Short report on the first European EPIC meeting by Anna Wojnarowska, UX researcher at Experientia:

Last Friday, 11th of May, around 100 members of the ethnographic research community in Europe gathered in Barcelona for the 1st European EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference) meeting, to discuss the conditions of ethnographic practice in Europe.

The meeting concentrated on the specifics of European cultures and traditions from the point of view of the research industry. It was developed as a younger sister of the annual EPIC conference, which this year will be held in Savannah, USA, in October.

The meeting included lectures and workshops organized into three panels. The first one, “Mapping Ethnographic Practice in Europe” gave an overview on how the UX industry is evolving in Europe, including the presentation of changes taking place in the Italian market, by Experientia’s partner in charge of user research, Michele Visciola. Emerging innovative ethnographic methods, such as “netnography” and self-ethnography, were indicated as important developing trends.

The second panel, “Evolving Industry-Academia Collaboration”, focused on what can be done to combine the expertise of academics and professionals so that the two parties can effectively support each other’s’ practices and supplement peer knowledge. All the panelists agreed that creating a cooperative platform between the two parties would significantly contribute to research outcomes.

The last panel, “The Corporate Perspective” gave an insight into how the work of an anthropologist can be effectively communicated and implemented in corporations. The discussion ended with a vivid debate on how anthropologists could profit from the increasing amount of data on humans, which is constantly collected through various technologies. How could it be useful during research? Can it positively influence the quality of our work?

The findings (the result of a “large-scale, long-term investigation into how the UK online population participates using digital media today”) have raised a little controversy since they seem to indicate that the long-term model or view of participation online, the 1,9,90 rule, is outmoded.

“The BBC claim that their research (I’ve embedded a presentation of the research findings below) shows that the number of people actively participating online is significantly higher than 10%, with 77% of the UK online population now active in some way and participation now the norm rather than the exception. The key driver of this, they say, is the rise in ‘easy participation’ – activities that once required significant effort but are now seamless and every day. 60% of the online population fall into this category. Interestingly, they also found that despite participation becoming much easier, a significant minority (23%) did not participate at all, a passivity not as closely related to digital literacy as some might expect. This leads them to conclude that digital participation is best viewed through the lens of choice, the decisions we make based on who we are rather than what we have, or our level of digital skill.”

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Brian Pagán of User Intelligence in Amsterdam argues that touch-free gestures and Natural Language Interaction (NLI) may open up further paths toward a true Natural User Interface (NUI).

“User interfaces for computers have come a long way from vacuum tubes and punch cards, and each advancement brings new possibilities and challenges. Touch-free gestures and natural language interaction are making people’s relationship with computers richer and more human. If UX practitioners want to take full advantage of this changing relationship, our theories and practices must become richer and more human as well.”

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A conversation with senior Wells Fargo execs reveals a bank trying to use the Internet, social media and mobile technology to worm its way deeper and deeper into their customers’ lives.

“Brian Pearce, senior VP in charge of Wells Fargo’s retail mobile channel, said the bank sees mobile as “a way to be with our customers all day long.”

Wells Fargo’s aim to go wherever its customers go involves more than getting them to use mobile apps, mobile websites and text banking. Pearce wants to move beyond purely mobile interactions into so-called “simultaneous uses.” After all, Pearce pointed out, people always have their phones with them, so they can use them at the same time as they’re engaged with ATMs, tellers or wellsfargo.com.

Customers could use their phone instead of a card to log into the ATM or ID themselves to a teller, for example. Or the bank could use geofencing to identify and alert a customer’s personal banker every time they walk into a branch.”

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The people at Nesta, the UK innovation charity, think that co-production is potentially transformative and its power comes from re-framing the problem and re-establishing relationships to enable more holistic and people-centred approaches. Co-production can also tackle the lack of trust between some users and professionals, a dependency culture where people look to the state to solve their problems and a culture of expertise where professionals are trained to be the sole source of solutions. At its best, co-production can build people’s capacity to live the life they want, in the community where they live.

This catalogue of co-production has been created as part of Nesta’s People Powered Health programme run with the Innovation Unit. People Powered Health is a practical innovation programme, to explore how co-production can support people living with long term conditions. We’re particularly interested in how to move co-production from the margins to the mainstream. Part of achieving that shift will involve a better understanding of what co-production can achieve and what it looks and feels like on the ground.

The catalogue, therefore, brings together some inspiring examples of collaborative public services in action, with a particular focus on health and social care. Each case study has been assessed against the Nesta and nef principles of co-production. This is done in the spirit of exploration rather than judgement – many of the case studies were never meant to represent co-production so it is no surprise they are stronger on some principles than others. The idea is to use these pioneering examples to increase our collective understanding of what co-production is and to raise our sights of what is possible.

