Editor’s note: For posterity’s sake, I’m reposting some content that we created during our time at Oracle. These statements and views are those of the author and do not reflect those of Oracle’s current user experience organization. Playing at work promotes discovery, opens door to innovation What if work could also be play? It turns… Read More
Author: Ben Bendig
When tech media started proclaiming 2016 as the year of the bots, they seem to have nailed it. At Oracle we have at least three groups working on bots, OAUX included. One of the latest forays into bots was a Personal Assistant Technologies (PAT) hackathon, organized by Laurie Pattison’s (@lsptahoe) Apps UX Innovation Events team, open… Read More
Companies talk about “Gamification,” but the first time I felt like I was playing a game at work was driving our Double telepresence robot around the office floor, rolling down the hallway and poking into cubicles. With a few simple controls—forward, backward, left, and right—it took me back to the D-pad on my NES, trying… Read More
The AppsLab’s Latest Inter-State Adventure: A Site Visit to Micros
Probably the best way to get to know your users is to watch them work, in their typical environment. That, and getting to talk to them right after observing them. It’s from that perspective that you can really see what works, what doesn’t, and what people don’t like. And this is exactly what we want… Read More
Samsung Developer Conference: VR and More
VR was the big thing at the Samsung Developer Conference, and one of the points that got driven across, both in the keynotes and in other talks throughout the day, was that VR is a fundamentally new medium—something we haven’t seen since the motion picture. Injong Rhee, the executive VP of R&D for Software and… Read More
VR Research at OBUG
As part of our push to do more international research, I hopped over to Europe to show some customers VR and gather their impressions and thoughts on use cases. This time it was at OBUG, the Oracle Benelux User Group, which was held in Arnhem, a refreshing city along the Rhine. Given that VR is… Read More
Any Port in a Storm: Novel Ways of Interacting with Our Devices
With smartwatches, sometimes your fingers just aren’t good enough for the task at hand. Fortunately, some ingenious users have found a suitable alternative for when those digits just won’t do: their nose. That thing sticking out from your face is enough like a fingertip to act as one in situations where your hands might be… Read More
Guerrilla Testing at OHUG
The Apple Watch came out, and we had a lot of questions: What do people want to do on it? What do they expect to be able to do on it? What are they worried about? And more importantly, what are they excited about? But we had a problem—we wanted to ask a lot of… Read More
QS15: Measurement with Meaning
Walking into something as a newcomer is always an adventure of reality interacting with expectations. Though I wasn’t quite sure what to expect at the Quantified Self conference, it wasn’t what I expected. But in a good way. The conference was structured around three main activities: talks given on the main stage, breakout sessions, which… Read More
IoT Hackathon Field Report: Mexico Edition
I recently ventured down to Mexico to participate in an Internet of Things (IoT) hackathon organized by Laurie Pattison’s (@lsptahoe) Apps UX Innovation Events team with some of my fellow AppsLab members, Luis Galeana, Tony Orciuoli, and Osvaldo Villagrana. Being the lone non-developer, I wasn’t sure how much I would be able to contribute—but I had… Read More
Automatic: Nice, but Not Necessary
Editor’s note: Here’s the first post from one of our newish team members, Ben. Ben is a usability engineer with a PhD in Cognitive Psychology, and by his own account, he’s also a below average driver. Those two factoids are not necessarily related; I just don’t know what his likes and dislikes are so I’m spit-balling.… Read More