The occasional light expression

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.

So we finally rounded off Dcamp - India’s first design unconference (where else but in Bangalore, despite all the bumps and grinds of its existence) this Sunday at the cheerful and inspiring Yahoo Bangalore office on Airport Road.

The unconference has been covered quite well by Saurabh Minni, Anand Bora, and Muthu. Thanks to everyone who took pictures of the event - now what we need is a mashup of the DCamp Flickr images!
In this post, i will cover some of my observations and takeaways from the event:

1. A bunch of folks with a simple motivation, the right technologies, and light structures can indeed put together something new - the coming together of the team for Dcamp (myself, Muthu, Navneet Shrikanta, Ruta, Abhishek…) showed the power of both strong and weak ties in social networks, the power of Wikis for light collaboration (we managed to keep our event management related phone calls to 3 and our emails to probably a dozen), and (in my mind is a small but good example of) the power of emergence. I probably saw more emergence in this event than in the ponderous paper on emergent e-governance i wrote years back. I almost learnt as much from this event as the World Usability Day event i organized last year!
2. There is little co-relation between age and inspiration, organizational role and inspiration, and subject and inspiration. One of the most interesting presentations i saw was on Schematic Mapping by Arun Ganesh. Arun started his presentation by saying “…was in London in 1998 when i was 10 years old and I saw the now-world-famous London tube map…”. Joe Arnold’s wonderfully visual presentation on innovation using the story of the Wright brothers and the first airplane was inspiring - so was Siddhi’s take on the re-design of programmer workspaces considering the social nature of programming activity. All very inspiring despite their different contexts (entrepreneurial/organizational or technical/social)
3. This might be contraversial but as Indians, we do tend to be unpredictably argumentative. Edward De Bono put this point across today in one of his Times of India interviews as well. Many of the presenters - including Siddhi and Arun - faced what i thought of as somewhat discouraging and trivial questions (who will buy it? what is your solution? i dont think..blah…). On the other hand, folks like Harish from OneBigWeb who had a very interesting model on the touchstones of Interaction Design (creating formulas for design is always a tricky affair) simply didn’t get too many questions! Perhaps i’m being biased here but i always have more interest in seeing the possibilities of somebody’s work than finding out nitpicky flaws.

4. …and finally, the Bangalore ecosystem of ‘interesting people’ continues to grow. Among others I met two interesting developer-entrepreneurs, an out of box thinking photographer, world class talent from Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, design freelancers, Chennai students who just landed up for the event, and of course folks running their start-ups out of their bedrooms. Bangalore does little to attract and retain global creative talent, but interesting folks end up through the cracks and staying here (till whenever they do) nevertheless.

CKS Consulting recently released the Mobile Development Report. Over the years CKS (formerly the Center for Knowledge Societies) has done some pioneering innovation consulting work focused on emerging economies.

In its signature style, the report notes…”Those seeking to be involved with the coming media revolutions that are bound to unfold in emerging economies such as India would be advised to leave behind the expectation that these regions shall merely come online or replicate industrial societies’ adoption and enthusiasm for the web as it exists today. This will not merely be a web 3.0 or a mobile 2.0. The world of mobile media in India by the end of this decade will be more richly immersive, multiply-mediated and nuanced, through subtle forms of gesture, moving, growing, shifting and changing at the rate of sociality itself.”

Will Value Added Service providers, and telecom providers wake up and develop meaningful, contextual, relevant applications and services for the large semi urban and rural consumer base in India?

On Friday, I attended a Siliconindia summit on Leadership. Since the 199os Siliconindia has been an inspirational magazine profiling Indian American and more recently, Indian success stories in the technology marketplace. I fondly remember reading the magazine back in grad school.

In this post, I cover highlights of a few talks at the event and my takeaways.