To realise the potential of co-production we need to be able to explain it clearly and to build the evidence of what it can achieve. Our hope is that this catalogue contributes to these aims and stimulates some new ideas about how to use co-production to develop truly people powered public services.

Harvard neuroscience researchers have just confirmed what many of us have suspected all along: social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest are “brain candy” for Internet users. Every status update, every tweet, every pin is a micro-jolt delivered squarely to the pleasure centers of our brains.

What’s alternately terrifying and inspiring is how all this thinking about emotions, visuals and sensory stimulation is starting to flow through to the actual strategies of leading Internet competitors.

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Leading neurologist Susan Greenfield tells Nokia Conversations that we need a new framework to make sense of our ‘mobile world’

Her argument is that mobile technology, and what we do with it, is now at the center of our family and social life, like the piano was for the Victorians and the TV was for baby boomers. But it’s even bigger than that, because it’s mobile, of course; so we not only do it at home, we do it at work – we do it everywhere.

“I don’t want to turn the clock back,” says Greenfield, “My concern is not that we have too much technology – but that we are not making the most of it.”

With huge increases in life expectancy, and demands for a better quality of life, we should be acutely aware of how we are harnessing technology for our own development.

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An older post, but I missed it. So here it is, more than two years after it was published by Stowe Boyd:

“A few posts have emerged recently that recapitulate the well-worn arguments of attention scarcity and information overload in the real-time social web. So, here at start of 2010, a new decade, will try to write a short and sweet counter argument from a cognitive science/anthropology angle. [...]

There is no golden past that we have fallen from, and it is unlikely that we are going to hit finite human limits that will stop us from a larger and deeper understanding of the world in the decades ahead, because we are constantly extending culture to help reformulate how we perceive the world and our place in it.”

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In a blog post (which is itself a paraphrased transcript of his talk at the Polish IA Summit 2012), Peter Bogaards talks about the relationship between user experience and customer experience, and how user experience designers can extend their influence in businesses.

“A customer-obsessed company focuses its strategy, its energy, and its budget on processes that enhance knowledge of an engagement with customers, and prioritizes these over maintaining traditional competitive barriers.”

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“The practice of user experience is most successful when focused on strategy, vision, and planning, not design and execution. In other words, UX adds value by bringing design practices to strategic endeavors. This means generative and exploratory user research, ideation and concept generation, scenario writing and roadmap planning. The impact of those strategic endeavors will not be limited to product and service design, but should be felt across business development, corporate development, marketing, engineering, sales, and customer service.”

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Experientia partner in charge of user research, Michele Visciola, will be one of the speakers at the EPIC Europe one-day meeting at the Elisava Design School in Barcelona next week, on 11 May 2012.

The European meeting is the first of its kind for EPIC (Ethnographic Praxis in Industry Conference), and is designed to provide a space for anyone involved in the use of ethnographic research in industry to meet, and explore ethnographic practice from a European perspective. About 100 members of the ethnographic research community in Europe are expected to attend the event.

Michele will be talking on the ethnographic research arena in Europe and especially Italy, and current trends in methodology.

Experientia’s senior partner for user experience design Jan-Christoph Zoels will also be attending, together with Laura Polazzi and Anna Wojnarowska, respectively Experientia’s senior UX researcher and UX researcher.

Businesses now sit on data goldmines, but very few leverage the data to improve customer service. Ziba’s creative director Sean Madden suggests three ways forward.

“Big Data has gotten a lot of attention over the past 18 months as retail, manufacturing, and technology companies realize the gold mines they’re sitting on and rush to scour them for competitive advantage. Nearly all of this discussion, though, revolves around consumer trends, marketing guidance, new product planning, and other market-level insights. [...]

Perhaps the only business and marketing topic that’s been talked about more than Big Data recently is the evolution of brand relationships into two-way conversations. Now that consumers have seen what social media and mass customization are capable of, they increasingly expect this kind of personalization in their communication with favored brands, not just a passive role absorbing marketing messages. Combine this insight with the rise of Big Data, and you have a clear mandate: In order for interactions to feel individualized and human, they must be well informed. That makes data about the customer you’re talking to right now the most useful data of all.

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Social TV is a major disruption in the rapidly changing television industry.

In the free report “Social TV and the second screen“, Stowe Boyd, acclaimed futurist, managing director of World Talk Research, and a researcher-at-large at The Futures Agency, characterizes the forces at work in the emergence of social TV, presents a framework for understanding the changes that are already at work in the industry, and profiles some of the most innovative companies in the sector.

“The most significant change — from the perspective of the user, at least — will be shift in emphasis toward a rich and social user experience, and a decrease in the emphasis around the content being delivered via TV. This doesn’t mean that people will stop caring about high quality TV: they will still care about quality. But users will demand that TV content fit into the social context.”

