Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Insights curated by Experientia, the UX research and design consultancy
Anne Galloway of Purse Lip Square Jaw has published her PhD thesis, entitled “A Brief History of the Future of Urban Computing and Locative Media“. It builds on available sociological approaches to understanding everyday life in the networked city to show that emergent technologies reshape…
Jared Spool recently interviewed Bill Verplank, the extremely gentle man at the origins of the fields of interaction design and experience design, whom I had the pleasure of meeting many times at the meanwhile defunct Interaction Design Institute Ivrea. “Have you ever thought about how…
In June 2008 Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, held a one day event about usability in the communications sector. The event was held to encourage debate, to share ideas about good practice, to hear others’ views on how usability can be promoted and to explore…
The September-October issue of Interactions Magazine has been published and is now shipping to all members of ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI). The rest of us can access some limited content online (three articles in the current issue). Now that Interactions has…
Ofcom, , the UK communications regulator, today published an initial consultation document assessing how the mobile sector delivers on the needs of UK citizens and consumers and posing questions about the future of competition and regulatory policy. Ofcom’s aims for the sector are to ensure…
The design of Intel’s new Classmate PC with its full touchscreen support, is based on observations and research collected about the way that the computers are used in real-world classroom settings., reports ars technica. In a video published by Intel on its YouTube channel, one…
While hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent on digital inclusion projects in Latin America, many of the programs start and end with the technology, writes CNET News (as part of its ongoing series exploring computing in Latin America). [Cafe] Aprendiz [in Sao Paulo,…
In this presentation, Bond Art + Science, a New York based digital services firm focused on strategy and user experience design, explores the state of the art in inviting users to participate in the conversation online. In the past, user participation in editorial publications was…
Born Digital: Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser Basic Books, 2008 Hardcover, 288 pages This new book, which grew out of the digital natives project at Harvard University’s Berkman Center, investigates “what it means to grow up in…
The HomeLab at the Philips research center is a model home built to test and monitor real-world response to prototype technology. Thirty cameras and microphones record subjects as they use and interact with products for the home; then researches review the recordings to refine the…
A few days ago Dori Tunstall, Associated Professor of Anthropology at the University of Illinois in Chicago, was recently interviewed on the Australian radio programme By Design. What can designers learn from anthropologists? Our guest today believes they can learn a great deal. In fact,…
Scientific American magazine (SciAm) devotes the whole September issue to privacy in an age of rapidly developing technology. Privacy in an age of terabytes and terror Introduction to SciAm’s issue on Privacy. Our jittery state since 9/11, coupled with the Internet revolution, is shifting the…
Adam Greenfield has written a truly excellent post — in fact more like a short essay — on the difference between location and context, calling the first one positivist and the second one phenomenological. “But it [the positivist tradition] stands in stark contrast to the…
In “A Treatment Room With a View”, the Wall Street Journal covers patient-centred efforts in health care. “Submitting to chemotherapy, radiation treatments, MRIs, CT scans and the like can be bad enough. But often, dreary, windowless rooms and corridors only worsen the experience. Now, some…
Russell Davies is concerned that “we’ll end up blundering into cities plastered with the equivalent of flash banners and microsites.” “Technologists are busying themselves turning buildings into displays, or at least draping them with informatics (whether physically or via various forms of augmented reality.) It’s…
MobileActive reports on how farmers in emerging markets are using mobile phones to improve their livelihoods: Agriculture is what keeps economies in most developing countries alive. However, farmers in many countries face major challenges. In an age of global markets, they are forced to enhance…
The International Herald Tribune reports that leading consumer technology companies “are revamping their audio and video equipment for a future centered around the Internet, a world in which televisions, stereos, computers – even kitchen appliances like dishwashers and refrigerators – can communicate with each other…
The PICNIC conference website has posted a short but intriguing interview with Adam Greenfield, Nokia’s new head of design direction. An excerpt about the urban experience, technology and solitude: “You know, I believe that cities are all about difficulty. They’re about waiting: for the bus,…
Nova Spivack, founder and CEO of Twine, reflects in an smart foresight article on ReadWriteWeb on the future of the desktop, now that everything is moving to “the cloud”. Here are his predictions: The desktop of the future is going to be a hosted web…
Trevor van Gorp explains how psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of “flow” can help you design emotional web experiences by cutting through information overload to engage users. Here are some basic website traits that will help to encourage flow. Clear navigation: Make it easy for the…
