Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Yesterday President Barroso met social innovation experts and stakeholders in Brussels, following a workshop organised by the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA) on social innovation, reports the European Commission. “The objective of the meeting was to explore ways to boost the social innovation dimension…
Designing for the Digital Age: How to Create Human-Centered Products and Services [amazon] by Kim Goodwin, Alan Cooper Wiley (March 2009) Paperback: 768 pages ISBN: 978-0-470-22910-1 Abstract Whether you’re designing consumer electronics, medical devices, enterprise Web apps, or new ways to check out at the…
The (in)famous Bad Usability Calendar has featured 48 classic design mistakes in 13 different languages since 2005. Now it is available in its 2009 edition (with versions in English, German, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian and Polish). NetLife Research, who is behind this initiative, got over 100k…
According to the New York Times’ Julia Moskin, the cellphone has transformed the kitchen lives of many Americans. “It has become the kitchen tool of choice for chefs and home cooks. They use it to keep grocery lists, find recipes, photograph their handiwork, look up…
Very nice and in-depth review by Marek Pawlowski: Palm, which launched a new flagship device and platform earlier this month, is a company staring at the very real possibility of extinction. The pioneering user experience of its PDAs has long since been super-seeded by smartphones,…
“Are experiences relevant in a recession?” asks Jonathan Picoult. The stock of Starbucks Coffee, long revered as a prime example of a consumer-focused, experience-oriented business, was down over 50 percent in 2008 (underperforming the S&P 500 Index during the same period). With one of the…
Press release Nokia and Securitas today announced a new cooperation regarding mobile services for personal security and every day safety. Mobile devices already today give increased feeling of security with friends and family only a text message or a phone call away. By combining the…
The people from Live|Work, a UK service design company, have inspired me from the time I met them at the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, now nearly eight years ago. Alice Rawsthorn, the design critic of the International Herald Tribune, was inspired too and…
Vodafone publishes a very good, but highly under-communicated, Public Policy series. The aim of the series is “to provide a platform for leading experts to write on issues that are important to Vodafone and that may help policy makers as they strive to provide a…
Just when everyone is writing on how mobile phones are bringing about huge changes in emerging markets, Cory Doctorow publishes a very nice and thought provoking article in the Guardian entitled “Laptops, not mobile phones, are the means to liberate the developing world“. “Mobile phones…
danah boyd is a a PhD candidate at the School of Information (iSchool) at the University of California (Berkeley) and a Fellow at Harvard Law School’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She just published her dissertation entitled “Taken Out of Context: American Teen Sociality…
The complexity of modern mobile phones is leaving users frustrated and angry, research by Mformation (and reported by BBC) suggests. Some 61% of those interviewed in the UK and US said setting up a new handset is as challenging as moving bank accounts. The survey…
Some months ago I wrote on Core77 about Itsme, a new “design-driven” way of organizing the contents of a PC, covering both the hardware and the software of the workstation. The project is developed by a group of Italian researchers, led by Giorgio De Michelis.…
Experience design for interactive products: designing technology augmented urban playgrounds for girls (pdf) is the long title of an interesting paper by Aadjan van der Helm, Walter Aprile and David Keyson of Delft University of Technology. Recent technological developments have made it possible to apply…
More on people-centric sensing, this time by LIFT’s Fabien Girardin, and it’s as if he is taking the Nokia paper I just wrote about one step further: “In the past, sensors networks in cities has been limited to fixed sensors, embedded in particular locations, under…
The Nokia Research Center published a short paper on participatory mobile sensing that I like very much because of its human-centred approach: By putting mobile phones in the hands of human participants, we can take advantage of users as creators, custodians, actuators, and publishers of…
Experientia is currently planning to participate in a number of European research projects, and is looking for interesting collaboration opportunities where we can bring in our human-centred research and design methodology. Next week Experientia partners Michele Visciola and Mark Vanderbeeken will be attending the ICT…
As part of the World Usability Day 2008, the Department of Information Technology at Vishwakarma Institute of Information Technology (V.I.I.T.), Pune (India) hosted on 27-28 November the Conference on Advances in Usability Engineering, a platform that brought together the professionals, academia and students to discuss…
Thanks to Vodafone’s Anxo Cereijo-Roibas, I just discovered Interfaces Magazine, a quarterly magazine published by Interaction, the specialist HCI group of the British Computer Society (BCS). Interaction provides an organisation for all those working on human-computer interaction – the analysis, design, implementation and evaluation of…
Matthew Neal contacted me today about a design challenge Toyota recently gave to students at the Royal College of Art London to create a household item that represents intelligent urban living. “We recently conducted interviews with the finalists of the competition in which the student…
