It’s All Happening in China
A Report from User Friendly 2004

by Whitney Quesenbery
Whitney Interactive Design, LLC

Last December, I traveled to Beijing, China for User Friendly 2004 to meet a few of our usability colleagues there. What I found was a large and vibrant usability community, with nearly 200 people attending the conference, organized by UPA China and UPA Hong Kong.

At the end of the conference, speakers, organizers and attendees all assembled on the stage in front of the conference banner for a group photograph. The lighting was not the best, but it was amazing to see the number of people who came to User Friendly 2004.

The community includes people working on mobile telephony, web design and in many other industries as usability engineers, user researchers and interaction designers. Take a look at your phone. There’s a good chance that people from UPA China worked on the user interface.

The first UPA China meeting was a “mini conference,” featuring talks on human factors and usability testing in China. By chance, Daniel Szuc, President of UPA Hong Kong, was in Shanghai at the same time, and was able to meet Qin and Jason from the UPA China leadership. They decided to cooperate on a larger conference later that year, and are planning more cooperation between the two chapters.

The first day of the conference featured short presentations on a variety of usability topics with speakers from China, Australia, Singapore, US and Hong Kong (see program details).

The speakers at the conference included Qin Lin, Gerry Gaffney, Carl Thong, Patrick Larvie, Professor Kan Zhang, Whitney Quesenbery, Professor Liezhong Ge, and Daniel Szuc.

Day two offered six half-day workshops on user-centered design, usability testing, personas, information architecture and prototyping. Daniel said, “We took a survey that showed a hunger for practical topics that people could use in their work, so we tried to focus on basic skills.”

Six workshops drew full rooms of eager participants.
This group, in a workshop led by Daniel Szuc, works on an exercise about preparing for a usability test.

For some, the workshops introduced new topics; for others they helped reinforce basic skills. One participant said, “Even when the material was not new to me, it was good to have my knowledge and skills confirmed. It gave me more confidence in how I might compare to other usability people around the world.”

The conference was also an opportunity for people from outside of China to learn more about the usability scene here. The breaks felt like any other UPA conference, as people networked, exchanged business cards (or ming pian) and talked about opportunities for work.

Networking opportunities included conference breaks, a party at the end of the first day, hosted by Yahoo!, and other social events.

Some of the companies represented at the conference were familiar names around the world – Yahoo, Nokia, Motorola, Siemens, IBM – others were names from companies headquartered in China -- Sohu, UTStar and Baidu to name a few. Some companies are creating the next generation of mobile devices. Several people were carrying new phones they had helped design. This focus on mobility means that industrial design, interaction design and icon usability are all strengths in this community. As Patrick Larvie, from Yahoo! put it, “This is where the next innovations will come from.” Professor Ge, from the Institute of Psychology at Zhejiang University of Science, for example, presented a detailed usability and human factors comparison of different models of mobile phones. The study examined attention and focus with eye-tracking, and made a detailed study of the effort required to complete simple tasks on each of the devices.

Gerry Gaffney, from InfoDesign in Australia, summed it up this way: “It’s all happening in China. There are all these bright, young, clever, motivated people here who are interested in usability.”

(Photographs by Jo Wong, Daniel Szuc and Whitney Quesenbery)