Standing Out From The Crowd

Babies represent the quintessential user experience challenge: understanding and satisfying the needs of someone with whom you have no common language, no shared experience or perspective.

You should never underestimate the power of being cheerful. As an user experience expert, I learned in the course of my career that human beings are driven by what they feel and believe (perceptions & expectations) a lot more often than they are by rational thinking. So much so that, in almost any situation one faces, you can achieve more with a smile and a cheerful attitude than what any amount of reasoning could provide.

Everything changes all the time; it’s just the nature of our modern world.  The real problem is not how fast things change but how out-of-control we usually feel for not knowing where all these changes will eventually lead. We are all afraid of missing the boat for the next big thing. Social Media, Netbooks, multi-touch [...]

 In a recent post,  The “ART” of Being Genuine,  Kathryn Jennex (aka @northernchick) generated a very passionate discussion about what it is to be “genuine.” It is a great post and I recommend reading it with all its comments but, apart from the insight on human relationships and perception, the post really got me thinking about [...]

I don’t know anyone who would want to be wrong.  Our culture is wired with a deep, primal need to always be right, which leads us to deceive ourselves into believing we actually are always right, which again leads us to believe that everyone else is wrong.   (Wait… WHAT??!?) Normally, one would think this is [...]

It’s interesting how you can find Customer Experience wisdom in the strangest places. The message I got for this post came in fact from a novel I was reading yesterday (The Dark Tower III, by Stephen King). In it, two of the main characters were discussing odd human reactions to certain situations when making decisions.  [...]

Everyone has been talking about how Obama’s campaign used the power of Social Networks and the Internet.  There’s also been a lot of buzz around how the same concepts and innovations could be used to improve the effectiveness of his presidency and turn it into a truly participative democracy. The expectations around what the Transition [...]

Pew study predicts that most people will be accessing the Internet via mobile/wireless devices (phones, smart-phones, portable computers, etc) by 2020. The study also has some interesting analysis on the evolution of Privacy, Property Law, Social Tolerance, User Interface Design and the mingling of personal and work time. See more about the study here   [...]