Sharad Sharma, who heads Yahoo R&D in India gave an excellent keynote on the journey from offshoring to in market incubation. He described some mega trends that characterize the new problem for multinational corporations – product clutter, aggressive and nimble international and local competitors coming out of nowhere, the emergence of overnight new technology innovations and unpredictable network/viral effects (He cited Facebook’s book application having 7000 Harry Potter reviews, the largest anywhere).

His viewpoint was that captive product development (such as the India Development Centers or IDCs of Microsoft, Symantec, or Oracle) and Outsourced Product Development (OPD) firms (such as GlobalLogic and Symphony Services) is already a fading story. Rising wage costs, talent crunch, and the tapering of Operating Margin gains means only one thing – it is harder to extract more business benefits from passive captive outfits.

The solution to this new MNC problem? In market incubation. Meaning the development of innovative products and platforms for local consumers, for small medium businesses, and the reorganization of captive units and OPD working arrangements to wards a multi-hub, autonomous, and risk sharing model (Sharad cited the Airbus/Boeing component responsibility model where landing gears are made in France and wings are made in Japan as self contained units!).

Sharad ended his talk suggesting that this new incubation model would mean the emergence of 3 key positions within the Indian product ecosystem:

1. Leader of a Global Center of Excellence with ownership for global or local products

2. Intrapreneurs – who seed inhouse innovation with access to go to market channels

3. Product entrepreneurs who develop new products or support the ecosystem

The subsequent panel discussion on Leadership traits included Dr. Anil Gupta from Sun’s India Engineering Center, and Vijay Anand from Oracle.

Vijay used famous CEO/Leader quotes to bullet his views on what makes leaders tick - including CEO views on newness, on opportunity, and on value systems.

Anil chose to go back to the basics of what makes a good leader tick – having a clear conscience, a human bond with employees, a healthy body, and a strong sense of values.

He ended with a lovely poem from the ex Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Touche!

“..Mere prabhu Itni Oonchai mat dena..

Gairon ko gale na laga sakoon..

Itni Rukhai mat dena”

The leadership panel was peppered with references to some very interesting books on the subject of leaderhip including Straight & Crooked Thinking, Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Fooled by Randomness, and The Whole New Mind.

All the panelists agreed about the need to have more ‘Integrative thinking’ leaders than reductionist/conventional thinking ones – and made references to a recent July HBR article on ‘How do Leaders think’.

..Other interesting talks at the event are archived here. I enjoyed most of the afternoon talks particularly the ones by Sanjay Singh from Akamai, Ramesh Srinivasan from Bally Systems, Santanu Paul from Virtusa, Alexius Collette from Phillips, and C Mahalingam from Symphony Services.

While browsing through the plethora of job sites in India, I noticed something that bothered me. Despite paying much attention to their homepage layouts, banners, and in some cases, even usability, most of the job sites catering to Indian professionals had pretty insipid, commonplace, arbitrary TITLE text. Most of the website titles had common phrases such as - ‘jobs’, ‘india’, ‘bangalore’, ‘chennai’, ‘pune’, ’search for jobs online’….

Now page titles are probably not the most interesting piece of virtual real estate, but couldn’t most of these companies pay a little attention to how similar they all look if they are opened next to each other in a tabbed browser? Why couldn’t the keywords be a little more enterprising, a little more descriptive, a little more differentiating? How did all the smart website designers and usability professionals miss such a small thing?

I find it odd that a well designed homepage could have an ‘HTML META ‘or an ‘HTML Tag Refresh’ listed as the page title. Shouldn’t Venture Capitalists or Private Equity analysts, those finance Gods who raise billions of dollars to fund or buy or sell these sites pay attention to how much attention their client (or their designer) pays to design detail?

From a recent IxDA post, I found some good references for US salaries of Interaction Designers and Usability Engineers. The salary ranges show a skew which would disappoint most opponents of the labor arbitrage angle of outsourcing - On an average, designers and usability professionals in America make an average of $65000 whereas their Indian entry level counterparts in blue chip product or services organizations are still paid somewhere in the $10000 to $15000 range.

