2016 has been a whirlwind so far, and February kept up the pace. Here’s a quick rundown of what we’ve been doing. As we did last year, OAUX made a trip to APAC again this year to meet partners, customers and Oracle people, show our Expo of goodies and talk simplicity-mobility-extensibility, Glance, Scan, Commit and our… Read More

I love data, always have. To feed this love and to compile data sets for my quantified self research, I recently added the Netatmo Weather Station to the other nifty devices that monitor and quantify my everyday life, including Fitbit Aria, Automatic and Nest. I’ve been meaning to restart my fitness data collection too, after spending most of… Read More

Worn Out With Wearables That well-worn maxim about keeping it simple, stupid (KISS) now applies as much to wearable tech (see what I did there?) user experience as it does to mobile or web apps. The challenge is to keep on keeping “it” simple as product managers and nervous C-types push for more bells and… Read More

From Antiques to Apple “I don’t own a watch myself,” a great parting shot by Kevin of Timepiece Antique Clocks in the Liberties, Dublin. I had popped in one rainy day in November to discover more about clock making and to get an old school perspective on smartwatches. Kevin’s comment made sense. “Why would he… Read More

Editor’s Note: Reposted from Ultan’s (@ultan) Tumblr, a great read. Ultan knows his fitness (and fashion), so his rousing endorsement of the Peak is legit. Read my impressions of the Basis Peak for more. Since I wore it last, Basis has updated the watch’s firmware to add some pretty cool features. Enjoy. “You’ve been running! Take… Read More

Cross-posted from VoX. Behind the Oracle user experience goals of designing for simplicity, mobility, and extensibility is a core design philosophy guiding the Oracle Applications User Experience (OAUX) team’s work in emerging technologies: “Glance, Scan, Commit.” It nicely boils down a mountain of research and a design experience that shapes the concepts you can see from… Read More

User experience design as a career fell largely on the era of GUI. Thus most people in my profession are visual thinkers if not by birth than by experience. When it comes to presenting information, we think visualization. Times are changing, and with that we are challenged to present information verbally. This is where text… Read More

I always thought of myself as a control freak, Type A, self-aware (flaws and all) person but then I attended the Quantified Self Conference last week in San Francisco. There is so much more one can do to learn about one’s self. The possibilities are endless on what I can quantify (measure about myself) and… Read More

A busy June is half over now, but we still have miles to go before July. We’ve been busy, which you know if you read here. Raymond went to Boston. Tony, Thao (@thaobnguyen), Ben and I were in Las Vegas at OHUG 15. John and Thao were in Minneapolis the week before that. Oh, and Anthony was… Read More

Google I/O 2015 has just ended.  There are lots of aspects regarding to Google I/O.  Lets have a taste of it from the user experience perspective. There are lots of features announced in Google I/O, and you may find a lot of focus have been around user experience this year. First, for the pre-show, there were planets and… Read More

Lots going on here in AppsLab land and in Oracle Applications User Experience (@usableapps). This here is a recap post. Showing the Oracle Applications User Experience Roadmap to Oracle’s Asia Partners At the beginning of May, Anthony (@anthonyslai) and Raymond joined a large contingent of the OAUX team in an two-stop tour of Asia. The… Read More

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

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

Earlier this month, Noel (@noelportugal) and I (@joybot12) represented the AppsLab crew at the UKOUG Apps 14 and Tech 14 conferences in Liverpool. I conducted customer feedback sessions with users who fit the “c-level executive” user profile, to collect feedback on some of our new interactive data visualizations. Unfortunately, I can’t share any of these design concepts just… Read More

Editor’s note: Here’s another new post from a new team member. Shortly after the ‘Lab expanded to include research and design, I attended a workshop on visualizations hosted by a couple of our new team members, Joyce, John and Julia.  The event was excellent. John and Julia have done an enormous amount of critical thinking… Read More

Our location is relentlessly tracked by our mobile devices. Our online transactions – both business and social – are recorded and stored in the cloud. And reams of biometric data will soon be collected by wearables.  Mining this contextual data offers a significant opportunity to enhance the state of human computer interaction. But this begs… Read More

I just got back to my hotel room after attending the first of a two day Cognitive Computing Forum, a conference running in parallel to the Semantic Technology (SemTech) Business Conference and the NoSQL Conference here in San Jose. Although the forum attracts less attendees and has only a single track, I cannot remember attending… Read More