An experiment in light expression

“Call of the Mall’ by Paco Underhill, retail ethnographer at large and CEO of Envirosell is an engaging part observation and part analysis, part personal reflection part commentary on American shopping behavior – all through the viewpoint of Malls – one of the more banal yet fascinating temples of capitalistic endeavor. The book grips you right from the beginning with the one liners in the Prologue (here is an excerpt):

“Why are we here?
We’re here to buy stuff
We’re here because we’re bored
We’re here because tomorrow’s Mothers’ Day
We’re here for the new Avril Lavigne CD
We’re here for emancipation
We’re here for lip gloss
We’re here because our mom made us come
We’re looking for sheets and towels
We’re looking for sex and love
We’re looking for self esteem
We’re looking for jeans that fit…….”

As I read Call of the Mall and reflected on the retail revolution underway in India, I thought (with due apologies to Arthur Miller’s quote on newsprint), “A mall, then, is a nation connecting with itself”.

This book reminded me that malls are much more than simple shopping sites. Malls are indeed legitimate social interaction spaces and initiation grounds for certain kinds of (teenagers, first time shoppers, binging consumers) socially sanctioned behavior. And indeed, malls are safer, more secure and sanitized than the otherwise chaotic urban cities they surround.

And yet, malls can be so much more interesting if they also become sites for community connections, experimental sites for new kinds of consumption, and ultimately sites that show us bizarre, friendly, and real faces of the multi-racial, multi-cultural world we live in.

Perhaps the world’s largest malls emerging in China, and someday in India, will show the way through performance art, community events, outreach programs, and most fundamentally relevant merchandise!

On Dec 14, I braved about 90 minutes of insane Bangalore traffic to fend my way from Whitefield to Palace grounds for the Remember Shakti concert (thanks Hari for another good trip report).

This concert was quite special because I finally heard John Mclaughlin ‘live’. My first brush with McLaughlin’s music was in the heady summer of 2002 when I spent much of extended graduate school life in a musical haze. It was then that I first heard Mahavishnu Orchestra and Shakti and some of McLaughlin’s work with Paco de Lucia, Al De Meola, Trilok Gurtu, Carlos Santana. Some of my old friends including Leon from Minneapolis and Sabari from Mumbai have had run ins with John personally or through his music and it would be fair to say that in the ‘fusion world music’ or whatever other silly category McLaughlin’s jazz music is put within, his music has been an important reference point for me.
The concert had a mostly ambient and light feel, with moments of punctuated release by Selvaganesh and ‘Mandolin’ Srinivas and Shankar Mahadevan, and a few vigorous taals and riffs by Zakir and McLaughlin. I went away with a generally satisfied feeling, I suppose its unfair to expect personal epiphanies to arise even with such a stellar lineup.
I tried recording some of the music with my Nokia 6681 which was a BAD idea - the recording sucked when played later. : )

In early December, I gave a small plug on User Experience 101 at Bangalore Barcamp 2006. Thanks Muthu for helping with the presentation :-]

The crowd at Barcamp is quite different than the usual Bangalore conference crowd. It is certainly more agile, sharper, savvier, and keenly aware of global technology, business, and design trends. Some of the presentations I enjoyed (below are links to their sites or related podcast links) were:

- Web 2.0 business models by Sowmya Karmalli

- A Reality Check on WiMax by Sujai Karampuri of Sloka Telecom

- An overview of MingleBox, an Indian social networking site (a direct competitor to Orkut) by Kavita Iyer

- An overview of the Venture Capital scene at Sequoia Capital by Sandeep Singhal
- An awesome overview of the Indian independent music service - RadioVerve by Shreyas Srinivasan

I hope there’s a Bangalore Barcamp 2007 round the corner…..if anyone hears anything let me know!

In November 2006, I had the opportunity to experience first hand the dragon’s presence – potent, powerful, and grand. All this and more, China turned out to be impressive for the quality and breadth of its user experience scene, which is what this post is about.

First, let me start with saying that like many others in the Technology & Design space, I had also let some of the standard clichés about China seep within my head. Henceforth, I expected to meet some interesting people in China, see some interesting design companies, and see some good examples of Chinese design - the operative word being ‘some’. I was told - the Chinese are still grappling with fundamental challenges – how to trade in the ideas marketplace largely ruled by the Anglophone world, how to encourage creative conflict and out of the box thinking in its universities, how to get out of the ‘factory of the world’ trap and move higher in the value chain. How can such a bounded and homogenous and conformist communist nation be original and design and innovate?

One of the things about assumptions is that they have a life of their own, a self reinforcing validity, that if unchallenged, leads to the assumption becoming common wisdom.

