An experiment in light expression

The Economist has an interested piece on Mao and management. In the same spirit as Machiavelli, Chanakya and others, this article describes Mao as a management role model of sorts. It outlines four strategies from Mao’s turbulent political lifetime for executives who are finding it difficult to get their message across and be considered ’successful’ managers.

1. Have a powerful, mendacious slogan (”Serve the people”) - how many modern corporations can claim to have a 3 word slogan?

2. Do ruthless media manipulation - A clear message, hammered relentlessly often overrides inconvenient truths
3. Sacrifice your friends and colleagues - the objective evaluation of performance

4. Substitute activity for achievement - Do more things (more emails, project plans, visions, groups and committees….) and bail out before the results of these random activities start manifesting

I’m reporting this live from the UPA China conference at the Jiuhua resort in Beijing.

Thyra Rauch, the UPA International President just finished a short and inspiring talk on UPA, on the evolution of UPA in China, and how in the experience economy, the user experience professionals in China have an opportunity to not only grow in their respective Interaction Design and usability areas, but also be responsible for new product innovations and new market innovations.

Jason Huang, the UPA China President is now giving an overview of UPA China and how they got to where they are (to become the fastest growing UPA chapter worldwide). He described how it started as a volunteer group and eventually began working as a non-profit, while dealing with the financial and operational challenges of a company.

He shared some personal anecdotes about his core UPA China team and how his team worked extra hours to be able to put User Friendly 2007 together. Jason them emphasized that this year’s theme is more around innovation, and that in innovating for China UPA China can be a catalyst for China’s creative industry. He presented lots of charts and details on the demographics of the UX industry in China (still a strong bent towards Hong Kong), on the undergraduate programs in UX and HCI, average ages, training realities and requirements on the ground for Chinese UX professionals, average salaries and such.

It seems the average salaries are highest in Shanghai (82000 RMB) and then Beijing (70000 RMB) and are lower than 70000 RMB in other cities. 220000 RMB was quoted as a very high salary number for a Shanghai based practitioner. It appears that 70% practitioners do not think they are paid well (is that a global trend or what!).

Jason then presented some other details on how many companies have usability labs, what the levels of UCD embedding are within the software development process and such.

He ended with an overview of presentations for the day and some design competitions for students.

This November, I will head eastwards again to Beijing for UPA China’s annual design and user experience conference - User Friendly 2007. This time around I will be conducting a workshop on how design teams in Asia can shift from the traditional ‘outsourcing’ and ‘captive unit’ mindset towards one geared for product innovation and in-house product incubation. This year’s conference promises to be even more exciting  than last time - with specific sessions around the usability of public services in China, housing in Beijing for the Olympics, and the burgeoning consumer products and services sector in China.
My motivation behind conducting this workshop (other than my own experience of these challenges in the past few years) specifically in China was to involve the international and Chinese participants at this workshop and generate some collective knowledge on how those of us in ‘emerging economies’ (India, China, Brazil and the like) are coping with the challenge of cultivating innovative thinking in virtual distributed teams and find out what sorts of best practices (or worst practices) people are following. I will plan on covering (among other areas) the state of the outsourced product industry, the challenges it poses for virtual and outsourced design and UX teams, the innovation opportunity, people topics (how to hire and hold on to scarce talent, how to build partnerships and local ecosystems), process topics (how to innovate in distributed workspaces, how to deal with ambiguity), and product topics (how to apply the user centered design process in the real world without blind allegiance).
If you are planning to attend my workshop or know of interesting design and innovation thinking workshops (or have attended interesting ones), feel free to drop in a note - would love to get any feedback as i prepare my workshop materials.

The Usability Professionals Association (UPA)’s Hyderabad chapter recently did a good survey on the demographics, experience levels, and salaries of User Experience (UX) professionals in India, primarily across the metro cities. The results of this survey are available for download here.

While the number of respondents was limited to a few hundred, the survey is interesting for several reasons. First, it is one of the only recent surveys on UX professional compensation in India. Second, the numbers indicate that technology companies and UX consulting houses are getting competitive and offering UX professionals much higher salaries than even a few years back. While it arguable whether this is because Indian or international technology companies see the business value of UX more clearly, or because the Indian market is fairly heated at this point (Average 15% raises, average 20% attrition in the IT industry), the availability of these numbers is a step in the right direction. Third, this salary also indicates that the UX industry in India is showing signs of maturing and the availability of world class UX technical and management talent continues to increase.
I wonder if a similar survey has been done for China. I should probably check with my friend Jason Huang, who heads UPA China, on how similar these numbers are to Chinese UX salaries in pure dollar figures.

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.

For a mind jaded with the humdrumness and everydayness of living in India and having experienced something similar in North America, China comes as a blast of winter air. The senses awaken not only to the many surprises that one vaguely expects from modern China – four lane freeways and toll booths, skyscrapers and experimental architectures, steel and glass proudly announcing China’s ambitions, but also to the surprises that one has a feeble mental model to initially comprehend – the ease of being comfortably Chinese in the glare of foreign eyes (and the gaze of English!), a strange dissociation from the past and tradition, and my personal highlight in the one week China visit — the presence of several interesting individuals and sub-cultures of music, art, and design.

My first impression of China was similar to my first impression of San Francisco – I knew the place had arrived – definitely arrived at some point in the distant past, and it was I, with my limited knowledge and cultural assumptions, arriving late : (

The greatest gift that China gave me is that it made me rethink and delve into my own assumptions about culture and design and markets and such things. I felt clearly that beyond India, beyond North America and Europe, China does represent a frontier for design and innovation that requires not only great sensitivity and intelligence to understand, but also great guile and pragmatism.

The truth is – I am still coming down from China : ) the inscrutability of its language and cultural frameworks – the fascinating interactions of a billion and a half people – Peking Duck and Chinese wine – the in your face consumerism – the realities I could sense but not see.

Dear China, I hope to see you again, soon….till then, Shei Shi Ni!