The occasional light expression

Yesterday on Mar 6 we finally managed to lift one foot off the ground and get the Bangalore User Experience and Design community closer through the first event of 2008 - a guest lecture by Murli on User Experience ecosystems, creativity, design thinking and innovation held at the Oracle Outer Ring Road office and supported by UPA Bangalore, CHI Bangalore, IxDA and various other individuals with a passion for user experience and innovation and that sort of thing.

Muthu’s just posted some pictures from the event on Picasa at http://picasaweb.google.com/bangaloreux/Mar06UXmeet/

If you were there, we would love to hear from you on what you thought and what kinds of things you’d like the community to keep working on further.

I am off to San Francisco tonight and will soon post my reflections from the event.

In mid February I traveled to IIT Kanpur with my colleague Adesh. We spent a good three days in the company of design students and faculty in the midst of the hustle bustle of ‘Techkriti’ - the annual IITK technical fest (read: a love fest for geeks and robo-heads) and the quaint (imagine peacocks walking outside your window) and picturesque IIT campus.

On Friday, we met some enthusiastic students and Prof. Satyaki Roy who was the brain behind this workshop idea - easily one of the most accessible, engaging, enthusiastic and savvy professors I’ve interacted with in a while. We had made up our minds that we would keep the workshop very engaging and hands on with minimal ‘Powerpoint gagging’ - however as I stood in front of those students and started my spiel on our past engagement and our plans for them and such, i had a moment of doubt on whether we’d be able to pull off an intensive Interaction Design workshop in all of two days.

Some say we did!

On Day 1, we started off the students on some basics of Interaction Design including user research and persona development. For the given design problem (Redesigning a healthcare system for the IIT Kanpur community on campus), the group conducted interviews with students, staff and faculty and went through the whole affinity diagramming process of sorting and synthesizing their interview findings. My big reminder/lesson from Day 1 was that user research is indeed a political process as much as it is a design process. We rounded off Day 1 with a requirements generation exercise.
On Day 2, we shifted gears and moved into Interaction design models, prototyping and usability evaluations. The students developed Interaction Design models to drive their requirements forward and subsequently worked with Powerpoint to visualize low fidelity prototypes. Dr. Roy was game enough to act as an archetypical ‘user’ during the usability testing session. My big reminder/lesson from Day 2 was that when you give students a free hand and let them work through figuring out a solution, they can come up with some pretty interesting ideas.

We ended Day 2 with each group giving brief ten min presentations to the workshop participants on their design rationale, process and final solution.

Alok Agashe, one of the workshop participants has posted the pictures from the workshop on Picasa

We left Kanpur on Sunday and were unfortunately too physically exhausted by the end of it all to try out Kanpur’s famous “Thaggu ke Laddoo” (The thug’s sweets). However, i found myself intellectually very charged up and inspired at the end of that weekend - I hope to be back in IIT Kanpur soon enough. There is something about good university campuses which is so different from air conditioned corporate existences. Edward Said, in one of his books fondly remembered his days at Columbia University as some of the best in his life.
I am hoping to conduct similar workshops within the Bangalore UX and Design community as well.

Last Saturday I attended the Mindtree hosted ‘icamp’ or innovation-focused Barcamp.

I must say I was rather disappointed by several aspects of the event. While the organizers got the ’structure’ somewhat right (the registration was smooth, the food was OK, the presentations were on time), they screwed up on the ‘content’. Most presentations were fairly dull and some were simply rip-offs.

A certain gentleman started valiantly on how innovation can be taught in MBA schools and was heckled immediatly by the audience with inane questions along the lines of: Why MBA schools? What is innovation? Why not the other schools? It made me realize that the word ‘MBA’ elicits a strange response from non-MBA’s - its sort of like using the words ‘Lawyer’, ‘Financial Planner’ or ‘Software Programmer’ - people either love them or just can’t stand them. Anyways, after much hand waving about Black Swans and Prototyping and Scenarios and such he managed to finish in time. My personal opinion is that the speaker had his heart in the right place but needs to get more fundamental inspirations from design thinking that he can share with students.
The second presentation was by the eclectic and sharp Murli, who, much to his discomfort found himself using a Powerpoint presentation. The minimal graphics content heavy Powerpoint was no match for the energy and vigor of the speaker and the whole experience got a bit disorienting with the rather lame Powerpoint and the rather convincing speaker. I loved Murli using paper with large text to convey that he sought disagreement and more questions and positive argument. I hope Murli tells organizers he doesn’t need Powerpoints.
A third presentation was by a senior gentleman who spoke about ‘Unusual Sources of Innovation’. While his hands on and interactive style went some way in making the presentation bearable, his content was simply too dull and commonplace in the end. Using Apple, Google, TV and the Tata Nano as starting points he launched into a discussion on what made these companies and their products successful and tried to relate how any learning from these case studies can be related to one’s job. Now the problem with Apple or Google case studies is post-hoc rationalization. It is rather easy to fit any explanation to explain their success - design, marketing, stickyness, rabid users, technology, user experience etc. I found the spirit in the presentation but the speaker would have been so much more convincing if they had used genuinely ‘unusual’ sources - how about ideas generated from sleep deprivation? from watching corny Hindi movies? from opening random pages of random (not only science fiction) books?
I bailed out in the early afternoon - couldn’t stay around long enough to be inspired to share my thoughts in that setting. It is events like these that make me question Bangalore’s claim to being the cutting-edge, futuristic metropolis. It ends up projecting itself as a city which is mirroring San Francisco or New York or London with a time lapse.