The reality is that China has a bustling, vibrant, and mature User Experience scene. The Chinese design universe consists not only of cutting edge design teams in large established multinational companies such as Nokia, Motorola, Microsoft, Google, or Lenovo (Most of these groups are based in Beijing or Shanghai), but also scores of Chinese companies such as Baidu, Alibaba, Taobao that seek to give multinational companies a run for their money, as well as specialist research companies and catalytic government institutions. In other words, China’s design ecosystem has all the necessary ingredients to put its unique signature in the international design scene. Much as Korea did a generation back, much as Japan did two generations back.

So what are Chinese designers like? Once I briefly crossed the language barrier (appropriately through a savvy translator) I found Chinese designers in Beijing to be as discerning, thoughtful, and worldly-wise as their counterparts in America and India. I found a great hunger for knowledge, a tentative curiosity about the outside design world, a general humility (or conformist social behavior?) and a vast number of opinions on how Chinese companies could more effectively compete on design with global companies busy harnessing the Yuan flowing in the Chinese middle class. I also found the design scene to be more organized, spread across the global cities and smaller ones, and Government supported.
In conclusion, I returned from China with more insights and questions than I anticipated. On the one hand, I recall my friend Kenneth’s line “When you say Digital Art in China, students and parents think of training kids on animation software tools for the job market” (much like in India) : ) On the other hand, I recall seeing more designer openings by Google and Microsoft and IBM than I have perhaps seen in Bangalore in recent years….

In the backdrop of the touristy yet charming West Lake, UPA China recently hosted its third international usability conference in Hangzhou, China. Attracting 550 UX professionals from over 20 countries, this was easily China’s biggest usability conference at an international level. (http://www.upachina.org/userfriendly2006/default_en.htm)

The conference was spread over 3 days. Nov 3 focused on keynotes, presentations, and more presentations. Nov 4 focused on parallel tutorials/workshops and Nov 5 was a day of round table discussions.

The main organizer and host for UPA 2006 was the ‘China Guanghua Science and Technology Foundation’ – a testimony to the active involvement of city level universities and governmental institutions in furthering the cause of UX in China.

Event sponsors were a who’s who of businesses with serious UX interests: Google, Human Factors International, SAP, Windows Live, Idean research (Finland), Motorola, HP, Techmith, Apogee (Hong Kong), userexperience.com, and others. Most of these firms have a strong design presence in the China market including interaction designers, user researchers, and usability professionals.

Vendors showcasing their wares at the event included Noldus, Tobii (eye tracking vendor), and HY-Insight (Asian firm dealing with market research and UX recruiting). These and other small companies and individuals have created a strong ecosystem for conducting user experience work in China for both local and international technology products.

Day 1: Welcome, Keynotes, On User Experience, On Design, On Mobile Usability

Keynote Review

The event was kicked off by Jason Huang, UPA China president (also MD of Human Factors in China). Jason highlighted the exponential progress of UPA China, described the organization’s management structure, and their charter. Established in 2004, UPA China has rapidly expanded from large company participants to include several universities, consultants, and non-UX professionals. It has spread its presence including and outside of the hubs of Beijing and Shanghai. (UPA 2004 was organized in Beijing, UPA 2005 was organized in Shanghai, and UPA 2007 will be organized in Shenzhen).

Not surprisingly, as the participant base has evolved, the conference topics too have evolved from UI and UCD overviews to describing UX field practice and new research.

Dan (Rosenberg) from SAP Labs was the first keynote speaker. Titled “The Deconstuctionist Paradigm of User Interface Design”, Dan’s talk was a variant of the ‘to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ – theme. Using examples from the North American Home Networking gear and Shopping markets, he invoked the ‘disappearing computer’ theme and reminded the audience that in most domains (except enterprise software!) increasing automation would make interfaces disappear. Dan’s talk was quite brief and managed to span cultural references ranging from Derrida to Thomas Kuhn. His final message to the audience was to create new markets through revolutionary instead of evolutionary UX approaches.

Apala Chavan who handles the Asia operations for Human Factors presented a very compelling talk titled “Users in Search of Methods”. .She emphasized the need for developing unique user research and design methods to develop technology products for emerging economies such as China, India, Brazil and others. Starting with the example of McDonalds and its extreme localization technique, she reminded the audience that while the consumer products world has quickly caught on to the need to have strong cultural localization, the software world has been much slower in doing so. In the second part of her talk, Apala took a few steps beyond invoking Hofstede, Trompenaars, Hall, and the cultural iceberg and presented some intriguing research by (Choong and Salvendy) on how different cultures follow different Information Architectures for consuming content (the paper proposes that the majority of Chinese prefer thematic information architectures – a relational cognitive style). She also spoke of work by (Wong and Schmitt) on individualist and collective relationships that end users have with brands in different cultures. In the third part of her talk, Apala spoke about how standard usability methods in the West, such as ‘think aloud’, sitting side by side with the users versus sitting across, and even simple protocols of saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’, and rating scales versus semantic differential scales. Her two examples of using the ‘Bollywood method’ and ‘Jungian archetype folk probes’ in India and China are somewhat arguable as representations of culture specific methods, but are certainly thought provoking.