The report is made available under creative commons licensing: not for profit, with attribution, without modification.

When companies don’t care about user experience, it is clearly reflected in the products they create. Although everyone can agree that software should be intuitive, user-friendly, and aesthetically pleasing, many managers aren’t willing to invest the time and resources it takes to build something compelling.

A large part of our job as UX advocates, argues Girish Gangadharan, is explaining design’s impact on the company as a whole. Determining which battles to win and which battles to lose – even intentionally – can help you win the UX war.

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When we talk about social media we are really only talking about tools that we can use to help us and the people we engage to achieve a task. To make a success in social media we need to understand online communities, argues Matt Rhodes.

“There is a fundamental difference in how people behave when they are primarily in a group of actual friends (such as on Facebook) and how you interact with people not because you know them and are friends with them, but because you share a common interest (such as in a forum for fans of Arsenal football club, a site for mum chatting about nutrition in early years or a group of runners helping each other with training advice and tips as they prepare to run a marathon).

An online community is a group of people who exhibit this second behaviour. They do not necessarily know each other, and may not have any desire to become friends in that broader sense of the word. They do have a common passion, interest, concern or question. And they can find and engage with others online because of this.”

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As ethnographic practice has spilled out into the broader world of design and policy-making, business strategy and marketing, the monograph has not remained the singular format for presenting ethnographic work.

In the design community and high-tech industry, it is the conference paper (see EPIC, DIS, CSCW, and CHI, etc), the technology demo, and within corporate walls, the PowerPoint slideset or edited video that have become established formats for delivering ethnographic outputs.

There is great pressure in some subfields to offer clearly outlined implications and propose practices alongside (or instead of) the theory and holistic description of the more conventional format.

In light of the publication this week of her own ethnographic monograph titled Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana, Jenna Burrell thought it worth considering the question: why should someone outside of the Academy read her book or any other of this genre?

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Tim Todish provides some good examples of companies extending the (user) experience beyond the device as a good way to differentiate from the competition.

“Most of the time when we think about UX, we are thinking within the confines of the digital world. What I’m suggesting, however, is that there are ways to extend the user’s experience from the digital world into the real world. This is by no means an earth-shattering revelation; businesses have been working hard at offering exceptional offline experiences for decades. The explosion of the web and, more recently, mobile devices has given businesses an exciting channel to expand the experience.

This holistic approach can create very powerful experiences, which in turn can build tremendous brand loyalty. Imagine the enjoyment you get when using an application or a website that has a carefully crafted, wonderful experience. Now imagine you’ve just received the product you ordered via that app or site, and the same attention to detail has been paid to the presentation and experience of receiving and unboxing that item. How much more likely would you be to tell your friends about your experience? The next time you need that product or a similar one, where are you going to go? Extending the experience can pay huge dividends in attracting and retaining customers, and some companies are already embracing this practice and providing inspiration for UX practitioners to use in their work.”

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Of all the conferences that are dedicated to discussions on technology and society, there’s one that has continued to consistently curate an amazing line of up speakers while maintaining an intimate environment for meaningful exchanges without any elitist barriers to participation – Lift, writes Tricia Wang.

After her talk at Lift 2012, Wang had a chance to chat with one of the people she has been “virtually brain-lusting” for years, Nicolas Nova, ethnographer, co-founder of Lift, and Lift program curator.

Nicolas found time to sit down with her to give a retrospective of past ethnographers who have given talks at Lift.

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“While technology can help strengthen relationships with people you barely know, it can damage relationships with the people that are close to you, like family,” says Team Gantt co-founder Nathan Gilmore.

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In his last article Simon Norris, founder and CEO of Nomensa, outlined a simple model ‘the meaning dimension‘ to help consider how we can understand the significance of meaning. The aim of the article was to introduce the meaning dimension as a scale that could be considered for interaction design. It also reinforces his position that truly great and engaging interactive experiences are meaningful and that’s because our need to understand represents a fundamental human need: we need to make sense of the world.

This article focuses on discovering and understanding what is meaningful in interaction design. Researching meaning raises many challenges. Meaning can be both obvious and ambiguous. We can interpret an event or situation in exactly the same way and yet, we can interpret it completely differently. It represents an interesting design challenge and this is why Norris consider it so important to explore and understand its implication.

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In this long article, Peter Steen Høgenhaug explores how and when to use gamification to improve the user experience of websites and apps, and also when not to use it.

Using game theories in areas not otherwise associated with games is often referred to as gamification. This term, however, has gotten a rather negative air recently, because people tend to use it for the wrong purposes. A common issue with gamification is that it is used in marketing with no other goal than to sell products. I don’t think gamification should be used this way — in the long run, it does nothing good for the company trying to sell. Instead, gamification should be used to improve the experience of buying and using a product.

