Hasta La Ideas

As businesses in Asia in various domains look to how they can mature, differentiate and compete globally in their respective products and services, User Experience (UX) is gaining significant momentum. Management are curious as to what UX means and how it can be applied to not just improve experiences but towards real customer delight. They are looking for people and professional communities to help them understand. This is being helped some by Asian companies like Samsung, Huawei, Baidu, Lenovo and HTC (to name a few) investing in design. There has also been an increase in design studios and research & development opening up locally as companies from outside Asia also want to get a deeper understanding of the “Asian consumer mindset”—especially in growth markets like mainland China—towards designing more effectively for their needs. The media has also helped with continued coverage of the importance of design in the business success of Apple and the continued integration of technology into all aspects of our lives.

When we started pitching the importance of related disciplines like usability and user centered design 10+ years ago in Hong Kong and in mainland China, there was little interest or understanding of what the terms meant, how they could be applied in product design and development, or how it could help the business make better products and services. Fast forward to 2011 and we are seeing encouraging trends and indicators in the Asian market to show that User Experience is healthy, growing and will continue to do well for many years to come.

Here are a few recent observations:

Local and Regional Communities of Practice
Whether it be smaller meet ups or professional association conferences, practitioners including researchers, designers, usability, product managers and marketing are keen to get together, learn from each other and take UX into their organisations. For example, the Usability Professionals’ Association China has been running a conference called User Friendly since 2003 and has been getting a steady and increasing attendance every year. The China Interaction Design enjoyed their first conference in 2010 and newer events are growing including User Experience Taiwan in 2011, User Experience Hong Kong in 2011 (repeating in 2012), the USID Foundation India and User Experience Singapore in 2010 and 2011 that all point to a need for local professionals wanting to get together but also a regional need to better understand the state of UX in each market and how each market help get a better global UX understanding.

From tools based learning to UX Leadership
There will always be a place for improving our understanding and implementation of UX tools we use on projects but we have also seen a steady increase of practitioners in Asia wanting to know more about forming, growing and managing UX teams, hiring UX team members, gaining a better understanding of the skill sets to look out for when hiring, better managing communications between the UX team and other teams organisationally, better understanding how to communicate the UX results to management clearly towards cultural change in organisations. This suggests the market in Asia is maturing.

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We can’t believe Christmas is right around the corner and to help encourage some holiday cheer, our friends at Moment Factory have created an interactive Christmas tree for Tribal DDB, “The first Christmas Tree powered by Christmas Spirit.” The 30-foot Christmas tree greets travelers in Toronto’s Union Station with a twinkling of lights that are triggered by Christmas cheer spread online—through blogs and internet news sources, social media outlets and the dedicated website ChristmasSpiritTree.ca. Send a note through the website and watch via livestream as the Christmas Spirit Tree lights up in real time with a special blue spiral.

Moment Factory is using its X-Agora interactive software to convert Christmas messages into a dazzling display of coloured lights on the tree. First, the Web is searched for messages, articles, blog posts and other content containing Christmas-related keywords. Then the information is collected and sent to the tree for visualization. Colourful garlands of lights are lit to reflect the relative number of messages exchanged in each medium and in real time: white for social media, red for blogs and forums, green for news media and blue for activity on christmasspirittree.ca/.

Here’s to spreading some Christmas cheer! See the making of video after the jump!

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A research group from the University of Tokyo has put forth a bold concept for the way we could interact with technology called “Invoked Computing.” It’s seriously outside-of-the-box, in more ways than one: The concept is that we would not learn how to use a technological device, but that device would instead observe us and learn to do what we wanted it to accomplish.

As a rather striking example of an application, Alexis Zerroug from the U. of T.’s Department of Creative Informatics shows how a banana (I swear I’m not making this up) could be used as a cell phone. The idea is that you pick up the banana and put it to your ear, the computer observes what you’re doing and recognizes what you’re trying to accomplish, then hooks up the phone call and projects the audio using parametric speakers so that it sounds like it’s coming out of the banana.

The silliness of the banana aside, this raises the interesting point that a lot of our current technological objects are simply middlemen, go-betweens serving as an occasionally unwieldy bridge between us and a desired result. It reminds me of the design school maxim about how people want toast, not a toaster. Watch it for yourself and see what you think:

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Above, New York Nearest Subway app. Reporting by Christina Beard

A new wave of location-based apps are changing the way we interact with people and experience places. But what we’ve seen is just the beginning.

Xlab 2011: The Design of Location held at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, hosted by the Soceity of Environmental Graphic Design, explored what’s currently being created with location-based technology and where we’re headed. Speakers ranged from User Interface Designers to Psychologist and the audience was just as diverse.

Speakers focused on using location-based tools to build on current wayfinding standards. By building on what already exist, there’s a greater adoption of new technologies. Instead of re-inventing the wheel, Jake Barton of Local Projects believes in evolving the pragmatics of wayfinding by creating a narrative layer on top of a rich interpretive experience. Local Projects 9/11 Memorial App, “a guide to understanding 9/11 through the eyes of who witnessed the events,” is a stunning example of creating this type of narrative layer. Video, still images and an interactive timeline guide users through a location-based tour of the site.

Augmented reality (AR) was presented in both conceptual and pragmatic ways. Greg Tran, a recent graduate of Harvard Design School, presented Mediating Mediums: The Digital 3D, an exploration of what the future of AR could look like and it’s potential affect on our experience with architecture. His work pushes the medium forward and helps us imagine what’s in our future.

Adam Carey from Imano/AcrossAir presented New York Nearest Subway, an app that helps users navigate the subway system specific to their location. Simply hold your phone in front of you and virtual signage appears in the streetscape. The utilitarian aspects of AR will undoubtedly make new places easier to navigate.

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Designing the shopping experience is a large challenge that we’re excited to watch the progress of, since nobody knows what it will really turn out to be. Recently Apple and Adidas have both proposed and are now beginning to advance new shopping experience designs that make very different bets on how consumers want to shop.

Apple’s Reserve and Pick Up program—whereby you order online, then pick up the object in-store—isn’t a new concept, with other retailers having gotten behind this much earlier; but I seize on it because Apple has a good track record for accurately providing experiences many people want to have. Their particular approach, particularly if BGR’s assertion is accurate that you skip lines when you show up and pay with an iOS device, is predicated on minimizing time spent in the store. It presupposes the consumer researches precisely what they want to purchase online, doing all of their shopping calculations from their own computer. The store simply serves as a fulfillment point for that particular transaction.

Adidas is taking a different tack with their adiVerse Virtual Footwear Wall, a trial unit of which has recently been installed in an Adidas shop in London. The system consists of a large multitouch display that requires customers physically come into the store and play around with the thing. It’s predicated on the decision-making process taking place in-store, and in that way maximizes in-store time. Seeing the video of it below, I think it’s neat but am not 100% sold; in particular, having to start the transaction on one screen and then switch to a tablet seems a little clunky to me.

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