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.

With educational applications for kids, corporate eLearning, and online degree programs, more and more UX designers face design briefs for creating digital experiences with an educational purpose.

In this article, Dorian Peters presents 14 design guidelines that derive from key findings from relevant psychology and education research on learning with technology. These findings relate specifically to user interface and interaction design for digital learning experiences.

He has drawn most of these guidelines from the pioneering work of educational psychologist Richard E. Mayer, whose discoveries form the foundation of much multimedia instruction today.

This week at the San Francisco Wearable Technology Conference, Jennifer Darmour, UX designer at the Artefact Group, shared with other wearable technology experts her perspective and insights on the principles we must follow to make wearable technology more compelling to a broad consumer market.

Through the successes and failures of her research and design in the consumer electronics and wearable technology fields, she has developed four foundational principles, which if adopted will accelerate making wearable technology mainstream.

1 Contextual : Understanding your audience and what they need to improve their lives
2 Discreet : Pushing the technology to the background so it’s non-disruptive and ambient
3 Connected : Connecting to software and services that bring more value to the experience
4 Fashionable : Removing the geek-factor toward a broader consumer market

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Computers, smartphones and other gadgets have made life easier, but now tech firms are worried that they may be harming people.

Huh? Tech firms worried about addiction to devices?

As also the author of the New York Times piece writes, it “sounds like auto executives selling muscle cars while warning about the dangers of fast acceleration.”

“The concern, voiced in conferences and in recent interviews with many top executives of technology companies, is that the lure of constant stimulation — the pervasive demand of pings, rings and updates — is creating a profound physical craving that can hurt productivity and personal interactions.”

Could it have something to do with their stressed out employees?

“Many tech firms are teaching meditation and breathing exercises to their staff members to help them slow down and disconnect.” [...] “Google has started a “mindfulness” movement at the company to teach employees self-awareness and to improve their ability to focus.”

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“Make your users do the work< ” is the not very people-centred title of a guest piece by Nir Eyal on Techcrunch.

He argues that putting users to work is critical in creating products people love, and he has a point.

Some excerpts:

“Several studies have shown that expending effort on a task seems to commit us to it. For example, when buying a lottery ticket, players are able to either choose their own numbers or play a set of digits generated randomly. Certainly, choosing either option has no effect on the odds of winning. Traditional thinking would predict that the less effortful path would be the one users prefer.

However, the opposite is true. Despite the considerable effort required to pick the lottery numbers, a process reminiscent of filling out multiple choice questions on the S.A.T., players who choose their own numbers play more. This phenomenon isn’t just about a skewed perception of luck. According to a classic study by Ellen Langler, even when players are explicitly told their chances of winning, they choose to trade worse odds for the ability to play the numbers they spent the time and effort picking.”

“Where user investment really becomes valuable is when stored value meets a network effect. Facebook and Pinterest, both services which were useful as stored value products, exploded in use when the power of the network effect took hold. Both are habit-forming products, which bring large numbers of users back unprompted. The combination of stored value and a network effect, along with continual investment from users who regularly add content, has created a strong pull for a large percentage of their users.

Habit-forming technologies take hold when a pattern of trigger, action, reward, and investment, creates desire in the user while providing increasing amounts of value. The more users invest in a way of doing things through tiny bits of work, the more valuable the service becomes in their lives and the less they question its use.

Of course, users don’t stay hooked forever. Though these companies have a good ride, the next big thing inevitably comes along and creates a better way to start building user commitment. While the mantra of making the experience easier to use certainly has its place, the rule must be followed with a strategic purpose in mind — namely increasing the value of the service the more people use it.”

New research by published in the journal Psychological Science shows that awe-inspiring moments can literally make time seem to stand still, or at least slow down. That feeling improves our mental health since many people often feel time-deprived in this modernized world.

Studies showed that experiencing awe made people feel they had more time in their lives. And that, the researchers suggest, can make us nicer to each other.

(via Discovery News and Press Association)

In this short essay, Jon Fisher of UK consultancy Nomensa presents some introductory thoughts about Nomensa’s framework for ”sense making in cross channel design”. In particular, he demonstrates a potential method for visualising the information space from which understanding can be supported in a system.

