In this new RSA Animate, Dan Ariely, bestselling author and professor of psychology and behavioural economics at Duke University, explores the circumstances under which someone would lie and what effect deception has on society at large.

The RSA Animate was taken from a July 2012 lecture given by Dan Ariely as part of the RSA’s free public events programme.

Enjoy.

Observing the User Experience
A Practitioner’s Guide to User Research
by
Elizabeth Goodman, PhD candidate, University of California, Berkeley’s School of Information, National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow, and Intel PhD Fellow
Mike Kuniavsky, Founder, ThingM
Andrea Moed, Staff User Researcher at Inflection
Publisher: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
608 pages – September 21, 2012
(Amazon link)

The gap between who designers and developers imagine their users are, and who those users really are can be the biggest problem with product development. Observing the User Experience will help you bridge that gap to understand what your users want and need from your product, and whether they’ll be able to use what you’ve created.

Filled with real-world experience and a wealth of practical information, this book presents a complete toolbox of techniques to help designers and developers see through the eyes of their users. It provides in-depth coverage of 13 user experience research techniques that will provide a basis for developing better products, whether they’re Web, software or mobile based. In addition, it’s written with an understanding of how software is developed in the real world, taking tight budgets, short schedules, and existing processes into account.

> See also this article by UC Berkeley: “Elizabeth Goodman revises classic handbook of user experience research“.

John Wood, Emeritus Professor of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, argues on Core77 that the user-centered mindset is based on a one-dimensional map in which only two places exist—master and servant. In the workplace, the designer is the servant and the client is the master. From a greater distance, the user is the master and the ‘client plus designer’ is the servant.

“The idea of user-centered design grew out of ‘humanism’, which can be traced to ancient Greece and the early Christians, who came to value the differences between individuals. However, while humanism has many admirable qualities, it is a dangerously incomplete basis from which understand things. [...]

We have designed ourselves into a bubble of self-satisfaction. ‘Solipsism’ is a good word for it. It reminds us of the old story of Narcissus, who was became obsessively absorbed by his own reflection in the lake and failed to notice that a beautiful girl was trying to get his attention.”

A few days ago SAP announced the opening of the new SAP Mobility Design Center to help customers meet the growing need for individualized mobile solutions.

Headquartered on the company’s campus in Palo Alto, Calif., the center is focused on enabling companies to keep up with the consumerization of IT trend by conceptualizing, designing and building mobile solutions to better connect with employees and consumers.

To achieve consumer-grade experiences, customers collaborate with a team of user experience (UX) designers, architects and developers. The team employs design thinking principles and validates mobile solutions with end users continually throughout the build process.

The SAP Mobility Design Center is a one-stop shop for designing, developing and validating customer-specific mobile enterprise solutions that are intuitive for users and leverage features such as touch, camera, GPS and other device functionality across a variety of device platforms.

Communicating the User Experience: A Practical Guide for Creating Useful UX Documentation
by Richard Caddick and Steve Cable
Wiley
2011, 352 pages
ISBN 978-1119971108
(Amazon | Scribd)

Abstract
As web sites and applications become richer and more complex, the user experience (UX) becomes critical to their success. This indispensible and full-color book provides practical guidance on this growing field and shares valuable UX advice that you can put into practice immediately on your own projects. The authors examine why UX is gaining so much interest from web designers, graduates, and career changers and looks at the new UX tools and ideas that can help you do your job better. In addition, you’ll benefit from the unique insight the authors provide from their experiences of working with some of the world’s best-known companies, learning how to take ideas from business requirements, user research, and documentation to create and develop your UX vision.

> Book review (UX magazine)

Experientia researcher Anna Wojnarowska spoke this Sunday at the Medicine 2.0 conference in Boston on her research on the influence of the hospital environment, communication devices – laptops, mobile phones – and the technologies involved in the curing process such as drips and cardiac devices – on patients’ experiences of hospitalization.

The yearly conference, which had over 500 attendees, focuses on social media, mobile apps, and internet/web 2.0 in health, medicine and biomedical research.

Anna’s talk, entitled Body Wholeness and Technological Struggles: How Patients and Staff Cope with the Reality of the Hospital, presented an ethnographic study of a cardiology institute in Warsaw with a focus on the way the digital technologies influence the dynamics between the doctors and patients

Background:
What interested me the most in the specificity of the hospital environment was the potential influence of digital technologies – such as mobile phones and laptops – on the dynamics between patients and doctors, mediated through medical treatment. I wanted to find out what role digital communication devices play in the balance of authority between doctors and patients and how using these tools expresses the personal needs of patients.

Objective:
My research examines the influence of the hospital environment, communication devices – laptops, mobile phones – and the technologies involved in the curing process such as drips and cardiac devices – on patients’ experiences of hospitalization.

