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At Centigrade, we are committed to providing our customers with a good user experience. Of course, we want the same for our employees! But what is the current status of this? In order to be able to assess this in an unbiased way, we had a SME check on employer attractiveness carried out by the Demografie Netzwerk Saar. read more…
How relative time is – 16 years sounds young and inexperienced on the scale of a human lifetime. For Centigrade as a company in the IT and digital design industry, however, it is a long time in which we have been able to gather a lot of knowledge and experience profound changes.
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More than 20 innovative presentations, several three-hour intensive workshops, inspiring exchange with UX professionals and new contacts. From 14 to 15.10. the UX Day Online Conference will take place again. Thomas Immich will give a talk on 14.10. at from 09:45 to 10:15 entitled “Getting User Stories right” and show how UX and agile product development come together more effectively through user stories and as a result a better product is created.
From Oct. 12 to Oct. 14, UX experts will gather for the eighth time at the World Usability Congress in Graz. At the three-day international conference, speakers from various industries discussed practical challenges in the field of UX and collaborated with participants in a wide variety of workshops. Thomas Immich will give a talk on Oct. 13 at 10:15 a.m. titled “Getting User Stories right” and show how UX and agile product development come together more effectively through user stories and subsequently create a better product.
At Centigrade we created the art word “parodyping”, because one time when we released a prototype we received the question if we were serious about this or if it was a parody. That got us thinking. But what do we actually mean by it? read more…
Which design school of thought is more meaningful?
Or do we simply need a new school of thought, since the climate crisis means that we are living in a time when it no longer makes sense to focus solely on people? So is there a need for something like Environment Centered Design? Planet Centered Design? Impact Driven Design?
Listen to our very entertaining podcast with Prof. Georg-Christof Bertsch. Have fun!
Since the beginning of the year, we have been a proud partner of edu-sharing NETWORK. The non-profit association has been networking educational organizations since 2010 and makes digital, free learning content accessible to teachers, students and other inquisitive people. At the beginning of the Corona crisis, the network built the national platform “WirLernenOnline – Freie Bildung zum Mitmachen”. As UX experts, we actively helped shape the platform.
Working on the digital product as a craftsmanship: True to this approach, the International Requirements Engineering Board (IREB) has created a new type of profession: Digital Designer. The goal is to take a holistic view of the digital working world – from technology to the economic environment. We at Centigrade are now a certified training provider for the preparation for the Digital Design Professional (DDP) exam. read more…
Our Armadillo OutdoorOffice concept is still in an early stage… or as we would say in UX Professional Lingo: it is still in the product discovery phase. In this phase, we want to use different prototypes and product variants to gradually find out which solutions for open air work really work and which do not. read more…
How can the future be shaped by the influence of information technologies and artificial intelligence? The Saarland Ministry of Economics, Labor, Energy and Transport is hosting an online event with Economics Minister Anke Rehlinger on Wednesday, July 14, from 6 to 7 p.m., in which this question will be examined with the participants. Peter Grendel from abat+, Dr. Sandra Strohbach from the Helmholtz Center for Information Security, Anna Lawera from the East-Side-Fab and Thomas Immich from Centigrade will be taking part.
The event is part of the “Zukunftsschmiede Saarland” campaign, in which forward-looking projects in Saarland were presented. Participation is possible directly via LinkedIn.
The UX-DAY Online Training is a series of seminars for all digital minds who want to acquire in-depth knowledge about UX, design, marketing and business in a short time. Selected experts share their knowledge live in intensive sessions, present current cases and best practices and provide practical insights. On July 8, a webinar with Thomas Immich will take place on Player Types and other modern methods for designing motivating user experiences in the healthcare sector.
Global change in the economy often leads to extensive structural change. This was also the case in Saarland. The decline of the coal and steel industry in the 1960s and 1970s resulted in the loss of more than 60,000 jobs. However, the campaign of the Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labor, Energy and Transport shows that Saarland is made up of more than just coal and steel.
In the “Zukunftsschmiede Saarland” campaign of the Saarland Ministry of Economic Affairs, Labor, Energy and Transport, the Saarland was examined from completely different angles. A state that is a strong and modern industrial state. An industrial state 4.0 – more sustainable, more innovative and more broadly based. To this end, four forward-looking projects were considered: One of them was the IOT Assist project by Centigrade.
Digitalization presents us with major health challenges. More and more jobs are becoming desk jobs, and balanced exercise or work in the fresh air is becoming less and less of a requirement – with negative consequences for the musculature and psyche. But digitalization also brings great opportunities: The IoT Assist project motivates people to integrate a healthier lifestyle into their everyday working lives – thanks to a combination of IoT technologies and gamification concepts.
The announced goal of the IoT Assist project is the development of a platform that enables communication between devices and services in the IoT and wearable area. This platform offers the possibility to implement intelligent assistance systems for health promotion in a simple and intuitive way. Here, particular focus is placed on the integration of existing device ecosystems in everyday and home environments to address the growing problem of isolated solutions. To ensure that the different technologies can be easily integrated, we provide a technology-neutral interface including various AI modules. In user-centered workshops, individual assistance systems tailored to the user are built and tested in daily professional life.
The motivation concepts developed in the IoTAssist project rely on “gamification”. Gamification is the “application of game-typical elements in a non-game context”. Gamification is by no means the same as conventional incentive or reward systems. A reward is merely an “external trigger”, i.e. a manual impulse that is intended to get someone to perform an action. For example, a health insurance company pays a premium if the client exercises more frequently. However, if this external trigger falls away, the person is also very likely to stop taking the action – i.e., the health-seeking behavior. The person was merely “extrinsically motivated.”
Gamification, on the other hand, is about awakening the “intrinsic motivation” of each person. To do this, a rational action (e.g., “I need to move to get the insurance premium.”), should become an emotional action (“I want to move because it makes me feel better.”). Instead of focusing on the reward, the focus becomes personal progress.
In the project, Centigrade designs and analyzes various IoT prototypes, conducts user studies, and optimally adapts the motivational design in the software modules to the psychological needs of the users.
In addition to Centigrade, the research panel consists of other Saarland-based companies, including DFKI, DHfPG, and Eyeled. Other partners are the Stuttgart-based company ThingOS, the Technical University of Munich, and the University of Duisburg-Essen.
In the first year of the project, a promising partnership has already been formed between Centigrade and the Munich-based startup Walkolution, which is revolutionizing office work “while walking”.
In addition, Centigrade is launching Germany’s first “Digital Outdoor Office” this summer as part of the IoTAssist project in response to colleagues’ “home office fatigue”. For this purpose, Centigrade has developed a desk that enables outdoor screen work even in intense sunlight.
Thomas Immich, Owner & Managing Director Centigrade
„In this forward-looking project, we are getting to the bottom of a highly explosive question: What really motivates people, especially in the long term, to behave more healthily in their daily working lives?“
