The AppsLab

Let me start by saying that there were kids in the audience of the Drones, Data X Conference held this past weekend in Santa Cruz, something I have not seen at any other tech conference. I thought it was pretty cool. At the end, I found there was a reason for kids to be there.… Read More

Editor’s note: Here’s our first Apple Watch review from Thao (@thaobnguyen), our head of research and design. Look for a companion review taken from Noel (@noelportugal) later this week. Thanks, Apple! I got an Apple Watch (38mm) delivered on Friday, April 24. Full disclosure, I’m a long time Apple user. My household runs on Apple so… Read More

And now back to the Apple Watch content. If you’ve read here for a while, you might remember we used to be part of the WebCenter development team, and we worked with Oracle Social Network, affectionately OSN. We even ran a developer challenge for OSN at OpenWorld back in 2012. Yesterday, longtime friend of the… Read More

Editor’s note: Let’s take a break from all the Apple Watch frenzy. Breathe. And now enjoy a post from Julia, interaction designer extraordinaire, about her favorite wearable. She knows her stuff, having lived with a couple of the early smartwatches for long more than a year. Among all the smart watch hype, one smart watch stays on… Read More

Ho hum, Apple released a Watch on Friday. I haven’t see this kind of nerd frenzy since Google Glass finally reached its first Explorers. The Watch has transcended nerd-only fandom to reach regular people’s consciousness too, e.g. when I wore the Basis Peak, several people asked if it was *the* Watch. Well, Noel (@noelportugal) and… Read More

Speaking of strategies, Misha (@mishavaughan) asked me to write up an article–not a post, there’s a difference–describing how this team goes about its business, i.e. researching, designing and developing solutions for the emerging technologies that will affect our users in the near and not-so-near future. You can, and should, read the resulting article over at the… Read More

So, apparently Apple is launching a watch soon, which has people asking us, i.e. Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps), what our strategy is for the watch of watches. If you read here, you probably already know we’ve been looking at smart watches, super watches, and wearables of all kinds for a few years. So, the strategy is already in… Read More

The kid in me loves this behemoth so very much, h/t to Kottke. This rail refresher is a Swietelsky RU 800-S. There are lots of videos showing this dream machine at work.

Right after I finished wearing the Nike+ Fuelband for three weeks, I moved straight on to another wearable device, the Basis Peak. The Peak falls into a category Ultan (@ultan, @usableapps) calls the “super watch,” a term that nicely differentiates watches like the Peak (and the Fitbit Surge) from fitness bands (e.g. Jawbone UP24, Nike+ Fuelband,… Read More

Editor’s note: Here’s a review of the Fitbit Surge from Ultan (@ultan, @usableapps); if anyone can road-test a fitness tracker, it’s him. As luck would have it, the Surge is on my list of wearables to test as well. So, watch this space for a comparison review from a much less active person. Enjoy. I’ve upgraded… Read More

I’m currently in Washington D.C. at Oracle HCM World. It’s been a busy conference; on Wednesday, Thao and Ben ran a brainstorming session on wearables as part of the HCM product strategy council’s day of activities. Then yesterday, the dynamic duo ran a focus group around emerging technologies and their impact on HCM, specifically wearables and Internet… Read More

For those of you who enjoy our content via the feed (thank you), I have news. Next week, I’ll be changing the feed’s name, so if you want to continue to receive AppsLab goodness in your feed reader of choice or in your inbox, you’ll need to come back here and subscribe again. Or maybe it’s… Read More

Here come some rapid fire tidbits about upcoming and recently past Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps) events. Events of the Near Past Laurie Pattison’s (@lsptahoe) team (@InnovateOracle) has been organizing events focused around stimulating and fostering innovation for quite some time now. I’ve always been a big fan of group-think-and-work exercises, e.g. design jams, hackathons, ShipIts,… Read More

I don’t like wearing stuff on my wrist, but in my ongoing quest to learn more about the wearables our users wear, I have embarked on a journey. For science! And for better living through math, a.k.a. the quantified self. And because I’ll be at HCM World later this month talking about wearables, and because wearables… Read More

This is a follow up to my previous post (“Where are the Mobile Windows Devices?“) in which I gave my initial impressions of mobile windows devices.  As part of our assessment of these devices we also developed a few apps and this post details how that went. Getting Started Windows Phone 8.1 applications have to… Read More

That was one of the questions one of the Oracle’s Executives asked when we presented our new Cloud UX Lab.  The short answer was that there were none.  As far as I am aware, we never did any testing of any of our prototypes and applications on Windows Phones or tablets because, frankly, we thought it didn’t… Read More

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

A couple days ago, I was preparing to show some development work Luis (@lsgaleana) did for Android Wear using the Samsung Gear Live. One of the interesting problems we’ve encountered lately is projecting our device work onto larger screens to show to an audience. I know, bit of a first world problem, which is why I said… Read More

Friend of the ‘Lab, Kathy, has been using Storify for a while now to compile easy-to-consume, erm, stories about the exploits of Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps). You might remember Storify from past stories such as the In the U.K.: Special events and Apps 14 with UKOUG and Our OpenWorld 2014 Journey. Anyway, Kathy has a new… Read More