we live in a beautiful world

Day 1 of the conference was by and large the best day of the entire conference and well worth attending. The presentations are a great chance to see what the industry is up to and meet all kinds of people involved in usability.Registration A large, red helium arc greeted attendees at the entrance to the Yellow Dragon Hotel in Hangzhou, “Welcome to User Friendly 2006″. Check-in/registration was well-organized but quite overwhelmed since people were not standing in proper lines, but rather, in a mob. After checking in, I wandered towards a small room where companies had set up their tables. Quite a few Shanghai-based usability companies were present. I also noticed a Google table, but it had no representatives, just job listing flyers.I sat down in my assigned chair in the rear-righthand side of the presentation hall. The man sitting behind me introduced himself as the VP of com.cn. He mentioned his company was the biggest webhost provider in China. (That’s a lot of mp3s!). Two young women from the Academy of Sciences also sat behind me.Presentations The presentation began with a keynote by Daniel Rosenberg from SAP. He kept his presentation short and sweet and spoke about the ultimate goal for the user experience as an automated solution which requires no user interface at all. He gave two examples. 1) networking, which was originally a task which required cables and a floppy disk in 1988 to DHCP today 2) inventory and sales, which initially relied on price tags stuck on a product, to the RFID technology being developed today.Next was Jason Huang, UPA China President. He gave an overall summary of the impressive growth of UPA China within the last 3 years, as well as the direction the organization would be heading in the next year. He predicted the start of local meetings in China as well as User Friendly 2007 being held either in Beijing or Shenzhen. In my naivete, I was surprised to hear that UPA China was a government organization.Paul Sherman gave a very interesting case study of how usability and user-interface design was incorporated into Peachtree Accounting software. He was very honest in presenting how un-userfriendly the application had been. No rose-colored glasses for the past in this presentation.Jinsoo Kim, the Director for user experience for Yahoo! Korea gave an academic-type of presentation grounded by examples from the Yahoo! Korea site. His presentation really broke down what made for good design and how it was tested and how it then emerged onto the main page.Giles Colborne discussed web communities and broke down the various key personality types within web communities and how to nourish them so that a web community could flourish.The most popular speaker among Chinese listeners was Yu Guo from Baidu.I think this was mostly due to the fact that he spoke in Chinese, kept the pace quick and interesting, and really expressed Baidu’s attention towards the Chinese market (and maybe not much else).The MSN speaker, Annie Chang, also spoke in Chinese, but the speech felt like a pitch for MSN Live. Annie did talk about their user experience team though.I think the least effective speaker might have been Google. Only because he spoke in English (while the other foreign companies had Chinese speakers present) and because his message was fairly generic with no mention whatsoever of China. This may have been a strategic move on Google’s part given the “competitors” who were present. The impression I received from Google was, “We’re doing everything great just the way we’re doing it and because we believe in our way, we’re going to keep pushing our message.”Apala Charan gave a very engaging and informative presentation which wasn’t as directly connected to usability as it was to addressing a key component of usability, cross-cultural communication and being aware of cultural differences in usability testing.Qifeng Yan also spoke on the same topic using his PhD model as a basis for his presentation rather than anything he had gleaned from Nokia, which I believe was a bit disappointing as that was how he was presented.After the 9th hour of presentations, my attention spanned declined a bit…so I can’t quite summarize on the last couple speakers.The presentations in English were all translated into Chinese and vice versa via headphones, which was incredibly valuable. I can’t begin to emphasize how key the presence of those headphones were.And candidly, I would say on speaking ability, I would say that Jason Huang, Apala Chavan, and Yu Guo made a strong impression with the audience.Day 2For the Day 2 workshops, I selected the Hands-On Usability Workshop and the Cross-Cultural Workshop. The Hand-On Usability was quite good and I would recommend it to first-time attendees of the conference.Unfortunately, the Cross-Cultural workshop was very poorly organized and run, which was completely the fault of the workshop leader and not the conference.