Methods:
I conducted ethnographic research in a cardiological institute in Poland. Having negotiated access as an “ethnographic intern” to one of the clinics, I participated in the life of the hospital to the extent available to an outside observer, for a period of three weeks. I conducted interviews with eleven patients, two family members, seven members of the medical staff – doctors and nurses – and three members of the hospital’s administrative staff. Further, I engaged in extensive observation of the hospital environment.

Results:
All of the patients whom I met during the research period were extensive users of mobile phones, but they were rarely equipped with their own laptops. Patients treated technology as an important conveyor of their private realities, lives that they did not necessarily want to include in their hospital routine. Patients approached hospitalization as a temporary period, which they did not want to integrate with their everyday lives. They protected their bodily integrity by negating their dependence on medical and communicational devices, not wishing to be perceived as ‘cyborgs’ (Haraway 1985) or ‘techno-social beings’ (Latour 1993). In order to separate themselves from their roles as ‘patients’, they exerted their agency on those technological aspects of the hospital reality, which were within their reach, such as medical screens and drips. Even though the doctors were very eager to share stories of how patients undermined their medical authority by browsing the internet, the patients themselves claimed that they do it only for their own sake, without wanting to disobey their doctors. The complexity of the treatments conducted in the clinic increased patients’ trust in the medical profession and decreased their motivation to look for alternative information online. Nonetheless, online sources do play an important role during the curing process, as an effective source of emotional support and personal comfort.

Conclusions:
The hospital is an area where patients construct their personhoods in reference to the surrounding environment and where they foster their identities. Digital technologies became deeply embedded in the process of maintaining bodily integrity and tackling a new – and yet temporary – hospitalized reality. What requires attention is the potential of technology in creating bonds among the patients themselves as well as supporting their daily routine in the hospital, far different from the ‘ordinary’ one. The influence of technology on the balance of authority seems a secondary issue, as patients who come equipped with an extensive knowledge of their condition seem able to effectively distinguish trustworthy online sources (such as encyclopedias, dictionaries, online medical journals) from the unreliable ones (online forums) and have no intention to carelessly undermine doctors’ diagnoses and opinions.

In the next post, Anna writes about her experience of the conference.

A study by the Pew Research Center, released Wednesday, found that among Americans adults who use smartphone apps, half had decided not to install applications on their mobile phones because they demanded too much personal information. Nearly a third uninstalled an application after learning that it was collecting personal information “they didn’t wish to share.” And one in five turned off location tracking “because they were concerned that other individuals or companies could access that information.” A customer’s whereabouts can be extremely valuable to marketers trying to sell their wares, or government authorities trying to keep tabs on citizens’ movements.

The study seems to suggest a deepening awareness of digital privacy. And it contradicts a common perception that the generation of young Americans who have grown up in the Internet age blithely share their personal details.

Read article

Ericsson is publishing interesting research these days (and therefore gets featured on this blog).

Its latest TV and video ConsumerLab report found that mobile devices are an important part of the TV experience, with 67 percent using tablets, smartphones or laptops for their everyday TV viewing.

New technology and services have also empowered us to interact socially with our friends as we watch our favorite content. Today, live sports commentary among mates is huge. The same ConsumerLab report found that 62 percent of consumers use social media while watching TV. This is up 18 percent from last year.

These are the topics of the latest update on UX Matters:

Strengths and Weaknesses of Quantitative and Qualitative Research
By Demetrius Madrigal and Bryan McClain
Both qualitative and quantitative methods of user research play important roles in product development. Data from quantitative research—such as market size, demographics, and user preferences—provides important information for business decisions. Qualitative research provides valuable data for use in the design of a product—including data about user needs, behavior patterns, and use cases. Each of these approaches has strengths and weaknesses, and each can benefit from our combining them with one another. This month, we’ll take a look at these two approaches to user research and discuss how and when to apply them.

UX Strategy: The Heart of User-Centered Design
By April McGee
Today, organizations interact with their customers through multiple digital channels such as call centers, mobile devices, applications, and Web sites. It is not enough to create a strategy for these channels from business, technology, and marketing perspectives. Rather, it is essential that an organization’s UX strategy be at the core of user-centered design. A UX strategy establishes goals for a cohesive user experience across all channels and touchpoints. The success of a UX strategy across multiple channels and offerings depends especially on identifying the business objectives of the channel leadership and relating them to the user experience, and understanding the overall ecosystem of the customer—in particular, what motivates them
Organizations must translate this information into a cross-channel user experience that meets the needs and aspirations of both its business and its customers.