“Having identified the critical nature of designing for channel transitions (and how they can degrade meaning to a user), we began to discuss various ways that we could visualise the informational needs that users require in a cross channel context. It is argued that there will be a core set of informational needs or requirements that a user must carry between channels that help them form a conceptual understanding of the wider service. We need a way, very early in a design process, to identify, visualise and map these informational needs so that we can begin to construct an idea of how information will flow across our wider product eco-systems.”

(via InfoDesign)

A recent crush of smartphone and tablet apps claim to make hard decisions easier, and the range of ethical dilemmas they can weigh in on will only increase. At this rate, Siri 5.0 may be less a personal assistant than an always-available guide to moral behavior. But depending on a digital Jiminy Cricket may be a regressive step away from what makes us all real, write Evan Selinger and Thomas Seager in Slate Magazine.

“Michael Schrage, research fellow at MIT Sloan School’s Center for Digital Business, gives us a glimpse into what the next generation of apps might do. While discussing potential developments in “promptware” platforms that cue ideal behavior (for instance, sense that we’re exhausted and recommend we should pause before making an important call), he notes that an app in the works will enable users to determine whether they speak too much in critical situations (like business meetings) and make real-time corrections to improve their performance. He speculates large-scale adoption might do more than change personal behavior. It could transform ethical norms—the very fabric of what members of a society expect from one anothe”

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Milan Guenther, founding partner of enterprise design associates, explores the word “user” in “user experience”, and compares it to customer experience, employee experience and brand experience.

“For me, the word Experience in the context of Design work refers to the way people experience the world, and making everything we produce fit into their lives. The word preceding Experience is about the perspective you use when talking about someone’s experience, the roles and the scope you want to focus on. For an enterprise, this translates to the ways it chooses to appear in people’s lives.”

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(via InfoDesign)

In arguing that digital technologies enable embodied experiences that reshape the very ways in which we conceptualize our everyday life, Nishant Shah, founder and Director of Research for the Bangalore-based Centre for Internet and Society, tells us a story from the village of Banni in the desert region of Kutch, located at the North-Western borders of India and Pakistan.

“In this small village that is about 80 kilometers from the biggest town with amenities like hospitals and schools, almost every household has a smart phone with access to the internet. In the absence of more popular forms like radio, which are disallowed because of the proximity to the turbulent India-Pakistan borders, the Chinese-made smart phones become the de facto interface of communication and cultural production. The phones become not only the life-line in times of crises, but also everyday objects through which the villages stay connected with the world of cultural production and entertainment. The internet services on the phones allow them to access Bollywood songs and movies, images and games, popular television programming and other popular cultural products in the country. In many ways, Banni is probably more digitally connected than many parts of the larger cities in the country.”

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In a long article, designer Avi Itzkovitch explains how, when connecting applications across smart devices, UX designers can create product ecosystems that dynamically respond to user contexts and thus provide enhanced experiences.

The author reviews various theories on the multiscreen ecosystem, including this one from Google:

“Michal Levin, a UX designer at Google, describes multiscreen ecosystems in terms of three main categories. The first is consistent experience, where the application and the experience are similar across all screens. [...] The second category is the complementary experience, where devices work together and communicate with each other in order to create a unique experience. [...] The third category of app ecosystems the continuous multiscreen experience, which is possibly the most important category for a contextual multiscreen design. For a continuous experience across several devices, UX professionals must evaluate when and where a product will be used in order to assess the optimal experience for the user at the time of use.”

Itzkovitch then continues by providing his own accumulated experience in understanding the basic context assumption for the various device types: smartphones, tablets, personal computers and smart TVs.

Washington Post publisher Katharine Weymouth announced in a memo that the paper has named Laura Evans, who has spent most of her nine years at the Post as chief researcher, to the newly created position of VP, Chief Experience Officer (CXO).

“As you know, one of the three foundational elements of our strategy is a relentless focus on the customer. While we all care about the customer and try to advocate for the customer, we do not currently have an executive owner of the customer experience. That was acceptable when we published one newspaper a day—when we had a well-honed product with over a century of research behind it. In a day when we have evolved to a 24/7 news operation publishing on multiple platforms, and when we operate in a hyper-competitive market, the customer must be the primary driver of our product-related decisions and changes. Today, we have scores of products that touch our customers in myriad ways—ranging from our flagship newspaper to our growing suite of mobile apps. We must understand the customer experience across and within all of these and other platforms. That understanding must be guided by accurate data and expert analysis of those data. In this regard, the CXO role is a natural extension of Laura’s previous role, where she worked with key leaders across the company to guide our consumer-related decisions with a deeper understanding, based on research and data, of our customers’ behavior, preferences, and interests. [...]