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Do people want touch on laptop screens? Daria Loi, user experience manager at Intel, did some research on the matter and the answer is a clear yes: people want a single device with a keyboard that opens, closes and is touch enabled.

In user experience testing conducted by Intel, researchers observed people tilting back the laptop screen and using their thumbs to touch both sides of the screen, similar to how people hold a tablet or smartphone.

Daria Loi uses an Intel reference design Ultrabook with multi-touchscreen functionality. Loi conducted user tests and found that people spent 77 percent of the time touching the laptop screen while running through a variety of tasks such as surfing the Web, watching online video, viewing and editing photos and adjusting the laptop’s setting.

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John Dilworth and Matt Miller of LDS Church provide an overall framework to communicate the value of UX within businesses, that directly associates the value proposition of UX with key business objectives.

“It is the job of the UX designer to demonstrate the value that UX work brings to a product or service. If the UX designer can’t articulate the value of their work, can you really blame business managers for lowering its priority or for being suspicious of the value it brings to their project?

The need to communicate the UX value proposition is often overlooked by UX practitioners. This probably happens for several reasons: it is hard to do, it is not part of the UX practitioner’s skill set, and sometimes it just hasn’t been needed.

Some companies have a corporate culture that unconditionally values and performs UX work. Unfortunately, most UX practitioners do not work in such an environment, and the simple argument of “you just don’t get it” won’t cut it.

It is neither uncommon nor unreasonable for a UX professional to be asked to justify the cost of their work in quantitative terms so that a determination can be made on whether or not to proceed. Communicating the business value effectively will help you focus on the most important work, and will help your team and other stakeholders understand the value that attention and focus on UX will bring to a project.”

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“My interest is how swimming in this digital soup has shaped the young generation’s view of the world. What assumptions have they formed? Four themes emerge:

A pervasive sense of connection: Connectivity is the basic assumption and natural fabric of everyday life for the Re-Generation. Technology connections are how people meet, express ideas, define identities, and understand each other. Older generations have, for the most part, used technology to improve productivity — to do things we’ve always done, faster, easier, more cheaply. For the Re-Generation, being wired is a way of life.

Options (not obligations): Because technology is so intimately intertwined with the Re-Gen’s sense of self, they control it in a way that older individuals often don’t. While Boomers or X’ers may feel obligated to respond to the technology, the Re-Gen’s use the technology with choice – on their own schedule, at their own pace.

Anonymity and the ability to hide: By connecting through technology, Re-Gens reduce the need to connect face-to-face. Many have friends they’ve never met with whom they interact regularly. This creates a strange sense of anonymity — they can be everywhere if they choose to post or, depending on their preference, nowhere. Physical appearances can be replaced with avatars. The alarming epidemic of childhood obesity may be related to this generation’s ability to hide.

Confidence and control . . . to be an initiator, designer, problem-solver: This is a generation that is used to asking big questions — and is confident of finding answers. Will the water run out? How many children travel to school in a sustainable way? Are cities a good idea? Let’s check the Internet. They have had the experience of digging deeply into a burning question because they have access to a mountain of information.”

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The UK Design Council, in partnership with the UK Department of Health, ran a national competition to find teams of designers and experts who could develop new ideas to help improve the lives of those affected by dementia, reports Dexigner.

Guided by in-depth research and working with those affected by dementia, the five teams developed the innovative concepts for products and services.

A fragrance-release system designed to stimulate appetite, specially-trained “guide dogs for the mind,” and an intelligent wristband that supports people with dementia to stay active safely, are just some of the resulting prototypes.

They will now be further tested and developed with commercial partners with the aim of making some or all of them available on a large scale as soon as possible.

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> “The capital of the forgetful” is a revealing BBC report by Louis Theroux on what living with dementia actually means.

The first campaign to break the 1-million-dollar barrier in this revolutionary crowd-funding platform was an industrial design project. Could Kickstarter transform the design industry as we know it? A design report from New York by Joseph Grima on FastCo.Design.

“Put simply, Kickstarter allows anyone with an idea for a “creative project” to seek backing for that project by posting a pitch in video form. A funding goal and timeframe is set; if a sufficient number of backers (or “investors”, as Kickstarter describes them) pledge their support by making a credit card payment, and the goal is reached, Kickstarter releases funds to the project leader.” [...]

“Kickstarter is by no means the inventor of crowd funding. Yet it is the only company to have succeeded in positioning it as a mainstream funding mechanism for a broad range of creative initiatives, and this success derives largely from its skill in structuring itself as a social media platform.”

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In an article for UX Magazine, Catalina Naranjo-Bock provides a solid general description of co-designing processes:

“The practice of co-design allows users to become an active part of the creative development of a product by interacting directly with design and research teams. It is grounded in the belief that all people are creative and that users, as experts of their own experiences, bring different points of view that inform design and innovation direction.