Book Review: Wicked Problems: Problems Worth Solving (Author: John Kolko)
Review by Arun Joseph Martin, Calvin Chun-yu Chan, Erico Fileno, Noriko Osaka, and Yohan Creemers
In this “Handbook & Call to Action,” Kolko introduces the idea of wicked problems—large-scale social issues that plague humanity, like poverty and malnutrition—then describes the role of design in mitigating these problems. Kolko points out that traditional approaches cannot deal effectively with complex social and cultural problems. Such wicked problems always interconnect with other problems, are costly to solve, and often lack clear methods for understanding and evaluating them.
Kolko suggests that it is possible to mitigate wicked problems through what he calls social entrepreneurship—entrepreneurship that aims to create social capital by adding value to the community rather than focusing only on creating economic wealth.

Google published yesterday a research report on how consumers use different devices together and navigating the new multi-screen world.

They set out to learn not just how much of our media consumption happens on screens, but also how we use these multiple devices together, and what that means for the way that businesses connect with consumers.

One of the key insights is that 90% of people move between devices to accomplish a goal, whether that’s on smartphones, PCs, tablets or TV.

A blog post provides further highlights from the research.

Megacities may be congested and complex, but are also among the planet’s most exciting places to live. They have proven effective at stimulating creativity, innovation, freedom and economic development.

Today, 50 percent of the world’s population lives in cities, a figure expected to reach about 70 percent by 2050. Almost all demographic growth over the next 30 years will be urban, and there is a constant stream of people moving from rural areas to cities.

The rise of the megacity has made an enormous contribution to the development of modern society. However, bigger populations also create challenges that megacities must address in order to retain their advantages.

The maturity level of a megacity is often closely connected to its ICT maturity, and therefore affects which types of ICT solutions are relevant and most effective. Megacities have a huge range of ICT opportunities, with countless potential connections, but on a very general level there are similarities between the most appropriate solutions for megacities within each maturity level.

There is no single set of solutions to suit every megacity and all their residents with their subjective views on quality of life. Any solutions must take local conditions into account. This is also one of the most important considerations for us at Ericsson when we create the fundamental building blocks for ICT solutions to meet megacity challenges around the world. They must be designed for diversity, flexibility, locality, transparency and uniqueness.

This report – compiled by User Experience Lab at Ericsson Research – highlights some of the effects of, and challenges stemming from, rapid urbanization and the emergence of megacities. It looks at how governments can manage the largest cities in the world, the significance of a city’s maturity level, and what “good quality of life” means for city dwellers around the world. The sources include publicly available material such as reports and data from international organizations, academic studies and business papers from management consultants. In-house research conducted by the Ericsson Networked Society Lab and Ericsson ConsumerLab is also among the key sources.

Across industries, companies are using the vast amounts of user-generated data to guide innovation of new products and services. But data mining does not equate to developing “customer intelligence,” write Lara Lee and Daniel Sobol of Continuum on Harvard Business Review’s Blog.

Human behavior is nuanced and complex, and no matter how robust it is, data can provide only part of the story. Desire and motivation are influenced by psychological, social, and cultural factors that require context and conversation in order to decode.

Data can reveal new patterns that point a firm in the right direction, but it can’t indicate what to do once there. It reveals what people do, but not why they do it. And understanding the why is critical to innovation.

Read article

It is not a secret that touch is not as easy as it seems and very difficult to get right, writes Wolfgang Gruener on Conceivable Tech. Cadillac is the first company that is trying to translate touch in a comprehensive way to be used in conjunction with a car’s entertainment system. He and his colleagues have had a few days to play with the CUE system and they walked away impressed and confused at the same time.

“I wrote about CUE (Cadillac User Experience) a few weeks ago after an initial demonstration that was admittedly breathtaking. However, that was in a parked car and only a product demonstration. This time I actually was given Cadillac’s new XTS sedan for a test drive over a week to see what CUE can accomplish in driving scenarios. After 200 miles, I am still impressed by the execution of this system, but I am convinced that not everyone will like the no-compromise translation of the smartphone/tablet concept into an in-car entertainment system. There is no grey area – either you like it and it is going to convince to buy the car around it, or you are going to simply hate it.”

Read review

PSFK spoke to Dhani Sutanto, a Digital Art Director who became fed up with swiping his Oyster card through the reader like millions of other Londoners each day.

He decided to tinker around with the card and create a more fashionable way to get in and out of the sensor-driven turnstyles.

They spoke to him about his first creation, a ring that contains an Oyster Card chip and how reimagining form factors can not only result in more pleasureable transporation solutions, but also everyday transactions.

Walking through IKEA over the weekend with two young children, writes Shailesh Manga on UXMovement, was a healthy reminder of what contributes to an ideal customer experience: innovative product design and thoughtful service design.

IKEA covers product design with innovative home furnishings that are cost effective.

Providing this outstanding product experience is only made complete by wrapping an amazing service experience around it.