On Organizational Usability

Paul Sherman, UX Director at Sage Software and long time UPA member spoke of a usability turnaround of the Peachtree Accounting software product in his talk titled “Shaking the tree: A Case Study of a Usability Turnaround”. Peachtree started as the CP/M product in 1978, and finally evolved to acquire a full UCD team in early 2005 – garnering several consumer awards including PC World’s best products in 2007.

The highlights of Paul’s talk were the product’s challenges in evolving from being an accountant centric product to being a winner in the SMB market when the user profile shifted to non financial users. In pushing UCD with senior management, Paul showed some of his interesting ‘tools’, including a layered model built on Terminology, Navigation, Information Design, and UI. Paul described the 2007 Peachtree redesign project as a complex negotiation between getting new users to discover, learn new features and remember how to get to those features, and yet keep the product efficient and largely unaltered for existing experienced users.

Two of the interesting design interactions I noticed were a ‘second’ navigation system built into the product, since users ignored a navigation that doesn’t work and quickly go to one that does. They did this to not disrupt the existing conceptual model of experienced users, and yet provide new users with a second (not secondary!) navigation system. They also retained across releases the 250 odd shortcuts in their system. Second, they strongly associated ‘people’ and ‘things’ – for example, Accounts and Customers.

One of the interesting takeaways from Paul’s talk was his emphasis on using large sample sizes, in order to convince management! Another interesting formative level technique was the use of very hands on focus groups. In one such focus group, the Sage team used printed color graphs and charts and allowed users to essentially ‘build their own dashboard’ using wall sized interface shells where they could visualize and iterate on their own dashboards. Paul ended his talk with the interesting question – what does a product do when it has already optimized itself as much as it could?

One of the mature talks on Day 1 was ‘Beyond Usability’ by Dr. Jinsoo Kim, a Director of User Experience & Design with Yahoo Korea and a member of Yahoo Korea’s product council. Dr Kim spoke of his 6 years of experience with the lab in Korea. He posed some interesting questions on balancing usefulness, usability, desirability, and reliability within the context of measuring and improving user experience. He also described the need to question the experts and question known approaches to defining the user experience of online populations.

Other than describing traditional approaches for usability testing, Dr Kim also covered bucket testing or live (A/B) testing in which actual behavior is measured under real life conditions. He spoke at large about the Yahoo Korea homepage which took about 6 months to change. He also spoke about some interesting more usable interactions which could not be implemented because of other considerations – such as inline login, perceptions about software quality, and information oriented websites versus community oriented ones.

On User Experience

Giles Colborne from cxpartners, UK, and President of the UK UPA chapter spoke about a very interesting topic – the design of online communities. His first clear message was – testing usability for online communities is very different from testing for individual users. Using his experience from designing internal corporate intranets to designing social cause related online communities, he described two interesting frameworks. The first was a framework for how to proceed from no communication within a community to how a community gets well connected. The second was a framework for describing the different kinds of ‘users’ in an online community, such as passive transients, passive loyals, contributors, sociopaths, self appointed policemen, and moderators. He spoke about the need to do different activities at different times to be able to continue sustained interest in the passive-loyals and yet keep engaging new members.

Yu Guo, User Experience manager at Baidu.com, China’s leading search portal (at last count 40% of searches in China were done through Baidu), presented at talk titled ‘UX at Baidu’. Yu’s account was a standard practice description, but gave an interesting overview of the maturity of one of China’s leading online portal UX teams. Baidu has a 40 member strong UX team, ranging from market researchers, innovation designers, and visualizers. An interesting part of Yu’s talk was the balance among competing ideologies of content, advertiser affiliations, and not losing the focus on mainstream Chinese users, many of whom are less internet and computer savvy and require more context and redundancy in the website’s content. One way Baidu manages is this by presenting several filter options including rules for customizations and rewards, and the role of allied websites. Baidu’s UX strategy is then best described as an accumulative experience strategy, periodically refined through the aggregation of user problems and the mining of usage data. .