Co-design is a method that can be used in all stages of the design process, but especially in the ideation or concepting phases. Partnering with users ensures their inclusion in knowledge development, idea generation, and concept development on products whose ultimate goal is to best serve these same users.

In this article I will examine the different stages of a co-design research process, as well as the methods and practices that are commonly used in each phase. Furthermore, I’ll look at the new forms of co-designing that have emerged as a result of social technologies.”

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Social media in particular has inexorably changed the world, driving openness and fear – but it is not beyond our control, argues Danah Boyd in a long essay for The Guardian.

“Most technology designers engage in their trade to make the world a better place. Technologists love to celebrate the amazing things that people can do with technology – bridge geography, connect communities and transform societies. Meanwhile, plenty of naysayers bemoan the changes brought on by technology, highlighting issues of distraction and attention for example. Unfortunately, this results in a battle between those with utopian and dystopian viewpoints, over who can have a more extreme perspective on technology. So where’s the middle ground?

One of my favourite maxims about the role of technology in society is called Kranzberg’s first law. He argues that “technology is neither good nor bad – nor is it neutral”. It’s irresponsible to assume that the tools being built just wander out into the world with only positive effects. Technology doesn’t determine practice, but how a system is designed does matter. How systems are used also matters, even if those uses aren’t what designers intended. For example, as social media has gone mainstream, some fascinating shifts have emerged that require reflection. Yet, even as the conversation becomes more important to have, it’s often hard to talk in a nuanced way about the role that technology is playing in shifts that are already underway.”

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Sherry Turkle is a psychologist and professor at M.I.T., says we use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right: the Goldilocks effect.

“Over the past 15 years, I’ve studied technologies of mobile connection and talked to hundreds of people of all ages and circumstances about their plugged-in lives. I’ve learned that the little devices most of us carry around are so powerful that they change not only what we do, but also who we are.

We’ve become accustomed to a new way of being “alone together.” Technology-enabled, we are able to be with one another, and also elsewhere, connected to wherever we want to be. We want to customize our lives. We want to move in and out of where we are because the thing we value most is control over where we focus our attention. We have gotten used to the idea of being in a tribe of one, loyal to our own party.”

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Saar Gur, general partner at Charles River Ventures, discusses a new generation of smart mobile services, which provide user information in the background to make accurate predictions around real-time user intention and will offer suggestions, results and different user interfaces/interactions based on their prediction of state.

“As I think about what these new Smart Services will look like, here are some of the characteristics I have been noodling on:

• The most disruptive ones will change our physical interactions and be additive to our offline experiences.
• Services will process things in the background, predicting our state with a high degree of accuracy.
• Many will primarily interact with the user through interruptions — and they only interrupt when they have something of value to add. (e.g., for Uber: Your car is arriving now.) They won’t feel “heavy” and bombard us with information overload – they will earn the right to interrupt with value.
• The user interface will look very different from existing web interfaces for some of these apps — as they won’t have things to suggest/interrupt a lot of the time, but when they do they will be very helpful. Example: It is “ok” for the user interface to say: ”Close the app, we don’t have anything for you now.”
• Understanding context will follow simple heuristics for some services and big data processing for others. As an example, many home automation applications may only need to know that I am in my house to automate music, thermostats, etc. But more sophisticated data analysis and processing will be required for more complicated interactions/recommendations/transactions (ala Square payments).

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UX consultant Harry Brignull spoke at UX London 2012 about the design of The Week magazine’s iPad app, telling the story of the project from the initial sketches through to its launch in Apple’s Newsstand.

In a long blog post on 90 percent of everything, he provides an annotated transcript.

“Let me tell you the story of an iPad app that I worked on for a magazine. As you can see (above), this story does turn out good in the end- but that’s not what I want to focus on. I want to focus on the bits that people would normally gloss over when giving a talk like this.”

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Henry Alford, contributing editor at Vanity Fair, wonders when in the digital age, did privacy become a choice rather than a given.

“When Facebook bought Instagram, the social photo app for iPhone and Android devices, on April 9, a chorus of concern emanated from the Twittersphere: Facebook would have access to Instagram users’ uploaded photos. Would that photo of Aunt Letty in her bathing suit suddenly show up in an ad for embolism stockings?

Granted, some of these invasions of privacy are the result of our not having correctly wrangled an app’s privacy control settings. But when did privacy become a choice rather than a given? And why does slogging through a new app’s voluminous terms of service or figuring out how to activate a site’s privacy control settings sometimes feel as if it requires a graduate degree in tiny print?”

