davos session on the “Next Digital Experience” involving Hamid Akhavan (Deutsche Telekom), Eric K. Clemons (The Wharton School), Chad Hurley (YouTube), Craig Mundie (Microsoft), Shantanu Narayen (Adobe) and Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), can be viewed live online (Friday 30 January, 4 pm CET). Social networking…
A new blog series, New Media Practices in International Contexts, looks at the intersection of youth, new media and learning in a range of countries outside of North America and Western Europe. The authors, a group of people around Mimi Ito, believe that examining new…
Peter Morville (author of Ambient Findability) and Jeffery Callender (co-author of Search Patterns) are planning a new book (in process) about design for discovery and the future of search. As part of this effort, they have begun collecting user experience deliverables, which can now find…
“Service design is simple. It’s all about three things,” says Idris Mootee, a business and innovation strategist, “creating compelling user benefits, optimising based on the separability of the service, and making educated trade-offs between human and technology.” Develop Compelling User Benefits. Understand what type of…
Robert Schumacher, managing Director of User Centric, has published a long article in the Financial Post of Canada on the user-centred design challenge of call centres. “As the scale of contact centre operations increases, it is becoming a primary area of focus and opportunity for…
Experientia, in collaboration with the Vodafone User Experience team, is running two workshops on 25 February at the upcoming LIFT conference to present the results of two recent projects and explore their impact. KashKlash: exchanging the future Join us for a workshop to explore alternative…
Designing Social Interfaces Principles, Patterns, and Practices for Improving the User Experience Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone O’Reilly Media and Yahoo! Press Abstract Designing for social interaction is hard. People are unpredictable, consistency is a mixed blessing, and co-creation with your users requires a dizzying…
Dan Saffer, who together with Interaction-Ivrea alumni Jennifer Bove, recently started the interaction design studio Kicker, is working on a revision of his book Designing for Interaction. Most interestingly, he will dissolve the service design chapter and “just place the topics and tools that were…
Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path asked Matt Jones, founder/lead designer of Dopplr, on the new ability for every Dopplr user to download a Personal Annual Report of their 2008 travels in pdf. “All of us at Dopplr are fascinated by the blur between the digital…
Katrin Verclas of Mobile Active reports on the ongoing debate over the value of cheap and open laptops for users in developing countries as opposed to mobile phones continues, most recently with a post from Cory Doctorow in the Guardian UK (reported also on Putting…
Lidija Davis reflects on ReadWriteWeb on the consequences of what you do on social media and its traces that cannot be easily removed from the Web. The social Web has given users great power: the ability to create and share content with people around the…
Alice Rawsthorn, the design critic of the International Herald Tribune, reflects on what skills have, because of technology, become less useful than they would have been 10 years ago and what we have them replaced them with. In her analysis, which is also a reflection…
The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the New Media Consortium (NMC)’s Horizon Project, a long-running qualitative research project that seeks to identify and describe emerging technologies likely to have a large impact on teaching, learning, research, or creative expression within learning-focused organizations.…
Fabien Girardin, whose work I start to know (and appreciate) more and more, just uploaded the presentation of his research work in the domain of people-centric sensing, presented last week at Yahoo! Research lab in Barcelona. Abstract Technological advances in sensing, computation, storage, and communications…
I just posted an article on Core77 about my visit yesterday to Kitchen Budapest. Check it out. KiBu will be presenting three projects at the upcoming Lift09 conference. Check also KiBu’s One Year book (pdf -28 mb), which includes all of its projects: mobile expressions,…
The German and Swiss websites of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) report that Silvia Zimmermann from Switzerland is the new president of the UPA. Although the global UPA website has not yet been updated, UPA Voice confirms the news. Zimmermann is the first European to…
A long feature article in the New York Times Magazine explores whether social networking can turn disaffected young Egyptians into a force for democratic change. “Freedom of speech and the right to assemble are limited in Egypt, which since 1981 has been ruled by Mubarak’s…
The Publius Project is an initiative of Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, with the cryptic byline: “a collection of essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net”. “The project brings together a distinguished collection of Internet observers, scholars, innovators, entrepreneurs, activists,…
Worldchanging published an original piece of science fiction by author Madeline Ashby. The story imagines a series of futuristic technologies (including smart tags, rapid prototyping and graphene memory) and explores ways their application might impact society and human life. “The story is unique for its…
Rohan Gunatillake of NESTA Connect highlights three principal drivers as being behind the new wave of online activity: the low barriers to participation, the thirst for conversation and the power of collaboration. “Let’s look in turn at the general lesson each of them has to…
In the current edition of UXmatters Michael Hawley (VP Experience Design at Mad*Pow Media Solutions LLC) reflects on the strengths and weaknesses of two existing alternative design approaches user-centered design and genius design. There is a trend among some in the UX community to take…
Press release: Complexity is preventing uptake and usage of mobile applications and services, according to a survey of US and UK consumers commissioned by mobile device management (MDM) specialist Mformation. 95% of consumers surveyed indicated that they would be more likely to try new mobile…
IDEO just announced a quick open user interface exploration project with Bug Labs, that will run for a little over a week on a new public blog BUG+IDEO. An open project between BugLabs and IDEO, this deep-dive exploration of the BUGbase UI is focused on…