experience design

Claire Melamed writes on the Global Dashboard: "What will happen if mobile phone use carries on expanding at its current rate in Africa, but literacy rates don’t improve?" http://bit.ly/gFBjWK

The potential future she sees where there are more mobile phone subscriptions outpace literacy rates, is a future where the gap between haves and have-nots widens. Where the illiterate and under-literate population are not able to take advantage of the data and information available through mobile.  ... Read More

I drive a 2004 Civic Hybrid and when I brought it in for service, I got a new 2011 Civic Hybrid as a loaner. It drove great, was fun, and had that great new car smell and feel. But one thing really bothered me. It's speedometer.

The new Civic uses a digital speedometer display that just shows the current speed as a number. Just a rapidly changing number.

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During our weekly Ascentium UX team meeting, we were discussing the rapid change and proliferation of devices in the market. With new phones, tablets, readers, netbooks all coming out at breakneck speeds, we got into a discussion about how that trend will impact what devices people are going to rely on day to day. 

We decided to take a look at ourselves, of course. We took a quick survey of the team to see what we carry around with us all the time and what we leave behind. The results were a bit surprising, but in another light, not surprising at all. ... Read More

Not that long ago, Augmented Reality (AR) was all the talk around the digital marketing table. There were POCs floating around and lots of talk of how AR will change the landscape of interactive design on the web. Lately, however, the dialog has shifted back to the more straightforward and understandable mobile and social digital experiences. Hardly any discussion about AR is happening. Has AR's star waned already? And why? ... Read More

I spent two days down in the city by the bay to attend the inaugural Warm Gun conference. This conference was catering to the design community, and start-ups specifically, focusing on measurable design. ... Read More

Ever since Scott McCloud gave the closing plenary at CHI 2006 in Montreal, I've been interested in how we, as experience designers, could integrate comics into the design process. How they would work as a story telling device and way to communicate the needs of users and how the designs we concept would meet those needs. ... Read More

Google has launched a new feature, Priority Inbox, that sorts your Gmail inbox according to what it deems your most important messages. The importance is based on things like how often you read messages with the same keywords, from the same senders, and whether you are the only recipient. You can teach it to refine the effectiveness by indicating if a message is important. ... Read More

Being a user experience design professional, I have, like you, standards for the things that I buy and what I want to use on a day to day basis. I expect then to meet my design, usability, and desireability bars, and what the hell, not piss me off every day. I rail against bad design and ergonomics when evaluating products, which is why my wife will no longer shop for appliances with me. Come on, how many years does it take to get decent design of stovetops? ... Read More

Heading through SeaTac airport, I was on my way to transportation and home when I spotted someting interesting. A google kiosk in the shape of a location pin. Cool.

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Water machine over at Microsoft offered an option, while accurate, could be labeled in a more user-friendly and appealing way...