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Even within the technology community, 33% agreed with the below statement:

“People will not trust the use of near-field communications devices and there will not be major conversion of money to an all-digital, all-the-time format. By 2020, payments through the use of mobile devices will not have gained a lot of traction as a method for transactions. The security implications raise too many concerns among consumers about the safety of their money. And people are resistant to letting technology companies learn even more about their personal purchasing habits. Cash and credit cards will still be the dominant method of carrying out transactions in advanced countries.”

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“To protect the web’s founding principle is a matter of what Tim Berners-Lee would call citizen vigilance, of restraining by openness itself the continual pressure for a closed-down, privately owned cyberspace that is the inevitable product of those internet Cecil Rhodes who would like to fence in the riches of the virtual world. It must be a web not for the consumer, but for the citizen.”

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In his book “Wicked problems: Problems worth solving“, author John Kolko (founder and director of Austin Center for Design) argues that involving end users in the entire design process ensures a humane design solution. He now summarises his argument in this article for FastCo.Design.

“Cultural probes literally probe a given culture, poking at society and trying to extract inspiration through narrative. Because the input comes from non-designers, this becomes a form of “designing with,” as the designer’s role becomes one of interpretation and facilitation rather than visionary. This is still a fully creative endeavor on the designer’s part. But consumers temper and inspire the results.”

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IKEA’s new Uppleva Smart TV-furniture unit was extensively shown at the Milan Design Week (which ends today), and on Core77 I wrote more about the interface design, but here some more about the user research that went into the product.

The user research consisted of two parts: in-home visits and an online survey. The IKEA press kit unfortunately provides very little information on the in-home visits, which is unfortunate, particularly since the results of the online survey are rather straightforward. I therefore hope to update this post later on with more details.

In-home visits
IKEA visits people in their houses and apartments all over the world. The visits were combined with interviews, and carried out in homes of different sizes, income groups, neighbourhoods, and people in a wide range of living situations and living conditions. Marcel Godfroy, who is the Uppleva project lead, writes:

“Fifty percent of IKEA customers wish to renew their living room. We have been visiting people’s homes around the world, and we understood that many people think it is difficult to find functional and beautiful solutions, which hide the clutter and integrate all media devices with the rest of their living room furniture. There simply has been a wish for something else – a complete solution for a new living room experience.”

Online survey
To find out more about how people experience their TV and sound furnishing solutions, IKEA combined the home visits with an online survey conducted in Sweden, Poland, Italy, France and Germany. These are the findings:

• In all countries, the living room is the most common room to watch TV in. 9 out of 10 German and French consumers watch TV in their living room and almost as many Swedish and Polish. However, a bit fewer Ital­ians, 7 out of 10. (On the other hand, Italian consumers watch TV in the kitchen or the bedroom to a larger extent than consumers in the other four countries).
• 3 out of 5 Swedish customers have a specific piece of furniture for the TV. 2 out of 5 in Poland, Germany and France, and a third of the Italians have a specific piece of TV furniture.
• 3 out of 4 people would like less visible cables in their living room. These visible cables and cords ­ or rather the lack of opportunity to hide them ­are also the main reason why people feel dissatisfied with the media furniture today.
• To Swedish and Polish consumers the media furniture not being stylish is another main reason for dissatisfaction.
• A majority of the consumers in all five countries would like fewer visible cables.
• 50% would like to see less of their technical gadgets.
• 60% OF ALL homes have three remote controls or more. 1­2 out of 10 have only one re­mote control.

Top five reasons for dissatisfaction with living room TV furniture today:

• Lack of opportunity to hide cords and cables.
• Media furniture is not stylish enough.
• Inflexibility.
• Visible technical gadgets.
• TV and furniture mis-match.

The online survey by market research institute YouGov comprised 5271 online interviews among a representative sample of the populations in Sweden, Poland, Italy, France and Germany as regards sex, age and region (men and women aged 18-­69 years). The survey was carried out 29th February to 5th March 2012.

It is quite remarkable how fast IKEA went from the online survey to the presentation of a fully functioning product at the Milan Design Week.

Chris Risdon, senior experience designer at Adaptive Path, looks at the explosion of smart products, which passively collect data about you and your specific behavior, and tell you a story which is designed to directly influence you, and argues that their very value proposition lies in behaviour change:

“These are products that have an explicit or implicit value proposition based on influencing your behavior. They’ve been around for a long time: smoking cessation and weight lose programs just to name a couple. But these highly personal solutions are exponentially enabled thanks to sensor technology.”

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Austin Brown, UX designer at EffectiveUI, and his colleague Lindsay Moore wondered if there was a way to design better, by combinubg the best aspects of interaction design and product design, as well as a little service design. They hoped that this would allow to create a holistic experience that transcends definition, and thus create better user experiences.

To test this idea, they set out to create design concepts for two common household products: an eco-friendly dishwasher and the home thermostat.

