Chris Ziegler of The Verge had a chance recently to chat with Ambient co-founder and CEO Pritesh Gandhi to hear about the company’s past, present, and future.

“We’re perpetually bombarded with information, 24 hours a day. That’s just our connected reality now, and there’s very little hope of escaping it. On Valentine’s Day, I penned an editorial on how I believe that the secret to distilling this information — the key to preventing humans from collapsing under the ever-growing weight of this data — has been right under our noses for years.

They’re called “glanceable” devices, and Massachusetts-based Ambient Devices has been developing them for over a decade. The company spun out of a project at MIT’s famed Media Lab with the goal of integrating data points into our lives in a natural, organic way. Ambient’s path to building a real business has been an unusual one, producing oddities likes the Orb — a glass sphere capable of glowing different colors to indicate a temperature, stock price, or anything else the user can dream up — and the Umbrella, whose handle would glow when rain was in the forecast.

These days, Ambient has largely turned its attention to bigger customers, focusing on power companies who can deliver glanceable products to end users that help them trim their energy costs. But will we ever see something like the Umbrella again?”

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Jan Chipchase, Frog Design’s Executive Creative Director for Global Insights, continues his argumentation on the importance of corporate design research.

After a somewhat confusing introduction (it’s very much for insiders), Chipchase focuses on the core issue: a backgrounder on the role of design research / ethnography and some of the nuances of the approach “that make the process one that is rewarding for the individuals concerned, their communities, our teams that conduct the research and employer, and ultimately the client.”

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> Read also this interview with Chipchase in The Hindu

Markus Latzina, SAP AG, and Joerg Beringer, SAP Labs, LLC. have republished an article they have written for Interactions Magazine on the Transformative User Experience.

“Instead of designing for many discrete applications, the Transformative User Experience approach aims to natively support a larger variety of task flows by replacing application boundaries with elastic, situational environments that allow transitions between different task states. Imagine businesspeople who work collaboratively on a large display to discuss business issues and make decisions (see Figure 1). This display must be able to surface relevant content. During the discussion, content may be moved, clustered, annotated, or synthesized to analyze information and capture insights. Areas on the display might represent certain task contexts typical for knowledge-intensive work, such as prioritizing, querying, inspecting, and displaying analytical information.”

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> Check this video to find out more about the SAP User Experience team

Donald A. Norman (of the Nielsen Norman Group) and Roberto Verganti (Politecnico di Milano) have jointly published a paper entitled “Incremental and Radical Innovation: Design Research versus Technology and Meaning Change“, based on a talk presented at the Designing Pleasurable Products and Interfaces conference in Milan, June 2011.

Abstract

We discuss the differences between incremental and radical innovation and argue that each results from different processes. We present several methods of viewing incremental and radical innovation. One is by examining the quality of product space, envisioning each product opportunity as a hill in that space where the higher one is, the better. Under this view, human-centered design methods are a form of hill climbing, extremely well suited for continuous incremental improvements but incapable of radical innovation. Radical innovation requires finding a different hill, and this comes about only through meaning or technology change. A second approach is to consider the dimensions of meaning and technology change as two dimensions and examining how products move through the resulting space. Finally, we show how innovation might be viewed as lying in the space formed by the dimension of research aimed at enhancing general knowledge and the dimension of application to practice.

We conclude that human-centered design, with its emphasis on iterated observation, ideation, and testing is ideally suited for incremental innovation and unlikely to lead to radical innovation. Radical innovation comes from changes in either technology or meaning. Technology-driven innovation often comes from inventors and tinkerers. Meaning-driven innovation, however, has the potential to be driven through design research, but only if the research addresses fundamental questions of new meanings and their interpretation.

The paper has been submitted to Design Issues.

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In a TechCrunch guest post by Uzi Shmilovici, CEO and founder of Future Simple, outlines how he came to the conclusion that there’s nothing more important for a startup than the ability to clearly understand what it builds and then relentlessly focus on it – which he defines as the concept of a User Experience Vision.

Here are what he considers te four critical elements that make a great User Experience Vision:

• It addresses a real need – If you don’t know what is the need you are solving for, I suggest that you take time and think through it. Now. It will also give you a good starting point for defining the UXV and help you focus on what is meaningful for the user.
• It is simple — keeping the UXV simple is critical so you can communicate it effectively to your customers, team, partners or any other stakeholder. If it is not simple, you probably didn’t figure out the right UXV yet.
• It serves as a guiding light — a successful UXV provides guidance to your team as for what to build next. It can help you think through your roadmap and identify whether the next feature you are building will be useful or not.
• It is unique — it does not apply to every other startup on earth. Don’t have as your UXV something like “Great User Experience”. The more unique it is, the more meaningful it will be.

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Over the past few years there’s been a lot of discussion around whether an experience can be designed. But it seems, writes Jordan Julien in UX Magazine, like everyone’s just getting hung up on semantics; an experience can be designed, but the user will always have the opportunity to experience it in a unique way.

