user experience

True story: a few years ago, I met a 40 years old mother who told me that, every once in a while, she and her son would get together virtually on MSN Messenger, her in the living room, him in his bed. They would discuss the day, share a few jokes, and sometimes engage into conversations they "could not have had face to face", like talking about some more sensitive and intimate stuff. The layers of technology they put between them actually facilitated a certain kinds of exchanges.

Whatever we think of this dynamic (some will find it brilliant, others horrifying), it is a fact that technologies have profoundly reshaped the way we communicate at home. Families function in a completely new way, and email is now the equivalent of postcards. I used to send postcards to my grandma, thinking "I need to use this obsolete form of communication to make her happy". Now my kids do the same with email. They use it only to interact with "old people" like me.

At Lift12, Stefana will share with us the results of hours of observation on families, telling us how technologies have reshaped our intimate interactions. She will give us a pragmatic view, and explain the good but also when technologies made our lives more complicated. She will answer the question raised by the opening session: is it us "with technology", or us "versus technology"?

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about UXconference, a conference organized by Lifters Diana Malerba and Luca Mascaro in Lugano later this year.

I am writing to present you UXconference, a user experience conference we are organizing in Lugano, Switzerland. The conference is about innovation and new ideas in user experience strategy, mobile site and application design, playful ux and agile design.

Starting on December 3, we want to create a first "Swiss" appointment to talk about innovation and to let people meet and know each other and generate new ideas, to contribute to the future user experience.

We believe in people, in innovation, in experiences. What about you?

See you at UXconference! Check the programme, speakers and register!

Beside team communications, this blog features posts written by community members. If you have a Lift account you can also share your thoughts and ideas by clicking here. Here is a post about the World Usability Day, an event organized by Florian Egger in Geneva.

World Usability Day was founded by the Usability Professionals' Association to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.

Join us on Thursday 12 November at Hotel Bristol, Geneva, to participate in World Usability Day 2009.

This year, the event will have two parts:
1. Usability training courses in the afternoon
* How to integrate User-Centered Design into your projects by Mary Mooney, MBA (Telono)
* How to set up and run your usability tests by Florian Egger, PhD (Telono)

2. Presentations by invited speakers and our traditional networking apéro.
* Achieving Usability with Interaction Design Patterns by Ahmed Seffah, PhD (EHL/UNIL)
* TRIL : Technology Research for Independent Living by Claire Somerville, PhD (TRIL Centre)
* Apéro sponsored by Telono

Cost
Training (course materials included):
* Regular price: CHF 240
* Student price: CHF 100
Guest Speaker Presentations & Apéro: FREE

More Information & Registration

Fabio is an interaction design and user experience strategist from Italy. He’s happiest in areas at the intersection of design, technology and (social) connectivity, working on projects that wrap business scenarios around people’s desires and dreams. He’s definitely enthusiastic about mobile.

He’s currently creative director at frog design. Before that he worked in a variety of roles related to design and user experience: lecturing as associate professors at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, managing the design process of soft- and hardware of mobile handsets for a major Italian telecom company as well as as user experience and interaction designer for different companies. He is also a visiting professor at the Politecnico di Milano, Domus Academy and at Scuola Politecnica di Design.

As a long time LIFTer and excellent speaker we are very much looking forward to welcoming Fabio as one of the three speakers for the “design thinking for the future” session on Friday morning. You can find more info about him on his LIFT profile.

Dear LIFTers,

World Usability Day will take place on Thursday 13 November this year and I'm happy to announce that Telono is, once again, organizing a networking event in Geneva!

This year, for the first time, we will have several guest speakers eager to tell you about their experience of user-centred design in practice, as well as a demo of eye-tracking, followed by our traditional apéro.

To see the full program and to register, please go to:
http://www.telono.com/wud2008.htm

I hope to see you there & wish you all the best!

Florian.-

For years, in the "North-West" (that is industrialized countries - usually understood as North vs. South and West vs. East), we've been babbling about the "digital gap" that is supposedly the new line of division, usually understood as running along that of economical and political development. We often have quite a simplistic idea of the situation, imagining countries that are like technological deserts, on top of being devoid of everything essentials for a normal life (that is one car per family, two TV-sets per household, all with at least 40 channels, and 4-weeks vacations in the Bahamas or in the Swiss Alps per years). We tend to forget the forest of satellite dishes that are ornementing most cities and even village buildings in what we used (politcally) incorrectly call "third world" countries. And a recent article from the Mail & Guardian, translated in French in the Courrier International, just reminds us how wrong we often are about the appropriation of "our" modern technologies by people in these countries.

Genevieve Bell grew up in Australia, moving between the working class suburbs of Melbourne and Canberra and the Aboriginal communities of Central and Northern Australia. She has a PhD in anthropology and works as Director of User Experience within Intel’s Digital Home Group. There she manages an inter-disciplinary team of social scientists, interaction designers and human factors engineers.

Ethnographic research is increasingly figured as a foundation for design practice, but the questions of just how these two approaches should be combined remain largely unanswered. In particular, designers often turn to ethnographic work more for marketing data than for cultural understandings. Drawing on some recent studies of mobility and privacy, I will outline an alternative approach that attempts to take ethnography seriously.

Younghee Jung talks about how Nokia explores the different usages of their mobile phones by customers to gain valuable insight on future products design.

What can ethnographical research reveal about the people's use of technologies that classical marketing studies miss? This is the question for which Yonghee Jung and Genevieve Bell, both anthropologists working in design teams for two high tech companies, have offered some answers. Paul Dourish, as the academic anthropologist has somewhat played the devil's advocate by pointing out that such "design ethnographies" also have weak points, that should be taken into account.

Yonghee Jung showed how people can get emotionally and even symbolically involved with the mobile technologies of their daily lives. She took as example one of the projects of her design team, called Nokia Open Studio (NOS), as an example of this phenomenon. The NOS aimed at putting people back at the heart of technology design by sending anthropologists to actually ask them what kind of mobile phone would be most useful to them. Three teams were sent for 2 weeks in three different communities: one in Mumbai, India, another in Rio, Brazil and a third in Accra, capital of Ghana. Since the time they had at hand was short, they mixed several methods (ethnography, street surveys and group meetings) to maximize their capacity to get as much insights from these people as possible. They offered these people to design the mobile phone of their dream and offered an award to the best one. It allowed the NOS team to analyze how these people understand what mobile phone are meant for, how they should be used and what specific needs related to their daily routine they should fullfill.