The article chronicles their process of combining disciplines and making decisions, and the lessons learned along the way.

“With the ability to incorporate modern techniques and practices to add value, we examined how we could make a dishwasher and a home thermostat more useful, usable, and desirable. These products tend to work just fine for most users, but fall short when it comes to providing a genuinely pleasant, compelling user experience. While some of the things we learned in this experiment could easily be applied to any product or digital interface, these were simulations only and did not result in any new products.”

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It is not clear to what extent the group is still active now, but the site is still alive.

The Brains, Behavior & Design Group is dedicated to exploring how insights from the fields of cognitive psychology and behavioral economics can be used to design better products, services, experiences, and business strategies.

The group is composed of interaction designers, design researchers and design strategists who each came to the field with a range of backgrounds (HCI, advertising, education, finance). We intersect in our two core beliefs that the better we understand people the better we can design for them, and this understanding gains value when it’s transformed into actionable insights.

Niki Pfarr (who is now at The Artefact Group and was featured on this blog earlier today) was one of the members.

Artefact is, like Experientia, a UX design consultancy that is strongly inspired by cognitive and behavioral modeling, and uses all kinds of inputs from cognitive and social science to enrich their design work:

“At Artefact, we’re becoming increasingly aware of the fact that regardless of the type of design challenge we work on, all of the decisions we make on a given project have the potential to influence human behavior – whether we intended them to or not.

As we outlined in our 21st Century Design paper, the toolkit of the modern designer is rapidly expanding. Design practice is maturing, and what was once a focus on aesthetics and usability is broadening to incorporate interdisciplinary knowledge from a variety of fields like4 behavioral economics and cognitive psychology. These disciplines shed light on the factors that impact human decision-making and motivate our behaviors.

Knowledge from these fields can help us better understand why people behave the way they do, help us design to reinforce or change that behavior, and help us make more informed predictions about how people will behave when faced with new decisions in the future.”

Artefact researcher Nikki Pfarr is now exploring the topic in more depth with a video that introduces some of the principles and tips coming from the fields of behavioral economics and human-centered design. We agree with her that these topics could allow us to better understand human behavior, and to design products and services that facilitate better decision-making.

Pfarr also wrote a short paper “Applying Behavioral Economics and Cognitive Psychology to the Design Process“ on the topic.

Tricia Wang is a cultural sociologist interested in understanding how people use digital tools in their day to day lives.

In her talk at the Lift 12 conference, she focuses on a story you may have heard of, concerning a student who ended up making international headlines for throwing shoes at the architect of China’s internet censorship infrastructure and then become the hero for information freedom worldwide.

Tricia tells us what happened to the student and how the outcomes were dependent on a variety of factors that tells us a lot about how we socialize and build trust online.

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Richard MacManus writes on ReadWriteWeb that the next generation of in-car apps will be about providing “smart” services, such as taking some of the cognitive load off the driver – including making the car autonomous in some ways. And he provides Audi (which just bought Ducati, by the way) as a case in point:

“One area where in-car technology will evolve is navigation; in particular how the car can automate some navigation aspects. [Anupam] Malhotra told me that Audi is currently figuring out “what the vehicle’s role is as the navigator.” Right now this is done via Google voice controls. For example if you’re looking for a spicy chicken lunch, you can tell the system “spicy chicken” and it will inform you of the nearest eatery where spicy chicken is available.

Another area that Audi is targeting is the HMI (Human-machine interface) in the car. The first generation was buttons around the driving wheel and touchscreen controls in the dashboard. Voice controls came next, with the Google voice system being the latest iteration of that for Audi. In the near future we will see gesture controlled systems, which Audi demonstrated at CES as a concept. Gesture controls will be used not just by the driver, but passengers in the car.

The software in the vehicle will also evolve, said Malhotra, to take away some of the decision-making from the driver. Not so much in terms of driving, which people want to keep control over. It will be focused on things that augment the driving experience. Features such as lane departure sensing, warning systems if there is a car in your blind spot, technology that protects the car occupants in the event of a collision. “All of this will happen through connectivity,” said Malhotra.

The overall goal of these future-looking developments, Malhotra said, is to take away the “misery” aspects of driving; like parking problems, dealing with traffic congestion, fuel management. This will allow the driver to enjoy the actual driving part.”

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In an extensive article by Charles Arthur, technology editor of The Guardian, on the rise of walled gardens (apps, social networks) on the net, we read this quote by John Battelle of Federated Media:

“The open web is full of spam, shady operators and blatant falsehoods. Outside of a relatively small percentage of high-quality sites, most of the web is chock full of pop-up ads and other interruptive come-ons.

“It’s nearly impossible to find a signal in that noise, and the web is in danger of being overrun by all that crap. In the curated gardens of places like Apple and Facebook, the weeds are kept to a minimum, and the user experience is just … better.”