How do we make our products easy to use and navigate? How do we ensure our readers enjoy the experience of using Post products, so that they spend more time interacting with our journalism? By adding Laura’s customer-focused expertise and capabilities throughout the process, we will be better able to achieve those goals.”

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UC Irvine will anchor a new $12.5 million, Intel-funded research center that applies social science and humanities to the design and analysis of digital information.

“Technology is profoundly entangled with our everyday lives. As researchers, we can’t get a handle on what’s going on by looking at technical factors alone. We have to study them in concert with human, social and cultural aspects,” said UCI informatics professor Paul Dourish.

He and Scott Mainwaring of Intel Labs will co-lead the center, dubbed the Intel Science & Technology Center for Social Computing, along with UCI anthropology and law professor Bill Maurer.

Intel researchers will work side by side with academics in campus labs. The research is not proprietary and will be public, open intellectual property. Mainwaring, senior research scientist with Intel Labs’ Interaction & Experience Research group, has already moved into an office at UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information & Computer Sciences.

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Experientia has always been very interested in the work of Paul Dourish, and frequently featured it on its blog. This is a tremendously exciting development, and we wish Prof. Dourish all the best with this new Intel research center.

And as a pleasant aside, the building tiles featured on the directors photo are somehow strangely reminiscent of the building tiles of another educational research center devoted to the same theme: the well-known Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.

Nir Eyal, lecturer in marketing at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, believes secrets about human behavior, which provide insights into the way people act even though they can’t tell you why, are levers for creating user habits and competitive advantage. These kinds of secrets are also relatively cheap to uncover but can be the basis of massive enterprises.

“Once, only large companies had the resources to discover monetizable secrets. Throughout the twentieth century, companies like GE, Dupont, Chrysler, and IBM specialized in discovering the optimal form of physical goods and their insights lay largely hidden in the discipline of industrial design. For these companies, uncovering secrets required massive R&D investment to find the best way to create a better, cheaper, or faster product.

But today, as software continues to eat the world, service industries are being upended by upstarts. A new crop of companies like AirBnB, DropBox, and Square exploits secrets gleaned not from industrial design, but from interaction and systems design. These companies remedy old problems by designing interfaces to create new user behaviors.’

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Dan Ariely is a professor of behavioral economics and psychology at Duke University and the author of Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions, and The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic, both New York Times bestsellers.

Ariely’s new book, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty, explores some of the surprising reasons we lie to each other, and ourselves. Raised in Israel, Ariely holds Ph.D.s in both business administration and psychology. Wired senior editor Joanna Pearlstein spoke with Ariely as part of the Live Talks Business Forums series at the City Club of Los Angeles.

“[What] worries me is we’re moving to a cashless society; we’re soon going to have all kinds of electronic wallets. We have all kinds of esoteric financial instruments. We have lots of things that are multiple steps removed from money. We are moving to a situation which allows people to rationalize dishonesty to a much, much higher degree. And because of that whenever we have financial instruments that are further way from money, we just need to be more careful.”

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When communicating, context is king. A breakthrough in modelling context in human communication could make computers better conversationalists, according to cognitive scientists at Stanford University.

“[Michael] Frank, [head of Stanford University's Language and Cognition Lab] and colleague Noah Goodman, also a cognitive scientist from Stanford, have developed a mathematical encoding of what they call “common knowledge” and “informativeness” in human conversation. “We have a vastly powerful predictive model of the world,” says Goodman. “When somebody goes to understand a statement that somebody else has made, they’re making the best guess about the meaning of that statement, incorporating all these factors like informativeness and context.”

By “putting numbers to” a theory of communication that dates back to the 1960s, they have come up with a model that not only describes part of the mutual understanding shared between human speakers, but also lays the groundwork for the next generation of our AI interlocutors, from pocket voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Android’s Iris to automated customer-service bots. “We’ve created a formalism for trying to predict what speakers are talking about and shown that it makes pretty good predictions,” says Frank. But the developers of Iris, for instance, also confirm that context-based understanding will give the edge in their field.”

