Can design change the world?

Letzte Woche war es soweit: Wir durften endlich mal wieder ein UX Academy Training vor Ort geben – und das nach zwei langen Remote-Jahren. Dafür haben wir sogar das Büro umgebaut! Okay…, nicht nur für dieses Training, sondern für unseren Brand Refresh und #RethinkDesignWork. Unser Office soll also schöner werden für alle Kolleg*innen, für alle […]

Earlier this year the start-up Elexir reached out to us with their unique vision of creating a more sustainable car. They built a highly customizable and extendable shared car, trying to attain the same experience as of owned, personalised cars. They achieved this by developing a completely new underlying software architecture. By using an open-source […]

How can you live a healthier life through games? What are gametypical UX elements? What types of players are there? And how do you take the healthcare sector to the next level with gamification? Thomas Immich asked these and other questions at the closing event of the Decisions2 lecture series organized by Game Dev Saar […]

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?

User Experience means that users experience a product. The most innovative controls and the most fluid animations are useless if the product is not sold and used. As a UX service provider, we have seen many times how good UX not only makes the product a success for users, but also how UX helps a […]

Motion design, the animation of digital content, has become an essential part of our modern interaction with computers. Wherever you look in modern applications, text boxes fly around, elements pop up and menus shrink as you scroll. UX designers have long recognized animations as an essential building block to increase usability and delight the user. […]

In the first part of this two part series my colleague Simon Kieke drew a bold conclusion regarding the importance of IoT for medium-sized enterprises. Instead of adapting an “all or nothing” mentality, he suggested to integrate small and user-centered digital services into already existing products. This way, IoT products are created with reduced risk […]

We are confronted with very different kinds of to-dos every day. It is only natural that some of those tasks are more fun than others. Especially less motivating tasks, for example housekeeping, are last on the list: cleaning the coffee machine, tidying up the refrigerator, sorting empty bottles. The preferences and aversions may be individually […]

2014 is ending, and  the term IoT (Internet of Things) is entering the public awareness of the German-speaking regions for the first time. The concept is promising: individuals can rely on a connected intelligent environment to solve everyday problems. Businesses can develop previously inconceivable products and services, and sell them at scale. McKinsey is predicting […]

This article is currently only available in German language.

This article is currently only available in German language

When I started working at Centigrade, I wondered what the “User Interface Architectures” tagline in the company name is about. New terms are common in our line of work; the terminology is still young and changing all the time, many people try to influence it with their own terms and definitions. Still, I thought “why […]

The first part of this article provided an overview of the concepts of the currently implemented user interfaces for the Kinect™ sensor. It pointed out technical specifications and explained the human-machine interaction within Kinect games. This second part now scrutinizes this interaction and assesses its potential for industrial application.

In November 2010, Microsoft® introduced Kinect™. As an expansion of the Xbox 360™ gaming console, it brings controller-free gaming to the living room and even long before its actual release it was believed to revolutionize Human Computer Interaction. Therefore, expectations were rather high and one felt reminded of the Natural User Interface (NUI) featured in […]

Keeping the background information of the previous article in mind, assume you want to make use of Blend to design a NUI based on Silverlight or WPF that lets you easily manipulate items on the screen. In the beginning, you won’t even touch the tool at all – you “invent” whatever gesture you think is […]

Every user interface designer is familiar with the procedure to some extent: To find out what a user interface needs to look and behave like it’s certainly a good idea to create a prototype and evaluate it with potential users. Users will tell you what’s still nagging them and therefore should be improved before coding […]