Author: Amit Pande, Senior Manager - Oracle Applications User Experience
Editor's note: Amit Pande and Jeremy Ashley Of Oracle Applications UX group recently made presentations at the 2007 Usability Professionals Association UX Annual Conference in Beijing, China.
Amit on the Great Wall of China
If you follow the news you probably know that China has the fastest growing economy in the world (10% per year). It has more mobile phone users than twice the size of the US population (540 million) and more Internet users than America in 2008. China has slowly become the world's factory and a voracious consumer of steel and cars and oil and technology. However, I believe a design and innovation revolution is simultaneously taking shape as well. Has the design community in China finally arrived? What does it mean for Fortune 500 technology companies like Oracle?
In November 2007, I found myself in a position to look at these questions directly. My VP Jeremy Ashley and I were invited by UPA China for the User Friendly 2007 conference in Beijing.
The conference started at 9 am sharp on Nov 23 with over 500 attendees and a visit to the Great Wall for the speakers and workshop presenters! We even got ourselves photographed in General Mao gear!
On Nov 24 the paper sessions started after overviews by (now former) UPA Global President Thyra Rauch and Jason Huang (UPA China) and Doreen Lorenzo from Frog Design. Jeremy's keynote address on the Business of User Experience was very well-received. He described the executive level perspective on how User Experience generates business value both within a company (with technology and marketing teams) and with customers and end users. In his workshop, Jeremy provided hands on tips and guidance on a very contemporary topic for China based technology companies and consultancies, how design managers can align User Experience goals with Business goals. My workshop presentation focused on how companies can leverage global, distributed, virtual design teams to drive design collaboration and innovation.
Speaker of the day, User Friendly 2007 in Beijing, China
Overall, the range of presentation topics was as vast as last year, they included the Future Web (Jeff Veen, Google), Wayfinding (Lance Wyman), Design education in China (Prof Patrick Yau), Web 2.0 in China (Bo Yang) and Self Service Usability (Sam Ng) - enough to satisfy a broad range of design practitioners. However, this year there was more of a "buzz" around Web 2.0 and Innovation. The "tracks" at the conference indicated how important these themes and industries are for the Chinese UX community: Telecom, Internet and Software, Industrial products, Design Education, the Business of UX, and Public Services. Overall I observed many more companies this time (including startups), more talk about new usability labs by Fortune 500 companies and an increasing presence of local Chinese technology and consultancy companies. UPA China has done a fantastic job both years in attracting universities with design programs in China, South Korea, and Japan. I met some very interesting faculty and students from Tsinghua University and other local schools.
In the conference networking events I tried to put this all together and see if I could get the "big picture" of China's design ecosystem - How is Chinese design advancing? What can be expected by 2010? I posed this question to industry colleagues like Daniel Szuc (UPA Board member), Guo Yu (UX, Baidu.cn which leads China's search market), Rex Wong (Yahoo, Hong Kong) and Liya Zheng (Liquidnet, New York). Some felt that Chinese design was ready to challenge global design and it was a matter of "when", not "if". Others pointed to the rapid growth of Web 2.0 sites in China like www.douban.cn and www.alibaba.com as a sign of design innovation. Some pointed to the R&D presence of Google, Microsoft, Oracle, HP and others as a sign of a maturing design ecosystem. Many suggested that it might take another generation of free thinking for more design innovation to come from China. I particularly liked Liya's note on the realities of Design in China.
I also carried some of these conversations along to Oracles China development center at the Zhongguancun Software Park in Beijing. One key difference from my last visit in 2006 was the interest in product innovation, Web 2.0, desktop gadgets and mobile technology. Colleagues in China were excited that Oracle may be looking to expand its UX presence in the region in the future. While the plans for Oracle's usability labs in China are still being finalized, it might not be long before the first batch of Apps UX designers and usability professionals finally arrive in Oracle's Zhongguancun facility. We will then have to figure out the best times for meetings between California and China.