These past two Friday afternoons, I’ve been visiting the National Institute of Design (NID)’s Bangalore campus for providing industry inputs and teaching a class on ‘Prototyping and Usability’ to students of the Masters in Design program.

Over the next few weeks in January/February, I will be covering (with Adesh, a brilliant and enthusiastic Senior Interaction Designer from my team) the following topics through a mix of presentations, case studies, examples and hands on activities.
- How prototyping drives design and innovation
- Overview of prototyping, fidelity and tool selection
- Fundamentals of low, mid and high fidelity prototyping
- Group and individual exercises on different prototyping techniques
- Usability evaluations: Methods, metrics and protocols

All the students are in their second semester and are taking other classes in User Experience Design including on web design, usability studies, Interaction design and user research.
I’m quite excited about how the next few sessions turn out. Its always energizing to be in the presence of students - keeps me on my toes too.

I’m also looking forward to my visit to IIT Kanpur’s design program in mid February for a design workshop we’ll be conducting over the weekend of Feb 15.

I recently caught an iTunes video of Jonathan Harris’s work including the fascinating ‘We Feel Fine‘, ‘Yahoo Time Capsule‘ and ‘Universe’ projects.

Harris’s work reminded me of an old (paraphrased here) Terence Mckenna quote “If aliens were to look down upon Earth from their ships, they would not see biology the way we see it - they would see the evolution of a gene swarm of concepts and ideas and language using human biology as the reduction valve”.
Harris’s work describes a new mythology - the mythology of the post modern relativistic age of the 21st century. For every kingdom, merchant mafias, gate keeper and courtesan of the ancient age, there is a corporate monopoly, Private Equity cult, legal counsel, and minor celebrity surviving through their 15 minutes of infamy. Harris’s Universe is not made of hydrogen and carbon, but of the bubbling cauldron of thoughts, events, concepts, and meta-verses.

I am getting to be a big fan of Slideshare - the online service which allows you to upload, share, tag, and download Powerpoint presentations using a very fast, engaging and usable interface.

What particularly excites me about the Slideshare interface is that it allows me to do very rapid, hyperlinked, keyword based trend analysis and learning - concepts and patterns and connections and trends form rapidly in my head.

In the desktop Powerpoint experience, I find my attention wandering because the plain Powerpoint UI backdrop doesn’t quite engage me - and the full screen Powerpoint is too attention demanding - you can only focus on it and nothing else on the desktop.
On the contrary, with Slideshare, I find my attention to be comfortably divided between the presentation at hand and the surrounding UI. I think the presentation mode is very compelling and fast, and it also seems to bring out the best in the authors of these presentations.

Perhaps, after years of seeing drab, soulless, templatized, over-worded corporate Powerpoints, most of the authors of good presentations on Slideshare have used this new medium to express their creativity. Also the community does a good job of generating interesting tags for the Powerpoint, which means that while viewing a certain presentation, you always have a nice ambient view of related presentations — always a boon for a hyperlinked-learning junkie like me.
Kudos to Rashmi Sinha and Jon Boutelle and their team on their continue brilliance and design touches within Slideshare.

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.

While listening to Barry Vandevier of Travelocity, i noted that very few companies have actually walked the talk in terms of ‘open innovation‘. Most companies pay lip service to building an innovation culture across their global workforce (from the mailroom boy to the documentation guy to the UI designer) but end up building ‘innovation’ silos which, when they interact with the rest of the ‘normal’ organization do so very little, very late.
In this regard, Yahoo and Travelocity’s Hackday initiatives are inspiring. Both companies have held Hackdays regularly in their US and international locations, and Yahoo has even gone one step ahead and hosted a ‘public’ Hackday. The notion of bringing in select groups and individuals from outside the company to seed new knowledge networks within the company is an old one but doing so in a Hackday format is pretty innovative. There is a difference between a 1 hour staid lecture and a 24 hour marathon design and technology creation session.
There is something exciting about the Hackday format - throw in a lot of smart and hands on people in a large room with lots of coffee, pump up the challenge by having multiple groups competing, and then select winners based on audience polls and expert reviews - i would argue that this format is suitable for any sort of post-brainstorming work and especially so for ’suits’ - there is nothing more heartening than seeing people create new concepts and ideas without the bureaucracy of top down organizational structures.

I am glad to say that World Usability Day is finally taking off the ground. ( You can register for World Usability Day 2007, Bangalore at the event wiki)
After I started UPA Bangalore this summer with other like minded folks, i wanted to let things lie low for a bit and see some ‘emergence’ within the user experience community - that emergence seems to now be happening. Following the success of Bangalore Barcamp and D-camp, the design, usability, technology communities seem to be somewhat aligning and looking at User Experience as a whole - not merely from their own vantage points.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for the event feel free to add a note to the wiki or email me

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.