The article centres around the dilemma this poses in terms of control and autonomy, well summarised in this example by Media commentator Jeff Jarvis:

“Apple’s iPad is sweet and pretty but shallow and vapid … I see danger in moving from the web to apps,” he said. “The iPad is retrograde. It tries to turn us back into an audience again.”

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I enjoyed the final paragraph of the Fast.CoDesign article on the second generation Nest Thermostat:

“Here’s a sense in which the Nest seems almost over-designed–all of this care for a one-time experience of screwing it in might seem excessive. But the fact is that user-focused design is also a form of good will–and a better sort of marketing than any ad could ever be. What happens if Nest starts creating all kinds of other products, for keeping track of your home or, hell, even managing your entertainment and utility bills? Consumers won’t forget the experience they had. And it will sell them on the next new thing.”

Many of the people surveyed by Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project said that the security, convenience and other benefits of “mobile wallet” systems will lead to widespread adoption of these technologies for everyday purchases by 2020.

Others—including some who are generally positive about the future of mobile payments—expect this process to unfold relatively slowly due to a combination of privacy fears, a desire for anonymous payments, demographic inertia, a lack of infrastructure to support widespread adoption, and resistance from those with a financial stake in the existing payment structure.

The survey results are based on a non-random, opt-in, online sample of 1,021 Internet experts and other Internet users, recruited via email invitation, Twitter or Facebook from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University. Since the data are based on a non-random sample, a margin of error cannot be computed, and the results are not projectable to any population other than the experts in this sample.

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Wired UK has published a guest post by Usman Haque, founder of Pachube.com and director at Haque Design + Research and CEO of Connected Environments, where he argues that current Smart Cities initiatives are looking for a one-size fits all, top-down strategic approach to sustainability, citizen well-being and economic development, and that their strategies focus on the city as a single entity, rather than the people — citizens — that bring it to life.

“Any adequate model for the smart city must focus on the smartness of its citizens and encourage the processes that make cities important: those that sustain very different — sometimes conflicting — activities. Cities are, by definition, engines of diversity so focusing solely on streamlining utilities, transport, construction and unseen government processes can be massively counter-productive, in much the same way that the 1960s idealistic fondness for social-housing tower block economic efficiency was found, ultimately, to be socially and culturally unsustainable.

We, citizens, create and recreate our cities with every step we take, every conversation we have, every nod to a neighbour, every space we inhabit, every structure we erect, every transaction we make. A smart city should help us increase these serendipitous connections. It should actively and consciously enable us to contribute to data-making (rather than being mere consumers of it), and encourage us to make far better use of data that’s already around us.”

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Wearable devices, or “wearables” for short, have enormous potential for uses in health and fitness, navigation, social networking, commerce, and media.

In a new report out today, Forrester argues that wearables will move mainstream once they get serious investment from the “big five” platforms — Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Facebook — and their developer communities.

A blog post by the research company lists the key take-aways.

> More reflections by The New York Times | TechCrunch

Meanwhile, interaction-design.org has published an extensive chapter on wearable computing, in collaboration with Steven Mann, a tenured professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Toronto.

Wolff Olins’s Mary Ellen Muckerman explores what a focus on user experience could mean for business.

“The principles and theories of UX have created a new normal in terms of brand delivery and interaction. They state that how people actually use your product is much more important than how it was intended to be used. So engaging your consumer in ongoing, iterative product development is more valuable than holding out for a “perfect” product launch. It is far better to get started in a live environment and be prepared to change fast around the needs of the user. As a result, consumers need to know what to expect from your product, as well as what you expect from them. This means they need openness and transparency from you. If they make choices online based on honesty and credibility of comments, forums, and communities, they’ll expect you to be a part of that same engaged and involved culture.”

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People Powered Health is a programme from NESTA, the UK innovation charity, to support the design and delivery of innovative services for people that are living with long term health conditions.

The programme focuses on co-production – that people’s needs are better met when they are involved in an equal and reciprocal relationship with professionals – working together to get things done. It is a radical approach to public services that is built around six characteristics:
- Recognising people as assets
- Building on people’s capabilities
- Promoting mutuality and reciprocity
- Developing peer support networks
- Breaking down barriers between professionals and users
- Facilitating rather than delivering

Avi Itzkovitch argues that the experience of interactive eBooks should not be confined to animations based on touch-and-response interaction, or merely flipping the page; when designing these Books one must ask what is the enhanced experience — why to move from print to digital, and how to create value and fun.

In this article, he showcases some examples for new eBooks that provide interactivity that goes beyond the superficial, adds value to the book and creates an experience that would be impossible in print, by using the full capabilities of a touch device to engage the user and enhance the learning and reading experience.

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