The reason, he says, every experience has the potential to be unique to the user is, in part, because cognition is unique to each user.

Cognition is about knowledge and understanding, so there’s a ton of psychological principles that fall under the umbrella of cognition.

In this article Julien focuses on two principles – cognitive barriers and cognitive load – that, once understood, will elevate a UX practitioner’s designs to a whole new level.

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Nir Eyal continues his article series on Techcrunch (see also “Habits are the new viral“) with a short essay on manufacturing desire.

“Companies increasingly find that their economic value is a function of the strength of the habits they create. But as some companies are just waking up to this new reality, others are already cashing in. [...]

But how do companies create the internal triggers needed to form habits? The answer: they manufacture desire. While fans of Mad Men are familiar with how the ad industry once created consumer desire during Madison Avenue’s golden era, those days are long gone. A multi-screen world, with ad-wary consumers and a lack of ROI metrics, has rendered Don Draper’s big budget brainwashing useless to all but the biggest brands. Instead, startups manufacture desire by guiding users through a series of experiences designed to create habits. I call these experiences “desire engines,” and the more often users run through them, the more likely they are to self-trigger. [...]

Like it or not, habit-forming technology is already here. The fact that we have greater access to the web through our various devices also gives companies greater access to us. As companies combine this greater access with the ability to collect and process our data at higher speeds than ever before, we’re faced with a future where everything becomes more addictive. This trinity of access, data, and speed creates new opportunities for habit-forming technologies to hook users. Companies need to know how to harness the power of the desire engine to improve peoples’ lives, while consumers need to understand the mechanics of behavior engineering to protect themselves from manipulation.”

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Trying out Windows 8 on the desktop gives a strange feeling, writes Matthew Baxter-Reynolds on The Guardian’s Technology Blog. There’s a solid update to Windows 7, and then there’s a strange interface which jumps context. Plus you can’t join a device to a domain? Whose idea was that?

“Thing is, we have the same thing over with Metro on the desktop. We’re told it’s all going to be fine and dandy but yet sit anyone with any experience down at that thing and the “BLAM! … SWOOSH!” aspects of running classic and Metro-style make this crazy to use on a PC. Yet we’re being told to believe in Sinofsky that is all fine, and all logical (although now I think about it, we’re being told that by Sinofsky), despite the fact that you can touch Metro on the desktop at it and just feel it doesn’t work. It feels like it’s haunted by the ghost of Microsoft Bob.”

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Daniel Szuc and Josephine Wong describe the current state of UX design in Asia:

“As businesses in Asia in various domains look to how they can mature, differentiate and compete globally in their respective products and services, User Experience (UX) is gaining significant momentum. Management are curious as to what UX means and how it can be applied to not just improve experiences but towards real customer delight. They are looking for people and professional communities to help them understand.”

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The economic value of web businesses increasingly depends on the strength of the habitual behavior of their users, argues Nir Eyal on Techcrunch. These habits ultimately will be a deciding factor in what separates startup winners and losers.

“Increasingly, companies will become experts at designing user habits. Curated Web companies already rely on these methods. This new breed of company, defined by the ability to help users find only the content they care about, includes such white-hot companies as Pinterest and Tumblr. These companies have habit formation embedded in their DNA. This is because data collection is at the heart of any Curated Web business and to succeed, they must predict what users will think is most personally relevant.

Curated Web companies can only improve if users tell their systems what they want to see more of. If users use the service sparingly, it is less valuable than if they use it habitually. The more the user engages with a Curated Web company, the more data the company has to tailor and improve the user’s experience. This self-improving feedback loop has the potential to be more useful – and more addictive — than anything we’ve seen before.”

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Sierra Wireless’ new USB cellular modems show how user-centred design can help differentiate products in a commoditised market.

Matt Plested of Alloy, the agency which helped Sierra design the products, explained to Mex how they explored user environments for USB modems to better understand customer needs.

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The Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University published a substantial new report from the Youth and Media project: “Youth and Digital Media: From Credibility to Information Quality” by Urs Gasser, Sandra Cortesi, Momin Malik, & Ashley Lee.

Building upon a process- and context-oriented information quality framework, this paper seeks to map and explore what we know about the ways in which young users of age 18 and under search for information online, how they evaluate information, and how their related practices of content creation, levels of new literacies, general digital media usage, and social patterns affect these activities.

A review of selected literature at the intersection of digital media, youth, and information quality—primarily works from library and information science, sociology, education, and selected ethnographic studies—reveals patterns in youth’s information-seeking behavior, but also highlights the importance of contextual and demographic factors both for search and evaluation.

Looking at the phenomenon from an information-learning and educational perspective, the literature shows that youth develop competencies for personal goals that sometimes do not transfer to school, and are sometimes not appropriate for school. Thus far, educational initiatives to educate youth about search, evaluation, or creation have depended greatly on the local circumstances for their success or failure.