On Design

In “The Science and Art of User Experience at Google”, Graham Jenkin, one of Google’s UI managers spoke about the underlying elements of Google’s UX strategy. Upfront Graham spoke about several Google decisions such as the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button as a tradeoff between logical usefulness and ‘personality’. Graham described Google’s user studies and testing data using the example of Google Talk + Gmail and several iterations based on user studies that finally led to the current version of Gmail + chat integration. One of the interesting nuggets was that despite now having a robust spell checker in place, Google logs showed that most users still prefer to misspell and did not click on the correct suggestion. He also described how overwhelming user feedback made the engineers bring the ‘Delete’ function into Gmail after initial developer reluctance. The last part of Graham’s talk was Google-speak for innovation systems – how to create a central idea database, how everyone at Google writes one paragraph of what they are working on and this is maintained in a searchable database, and the relentless focus on iteration and experimentation. It helped that all the Google UI folks were walking around the conference with their slogan ‘Focus on the User and All else will Follow’.

Annie Chang who manages the Windows Live UX team in China presented a visually rich, half methodology half Windows Live pitch talk titled ‘Experience Windows Live!’. The Windows Live team was one of the most lively and dynamic Chinese UX teams I met, and they have a competent and articulate bunch of usability engineers, ethnographers, UI writers, and visual designers. The China team uses standard ethnography techniques to visualize usage patterns (including relationship ethnography, street ethnography, focus groups/dyads, and contextual interviws) and standard design methods (use cases, IA, scenarios, wireframes) to develop products focused on Chinese users.

In his talk titled “UX Design for Eastern Western Cultural Differences”, Qifeng Yan re-invoked the ghosts of Geert Hofstede, Hall and others to describe how Nokia manages to design for specific cultures, while avoiding imposing American and European cultural models of behavior. Describing the different standard 6 dimensions of Hofstede’s cultural model, Qifeng compared and contrasted Finnish and Chinese architecture, social behavior, language modes, communication modes, color preference. One interesting data point was the data gathered from different numbers of key presses by learners in Finnish and Chinese users. It was found that Chinese users used more key presses and were more likely to feel personally embossed and responsible if they did not successfully navigate the phone UI. Qifeng ended by describing solutions to managing this cultural navigation by UX teams, including setting up special Localization teams, using very cross cultural collaborative design teams, and CCUIVT and CSUI.

Day 2 and 3: Workshops and Roundtables

UPA China arranged a series of parallel workshops on Day 2 by local and international experts. The topics ranged from rudimentary ones on heuristic and competitive usability evaluations to more general ones on the politics of usability and designing for emerging economies.

I attended two workshops – one by Paul Sherman of Sage Software and another by Richard Douglass of IBM. The other parallel workshops included:

· Workshop 1:Using Cultural Probes (’Diary Studies’) to Gather User Information

Gerry Gaffney, Information & Design, Australia

· Workshop 2:Getting the Most Out of a Usability Test: Effective Note-taking and Analysis (Full Day: Am Part)

Whitney Quesenbery, WQUsability, US

· Workshop 4:Product Ideation for Emerging Markets - this is the ‘how’?

Apala Lahiri Chavan, VP Asia, HFI, India

· Workshop 5:Designing for Accessibility

Giles Colborne, MD, CX Partners, UK

· Workshop 6:The 360 Degree View of Leadership of the User Experience Team

Daniel Rosenberg, SVP, SAP, US

· Workshop 7:Conducting a Hands-on Usability Test(Full Day: Am Part)

Robert Barlow-Busch, Practice Director, Quarry Integrated Communications Inc, Canada /Daniel Szuc, Principle Consultant, Apogee, Hong Kong

· Workshop 8:Using Web Design Stands to Support Usability Design

Qi Chen,Director of UI Design, Taobao, China

· Workshop 9: User Research & Globalization

Robert Schumacher, Managing Director, User Centric, US & Yiner Ya,

Research Director of User Experience, User Centric, China

Vendors, wares, networking, and parties at User Friendly 2006

Among the interesting vendors showcasing their wares at User Friendly were Noldus, Techsmith, Tobii, as well as usability and research consulting companies such as IDEAN research, . Among the interesting sponsors doing their hiring pitch for their China operations were SAP Labs, Google, Windows Live, Human Factors International

Among the companies with an active UX presence in China, Google seems to have a fairly active and dynamic UX team in Beijing. Windows Live has a very dynamic UX team in Shanghai. Also, under the able leadership of Jason (Feng) Huang, Human Factors International has an upcoming and expanding presence in Shanghai

Local Chinese companies including Baidu.com, taobao.com, ArcSoft have designers who are similar to their counterparts in other parts of the world – they are busy evangelizing and solving daily problems and working with technologists on getting more UX into the product with limited budgets!

Conclusion

As I describe in one of my other general posts, China has a very vibrant design and UX scene. Chinese counterparts are quite design savvy and eager to exchange ideas and best practices with international participants, while holding their own. China is also a major base for international product companies looking for design talent and every large organization including Google, Microsoft Research, Windows Live, SAP Labs, IBM, HP and others have design teams in China even though their core development operations are at nascent stages in China.