Donald Norman has just posted a few excerpts from his draft book manuscript tentatively entitled “Sociable Design” for comments and reactions. Introduction Whether designing the rooftop of a building or the rear end of a home or business appliance, sociable design considers how the design…
A new generation of well-educated, technically-savvy young web users are shaping the media habits of the US, with one in 20 Americans saying they do not watch TV on a typical day and a sharp decline in newspaper readership, according to new research. The biennial…
The Economist is enlisting the “collective power of [its] readers” to improve its online resources, and has created “Behind the curtain“, a blog to “give our readers a way to engage in what we build and how we build it, and help to make our…
The New York Times reports on how software designers get hands-on with real world objects to learn to think more creatively and intuitively, featuring examples from Adobe and Mike Kuniavsky’s Sketching in Hardware gatherings. Using computers to model the physical world has become increasingly common;…
Benjamin Dangl of AlterNet reflects on how cell phone use has crept into every aspect of daily life, ironically weakening the basic human communication that is the fabric of any community. As Slate commented in his Adbusters essay, “It seems the more ‘connected’ we are,…
Jonathan Follett writes on how as UX designers or researchers — we’ll be on the forefront of the movement to handle the coming flood of data — and make it not only available, but easy for people to use and understand. One of our jobs…
More Italian news on how communications technologies are penetrating people’s daily lives, and sometimes create frictions: The Italian newspaper La Stampa reports on plans for a virtual cemetery in Turin to commemorate those cremated, apparently developed without public consultation (my condensed translation): The project is…
It has been pointed out before [The Economist – San Francisco Chronicle] that immigrant workers are often the most advanced users of communications technology. The Italian newspaper La Repubblica today provided an unusual example of this phenomenon: drug dealers (which in Italy tend to be…
Coinciding with the introduction of Dell’s new laptops, the company launched a new community site called Digital Nomads (with not much Dell branding to be seen). According to a Dell press release, the site “is designed for individuals who are not defined by the four…
Alan Cooper was asked by the leadership of the Agile 2008 Conference to give the closing keynote address at their annual conference in Toronto. Since the audience at Agile08 consisted of about 1500 programmers, engineers, product managers, and others involved in the creation and deployment…
A few months ago I wrote on an ethnographic research project undertaken by AP (Associated Press) and how it is influencing their reporting style. Now Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher on the impact of information technology in developing nations, has written a long reflection on the…
Carolyn Wood contemplates in another article on A List Apart how we can transform discussion sections on major sites and online magazines from shooting ranges into arenas of collaboration. “The real challenge is to move beyond basics to something much more fruitful, communal and, at…
Because of limited awareness around Deafness and accessibility in the web community, it seems plausible to many of us that good captioning will fix it all. Lisa Herrod argues on A List Apart that it won’t. “How many times have you been asked this question:…
CNN reports on the cell phone boom in Africa: “In less than a decade, cellphones, once the preserve of the very rich, are now ubiquitous in Africa and parts of Asia. A device that’s sometimes used as a fashion accessory in the West has become…
A 25-year veteran of the design and technology industries, Terry Swack hopped on the Internet bus a little earlier that most of us. As founder, in 1994, of web strategy firm TSDesign, and later Green Building Blocks and BlueEgg, she has witnessed firsthand consumers’ enthusiasm…
Randal Stross of the New York Times explains why many experts propose dropping website passwords entirely for a security system based on cryptography. The best password is a long, nonsensical string of letters and numbers and punctuation marks, a combination never put together before. Some…
A view on experience design by Idris Mootee, a business and innovation strategist: The word “Experience Design†is often taken over by advertising and CRM people as design of touch points. They see experience design focus is around moments of engagement between people and brands,…
Because today’s social networking rarely function or perform well on a mobile device, Oz Communications CEO Jim Knapik argues that carriers must find a simple way to bring the best social networking communities to the mobile masses. A complete mobile social networking experience is composed…
According to the Register, HP Labs is hard at work figuring how to harvest the collective intelligence of groups arising from “web 2.0” and turn it into a profit. In a short article, the Register reports on an update that Bernardo Huberman, a senior fellow…
As part of its coverage on the Bellagio conference on mobile health, MobileActive interviewed Patricia Mechael who is coordinating the mobile strategy for the Millennium Village Project. She talks about mobile adoption, user-centric design, women and mobiles, how Millennium Villages is using mobiles to improve…