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Windows 8 and the art of UX compromise
by Ryan Bell, user interface software team lead at EffectiveUI
Microsoft is cleverly promoting Windows 8 with the tagline “no compromises.” The idea is that you get both a desktop/laptop operating system (OS) and a tablet OS in one package and a “best of both worlds” experience on any device.
In reality, the decision to meld the traditional mouse-and-keyboard Windows with a new, radically different kind of interface designed for touch devices is itself a compromise – a choice with understandable business and engineering rationales, but one that is likely to introduce significant challenges for the Windows user experience (UX) in the months ahead.

Why Windows 8 could be the next Vista
by Sean Ludwig, staff writer for VentureBeat
Thinking about Windows 8 fills me with a strong sense of unease. Whether it’s the thought of using the OS on my desktop on a daily basis or the coming backlash by consumers when the OS lands, it distresses me on more levels than it should. Windows 8 could very well be the next Vista.

As a people-centred design company, Experientia® frequently uses participatory design methods in its projects.

We believe that people are usually the best experts on their own lives, and participatory methods help us to tap into that expertise, to create an outcome that really matters to people.

Over the years, we have used participatory workshops and co-creative activities in North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Nordic and Continental Europe, to design product and service concepts ranging from websites to public saunas, from mobile phone applications to office spaces.

In a feature article in our spotlights section we present three examples of how using participatory design in a project has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the problem being explored, and the quality of our solutions. The examples include better service ideas for one of America’s biggest pharmacy chains, mobile phone concepts for emerging markets, and combining saunas and business in Finland.

Method principal Reuben Steiger argues that companies need to start thinking about the holistic relationship between their brands, products, and services.

“Crafting an experience requires design that considers these 3 elements of brand, product, and service in order to generate successful results. Any company can be analyzed through these lenses to evaluate the experience it creates for its customers. The iPhone is a product that delivers services and fulfills the promise of the Apple brand. Other examples abound: Nike Fuel, Amazon Kindle and HBO GO. Put another way, a product is an experience that occurs in the moment. A service is a relationship that extends over time and across platforms and mediums. A brand is much more than the logo; it is the pattern our brains expect based on everything we have previously heard, seen, and felt. All of these components roll up into the larger experience.” [...]

“Ultimately, we all recognize a great experience when we encounter it, but designing your own is elusively difficult. The days of perfect plans within a top-down hierarchy are over. Instead, we need to influence our companies to embrace shared values and product principles. Then, each of us can be a Chief Experience Officer creating memorable experiences and a cohesive, engaging, and delightful brand.”

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As visual analytics architect in SAP’s User Experience team, John Armitage is responsible for creating designs and design concepts for SAP’s analytics products. In this article he talks about new and creative ways of displaying information.

“To demonstrate how current technological and market opportunities can transform how analytics are applied in the SAP product landscape, I launched two projects, LAVA and Pele.

I proposed LAVA as a user experience standard for analytic content in SAP products. The project began in 2011 as a team effort with Fred Samson of the SAP Experience Team. LAVA is best described as a method for analytic consumption. It makes analytics accessible to many more end-users, filling and expanding the role of traditional dashboards in the business intelligence landscape. It can be used as a stand-alone solution or for embedding within SAP products.
Simple and systematic, LAVA is intended to be low-cost, easily implemented, and widely applicable. State-of-the-art chart appearance, interaction, and scalability result from LAVA’s clean, practical visual language. Templates and components enable continuity of user experience and code across devices and products, and components are built to enable social collaboration, annotation, and closed loop scenarios.

Pele is a more experimental project conducted with SAP Research, combining navigational menus with charts into a visualization environment that users can explore. Pele is also a response to the challenge to demonstrate “immersive interaction with quantitative information”, and addresses the request by Andrew Murray, general manager, SAP Mobile Analytics, for an intuitive, proprietary data exploration experience on mobile devices. The result combines semantic navigation (via words) with spatial navigation (via screen areas representing quantities) to provide a fluid, intuitive, immersive experience of exploring a data set.”

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