Key Findings:
1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.

To access the full report (150 pages) and additional material, please visit: http://youthandmedia.org/infoquality

Television is breaking free of old paradigms and constraints. Consumers have no shortage of places to look for the content they want — online, on-demand, broadcast. But with added choice comes added complexity. As television becomes decentralized, holistic user interfaces can make sense of the various content options and unify them under one experience. A perspective by Punchcut.

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With Apple, Inc. having the largest market capitalization of any company in the world, and an endless stream of CEOs and pundits talking about the importance of user experience, Peter Merholz suspects the phrase “user experience design” is no longer necessary, and could even be harmful.

Harmful because it suggests that the only folks who need to worry about user experience are the designers, when in fact companies need to treat user experience no different than they treat profitability, or corporate culture, or innovation, or anything else that’s essential for it’s ongoing success. The companies that succeed best in delivering great experience are those that have it as an organization-wide mindset.

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The most popular content strategy tools borrow from the discipline of information architecture, but there is one invaluable tool that is imperative to the process of strategy and implementation of tactics that we can thank our user experience cousins for: personas.

“Content strategy is more than just a discipline. It’s an approach to content that must be adopted at all levels of an organization to be effective. As it becomes ubiquitous to the way in which traditional disciplines create and manage content (marketing, communications, public relations, etc.) across digital channels, the tools that we use now to plan for content will need to evolve beyond the out-dated approach of target audience segmentation. With the demise of top down communications and a increasingly fractured digital channel landscape, organizations must continue to plan for and produce content that remains liquid and linked to engage users on their terms.

That’s why personas are such a critical component to an organization’s overall content strategy. You can’t provide the right content, at the right time, on the right device to every user without it. Over the long term, personas are the insurance policy that all organizations need to protect a key component of one of their largest digital assets – their content.”

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World IA Day 2012 is about bringing the Information Architecture community together, and the first ever World IA Day, which took place on 11 February, featured keynote presentations by Peter Morville, Lou Rosenfeld and Jorge Arango.

- Peter Morville: Cross-training for ubiquitous information architecture
- Lou Rosenfeld: Thoughts on the last 14 years and the future of information architecture
- Jorge Arango: The Well

User experience is a priority that should, in some way, find a home within the design of any new-media strategy, writes Brian Solis.

“The reality is that the relationship businesses hope to have with customers through these new devices, applications, or networks and their true state are not one in the same. In fact, it is woefully one-sided, and usually not to the advantage of customers, which for all intents and purposes still affects businesses.

Rather than examine the role new technologies and platforms can play in improving customer relationships and experiences, many businesses invest in “attendance” strategies where a brand is present in both trendy and established channels, but not defining meaningful experiences or outcomes. Simply stated, businesses are underestimating the significance of customer experiences.”

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Adobe’s decision to cease development of the mobile Flash platform and increase their investment in HTML5-related efforts created perhaps the final piece of conclusive evidence that HTML5 is the current go-to technology for creating ubiquitous user experiences regardless of device. A reflection by SuAnne Hall, a user experience designer at EffectiveUI.

“While there’s been an abundant amount of discussion on what this means to developers, there’s been a lack of focus on what this means to the overall user experience (UX). If HTML5 thrives where Flash struggled and becomes the dominator in the choice for new mobile and desktop technology, will users benefit from the transition? Yes, as long as designers and developers do their jobs right.”

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Behavioural change researcher Dan Lockton discusses an approach which has emerged out of some of the ethnographic work he has been doing for the Empower project, working on CarbonCulture with More Associates, where asking users questions about how and why they behaved in certain ways with technology (in particular around energy-using systems) led to answers which were resolvable into something like rules: behavioural heuristics [which are] rules (of thumb) that people might follow when interacting with a system.

“I would envisage that with user research framed and phrased in the right way, observation, interviews and actual behavioural data, it would be possible to extract heuristics in a form which are useful for selecting design patterns to apply. While in the workshop we ‘decomposed’ existing systems without doing any real user research, doing this alongside would enable the heuristics extracted to be compared and discrepancies investigated and resolved. The redesigned system could thus match much better the heuristics being followed by users, or, if necessary, help to shift those heuristics to more appropriate ones.”

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User Interface (UI) is the next battlefield in consumer electronics and, as products mature, the race to differentiate based on the UI will accelerate. Rather than compare minor differences in features sets, consumers will increasingly make purchases based on ease of use and access of features. Specifically, when innovation in the core functionality of an end product approaches maturity, consumers increasingly turn to the industrial design and user interface of the product to guide purchasing decisions. Further, the UI is now defining the personality of a device and becoming an integral part of the branding equation, thereby creating emotional ties between consumers and their devices, and ultimately building loyalty to a particular product.

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