Peter Merholz, President of Adaptive Path, has published the first part of an interview with Margret Schmidt, VP of User Experience Design and Research at TiVo. “Margret Schmidt’s extensive experience heading up design at TiVo has given her a deep understanding of what it takes…
Social networking has become an integral part of our lives, but how much say will users have in what they do with social networking and what it looks like? This is the central question in an article by Jesse Ashlock in Print Magazine, that provides…
Both Penny Edwards (Headshift) and Bill Ives (Fast Forward) report on recent IBM research on social software in the marketplace: To what extent does your company facilitate social networking between employees split by geographical or organisational distance, or with (existing or potential) clients and business…
I find articles with titles like this difficult to digest. What if you are under 30? And especially if the article is filled with banalities – partly put in the mouth of the “authority” of professor Mark Bauerlein – like: The bad thing about…
Elsewhere, U.S.A. How We Got from the Company Man, Family Dinners, and the Affluent Society to the Home Office, BlackBerry Moms, and Economic Anxiety by Dalton Conley Pantheon, Hardcover January 2009 Abstract Over the past three decades, our daily lives have changed slowly but dramatically.…
Whitney Hess, an independent user experience designer, writer and consultant, asked some of the most influential and widely respected [USA] practitioners in UX (including Steve Baty, Mario Bourque, Dan Brown, Liz Danzico, Bill DeRouchey, Will Evans, Chris Fahey, Kaleem Khan, Livia Labate, Erin Malone, David…
New York Times technology reporter Steve Lohr reports on the “dream” of the smart home. “Yet the smart home has remained a dream for years, just over the horizon. And the horizon keeps receding. Along the way, there have been intriguing pilot projects and lab…
Nearly by accident I discovered Nokia’s recently launched IdeasProject, an effort “to surface Big Ideas about the future of communications — and to show the many ways that these ideas are connected”. It is definitely a site rich with content. What big ideas will matter…
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang, researcher director at the Institute for the Future, has posted a thoughtful essay on his blog about how trends in computing and design might affect the way that futurists work: how they could be used to sharpen our research methods, create new…
What are the profound socio-cultural changes currently taking place and are people-centred designers well equipped to help companies and institutions address this new context? The current economic recession is turning out to be very severe (The Guardian evokes the spectre of a 1930s-style depression), with…
Lately posting has become a lot more complicated. Putting People First (PPF) started out some years ago as a dumping ground for all kinds of articles and readings that I found interesting and worthwhile sharing. It gradually became a much more precise resource, focused on…
Jonathan Donner of Microsoft Research India and Camilo Andres Tellez of the London School of Economics and Political Science have together written a paper on mobile banking and economic development that just got published in the December issue of the Asian Journal of Communication. Abstract:…
At the beginning of last year, we at Experientia worked with a Belgian regional authority on developing the concept for a new design centre, called the Transformation Factory (read more about it in this paper). Now also Business Week’s Bruce Nussbaum is publicly advocating the…
Computerworld columnist Mike Elgan argues that most gadget and software makers don’t understand what users want most: control. Both users and product designers alike talk about user interface (UI) consistency, usability and simplicity, and system attributes like performance and stability. What’s missing is that these…
John Maeda, the new president of RISD, wrote some smart words in Esquire (where he was profiled as one of 75 most influential people): “Technological advances have always been driven more by a mind-set of “I can” than “I should,” and never more so than…
The January-February 2009 issue of Interactions Magazine has just been launched, which in itself is a celebration of the fantastic transformation of the magazine under the careful stewardship of Jon Kolko and Richard Anderson, now one year ago. This transformation is never complete of course.…
Tuning up your focus on customer needs is more crucial than ever, writes business and innovation strategist Idris Mootee. Customers always have problems to solve, even more so in a downturn. This downturn itself is creating a permanent impact on customer needs and at the…
Last week, the World Bank’s CGAP hosted a roundtable and webinar on the important topic of how mobile phone banking can deliver a range of financial services to poor people and change lives for the better (see also this blog post). If you missed the…
Increasingly our personal records and social lives are being privatised, with normal people having very little recourse when these private services are being cancelled or the companies themselves disappear (as most companies eventually do). Currently the country where I live (Italy) is in advanced stages…
The first European conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), which was dedicated to Usability and Design, is more than a week away but the high quality of the event still lingers. The conference, which took place in Turin, Italy, was inspired by the designation…