By fighting over whether tablets or PCs are better tools for creating content—as a sort of proxy war over whose vision owns the future of computing devices—we may be overlooking something important: the possibility that these very different devices may simply be good at different kinds of creativity and that their differences may actually complement one other.

In other words, both form factors have creation or production in their DNA, but with very different emphases, contexts, and approaches. The big difference between them is this: the typewriter form factor (that is a the root of the PC) has its roots in creation that is formal, mechanistic, and professional, while people have historically used tablets to create content of a more personal or intimate nature.

Both tablets and traditional PCs have strengths in content creation, but they are strengths of different types. And their different strengths have more to do with the creative process than the content itself.

Read article

“What marketing executives should know about user experience” is the title of a short and introductory piece, mainly aimed at marketing people, by Nick Myers, managing director of visual design & branding at Cooper (a design and strategy firm in San Francisco that I had the pleasure of visiting two weeks ago).

His central question is how marketers can connect customers and brands in the digital era, and direct their organizations to guide products that inspire lasting engagement.

The language and approach in this short article can provide guidance to all of us in the UX community on the kind of arguments we can use with the marketing executives whom we often face as (prospective) clients.

UX Best Practices – How to Achieve More Impact with User Experience
Helmut Degen & Xiaowei Yuan (Eds.)
McGraw-Hill Osborne Media, 2011
ISBN-10: 007175251X, ISBN-13: 978-0071752510
304 pages
(Amazon)

Helmut Degen, Ph.D., works as a program manager for Siemens Corporate Research (SCR). He was previously a user experience design lead and senior user experience manager for Vodafone Global Marketing in Dusseldorf, Germany, and for the Siemens User Interface Design center in Munich, Germany.

Xiaowei Yuan, Ph.D., is an expert commissioner of the Standardization Administration of the People’s Republic of China, and the founder of ISAR User Interface Design. He was previously head of the Siemens User Interface Design Center, Beijing, China.

Gerd Waloszek of SAP User Experience wrote a lengthy review on the book. Here are his concluding paragraphs:

“As I have already mentioned, the editors’ vision of the book is that “readers change perspective from a ‘how-to’ perspective to an ‘impact’ perspective”, that they “then apply the new perspective to their organization or customers’ organization systematically to achieve greater impact with UX contributions more often.” However, in recognition of the survey results from October 2011, they are more modest in their goals for the book when they state,”The UX practices described in the success stories in this book can be used as a starting point to improve existing UX processes,” because “the UX success stories in this book are rather exceptional in the UX industry and can be considered as benchmarks.” Of course, this is by no means a contradiction and both aspects are useful. But when the editors finally promote the “model” perspective for the book, it has eventually become what they initially intended not to publish: a “how-to” book.

Nonetheless, considering its broad perspective with respect to industries (in-depth case studies from Yahoo!, Siemens, SAP, Haier, Intuit, Tencent, and more), its cross-regional coverage (USA, Europe, China), and its variety of user experience techniques (for example, analyzing user needs and expectations, creating design concepts, prototyping, using agile development, conducting usability testing, developing user interface guidelines, defining user interface patterns, and specifying metrics), the book is definitely a rich and unique resource for readers who want to learn about the state of the UX industry, find the gaps between what would be desirable and what is still the current state of affairs in the industry, and, last but not least, get familiar with approaches that help provide UX teams with more impact on products and organizations.”

In three essays John Payne, Principal of Moment’s Experience Design practice, reflects on his workshop, Ethnography for User Experience, and their field research with Occupy Wall Street.

Payne was recently asked by IxDA NY’s local leadership to lead a workshop on Ethnography for User Experience. His goal was to provide the attendees, a group of 25 interaction designers, some working principles of ethnography that they could adapt to their day-to-day design work; in essence, to help them shape a more “ethnograph-ish” approach to user experience design.

As he prepared the workshop materials, Payne suggested to the IxDA organizers that Zuccotti Park (or Liberty Square, depending on your persuasion) might be a good research site. For the uninitiated, this is the nexus of the global Occupy Wall Street movement. Ground Zero for “We are the 99%.” At that point, in early November, Payne hadn’t yet visited the park, but everything he was reading and hearing about it made it seem an ideal (if perhaps a bit risky) site for a group of eager workshop attendees to get some real-world experience putting ethnographic principles into practice.

They took on the task of trying to understand how the occupiers communicated and coordinated within the group and with other occupy sites around the world. Their design goal was to gather information to inform the design of digital products that could help that communication and coordination process.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

The take of the author Paul Bryan:

UX strategy and agile UX are neither compatible nor incompatible. In an agile shop, UX strategists have to get ahead of the curve and do their work before agile development starts. They need to coach UX team members and convince others on a product team to value the guidance that UX strategy brings to digital design efforts and to follow the strategy in making design decisions throughout the life of the program. Once the agile train gets rolling, it may be very difficult to introduce strategic considerations.