This makes me wonder - If MBAs coming out of India are now being paid extremely competitive salaries since they form the backbone of business success, why are designers not paid more money than say, the average Quality Assurance Analyst, or the average template-driven software developer who’s hacking together a bunch of APIs lifted from the web. Didn’t Bruce Nussbaum note not too long ago in Business Week– “When people talk about innovation in this decade, they really mean design”.

If business innovation is essentially about design innovation, why are designers not considered at par with business professionals? For those interested in some number comparisons, check out the following links:

http://www.indeed.com/salary/Usability-Engineer.html

http://iainstitute.org/pg/salary_survey_2006.php

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/salaries.html

http://www.peakusability.com.au/resources/usability-salary-survey.html

http://www.stcsig.org/usability/topics/salary.html

http://www.usabilityprofessionals.org/upa_publications/upa_voice/survey/2000_survey.html

http://www.spiritsoftworks.com/resources/2004-salary-survey.htm

http://www.designsalaries.org/

In the next few weeks, a couple of us are organizing a design focused un-conference - Dcamp Bangalore. Dcamp is similar in spirit to Barcamp, but with a focus on Design, User Experience, Usability and generally, design driven innovation.

The general notion is to create a casual, peer to peer, hands on space where designers and design enthusiasts can connect, share ideas, and learn - No ribbon cutting, no lamp lighting, no invited celebrities, no corporate ideological axes to grind - Instead ideas, interaction, creativity, and henceforth - interesting and unpredictable outcomes. Isn’t that what perhapsness and possibility is all about! Ok Ok, no preaching either at Dcamp…
The event is slated for early September. If you are a product manager, entrepreneur, technologist or generally, a design enthusiast, you can register at the Dcamp wiki site or we’d love to hear from you on design topics that might be of interest to you!

This Monday I flew Jet Airways from Delhi to Bangalore and was pleasantly surprised by Jet Airways’ new in-flight entertainment system. The system has a good and contemporary music selection ranging from the unavoidable Himesh Reshammiya numbers to some good jazz. What stood out in the music experience was the jukebox function which allows users to quite easily select tracks and add them to a playlist. The jukebox does have its usability issues including 1) you cannot select songs from a particular album without actually selecting to ‘play’ that entire album 2) the playlist disappears from memory if the inflight entertainment system is shut off - which happened to the playlist i created before the flight took off 3) at some point you can get back to the main menu and have the song playing and have no way to turn off the song without actually selecting another one!

As such the system is quite visually savvy and the video selection isn’t all that bad but the availability of music in that 140 minutes flight made it a pleasant experience for me.
Apparantly the competition saw this coming and now Kingfisher has implemented Live TV in its flights - becoming one of the few airlines in the world to offer this service.

During my Barcamp conversations with Ashish from Yahoo and Soumya from Aditi, i was stuck by how User Experience (UX) and Product Management (PM) are two groups which have more in common than many other product development related groups.

Both care about products being successful, easy to use, and differentiated in a cluttered technology marketplace. Both use various methods to gather customer and user data and map that data into features, functions, and User Interfaces. Both need to be good at what they do but also good at generally understanding technology, competitors and market trends.

Boxes and Arrows even had an interesting plug on ‘Transitioning from User Experience to Product Management’ - both the authors are ex-UX professionals who now work as product managers. They’ve outlined some interesting distinctions and overlaps in these two roles.

I think Product Managers and UX professionals/managers can collaborate and find common ground on several areas: Field research methods (dont both groups use interviewing and focus groups as a standard data gathering technique?), wireframing and prototyping, development of product roadmaps (most UX groups are called too late to the table for roadmap discussions), joint customer site visits, and how usability and design labs can be jointly used by PM and UX professionals to conduct user sessions.
I’m thinking of organizing a round table along these lines - perhaps in d-camp space. Feel free to send me any ideas on this…