It was shot manually with a Canon IXUS 70, with a shot every minute for 32 minutes. The camera was sellotaped to a balcony railing. It moved occasionally, which meant the photos needed some Photoshop realignment. I didn’t crop the video, so you can see the resulting black borders flash up.
Soon after I took these shots I found CHDK, which is a hacked version of the software for Canon compact cameras. Installing that allows you to set up a timelapse sequence and let it run. You can do hundreds of other things using CHDK. It’s brilliant, and it’s spirited. I don’t know what Canon think of it. The hackers created a Canon compact camera App store long before they were as hip as they are now.
The other day I had some great Dim Sum and an interesting UX conversation with Daniel Szuc and Jo Wong of Apogee Hong Kong. I thought I’d share what we discussed …
(This is a loose summary of what we each of us said, mostly unattributed to individuals, and paraphrased rather than quoted.)
On awareness and demand for User Experience in Asia
The term “User experience” is now well understood in China. Clients know what it is and why they need it, but they don’t know how to embed it into the organisation, or even how to integrate effectively into project lifecycles.
So, the challenge is partly about giving them processes and methods, but partly about helping the company’s people to really embrace UX, to have the vision for what it can achieve, and to feel it in their “hearts” too.
Getting this to happen in an organisation needs the support of quite senior people.
Cashless payments
Hong Kong does have a very popular cashless payment card, the Octopus card. It began for the underground (in 1997), but now can be used in many places, including shops, parking meters. Schools and businesses use it for recording attendance.
Why aren’t more products and websites crossing the divide between the East and the West?
One factor is the consumers’ allegiance to local companies.
Another major factor in mainland China is that some sites are blocked. Facebook and Twitter are examples. People can circumvent the blocks if they really care, but most don’t, so sites like Facebook can’t gain critical mass.
In Hong Kong it’s a different story, Facebook is hugely popular, both among the ex-pat and the Chinese communities.
There is of course the factor that sites/services designed in the West are inappropriate for Eastern audiences. Localisation by translating is probably not enough. In many cases (such as financial/payment), the business logic needs to be different, and in most cases, there needs to be some mindset shift to take account of the culture.
Testing East versus West
There’s little confidence among Western companies when it comes to testing in China. Dan & Jo often work with companies to get the testing done, but also think it’s about building up the confidence to engage with China, so the companies feel able to include China in their normal processes.
Dan & Jo said that sometimes they can spot cultural problems with a site before even testing it.
Sometimes project teams in Europe or the US don’t even collaborate well with their own teams in Asia. It may be a budget/territorial thing, but it is obviously a crazy way to behave. They could get quick answers without expensive testing rounds.
Product development strategy
Daniel expressed the view that the process for allocating product development budget is flawed. Those assigning budget are not thinking in a user centred way. They’re not establishing what questions they need to ask to figure out where to spend the money, and for us UX people, the question we face is what is our role.
Product development strategy … Chinese style
Dan & Jo told me about “Shanzhai”, which is the name given to the Chinese fake mobile phone market. The illegal industry produces copies very quickly. They work, but the software might not be as good as the original. This New York Time article suggests that the hardware is produced by factories doing a ‘night shift’.
Here’s an example, the one on the left being the Apple version.
UX Hong Kong 2011 – 18 Feb 2011 – Hong Kong
5 Speakers, 100 people, and timed to coincide with Chinese New Year. More info to follow shortly. I’ll update the post when it comes.
That’s it … it would be interesting to hear any thoughts on these topics.
I’ll be posting more soon on views on UX from Japan.
Thanks for sharing your conversation with Dan and Jo.
I’m living in Japan for a couple months now, here’s my two cents.
From perspectives of designer and UX community, I also believe that more and more people are embracing UX, absorbing ideas from the west and trying to apply them in their works. But I suspect that the UX movement is still only happening low in the company hierarchy, and rarely bubbles up to management level let alone realizing as a product.
Also from typical citizen’s eyes, life isn’t much easier. Some examples of difficult to use daily items: bank ATM, cel-phone, train ticket vending machine, interactive map…are still purely designed and implemented. Older citizens are suffering from confusing and heterogeneous machines, yet average people seem to have very high tolerant of those unfriendly systems, and companies are still profiting. Not much demand for change, evolution is very slow.
Culture is a big factor. User feels embarrassed for not able to figure out how to use a product, instead of questioning whether the product is badly designed to begin with. People like to read manuals before starting to use a product at all.
Also, questioning someone’s work is considered inappropriate and impolite. Unless you are a professional yourself (there’s indeed a HCD professional qualification you can acquire), your comment may not have much weight.
From an interaction design perspective, Japanese text entry on the iPhone is interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly it uses a gesture that I’ve not seen elsewhere, a tap-and-swipe. Secondly, at least some Japanese people prefer not to use it, despite it seeming to be much quicker.
(There’s a bit of background on Japanese text at the end of the post.)
In this first video you see two ways of selecting characters: firstly a touch followed by a selection, much the same as a typical dropdown menu, albeit in 3 dimensions. The second method is the tap-and-swipe movement, which gives different on-screen feedback.
It seems elegant, however in this next video you see a Japanese person typing, and using multi-tap rather than tap-and-swipe.
I plan a little international UX fieldtrip to investigate this and other topics further. More about that later.
Background on Japanese text
There are two phonetic character sets with 48 characters each, and one semantic set with thousands of characters. The phonetic characters come in groups of five, e.g. ka, ki, ku, ke, ko,which look like this:
An example from the semantic set is
meaning scales (of fish). It’s pronounced koke, and can be spelled out (or typed in) as such … こけ.
Here’s a screenshot of the iPhone keyboard. Each visible key represents a set of five characters, and shows the first in the set, e.g. か (ka) is the top middle key. Note that the semantics characters don’t show, they have to be spelled out using phonetic characters.
It is confusing but I guess they’ve done this because legally you have to ‘opt in’ to receive emails and texts but not for post or phone. At least they give the opportunity to opt out of the latter two which most companies don’t.
The London Underground is on strike, but what’s really unforgivable is this information design. I’ve always felt the grey was used the wrong way round, but today it’s worse.
The tube lines that you can use are shown in grey. The suspended lines are in colour.
I’m really inspired by Papervision at the moment, and I came across this brilliant example of its use by Quentin Lengelé. It’s a video that allows the user to turn the camera while it’s playing.
In fact, the way it’s done is by taking a camera like this
to produce 360 degree video footage which looks like this
then plastering that (playing) video footage onto the inside of a virtual hollow sphere. The viewer can control his/her view by rotating their viewpoint inside the virtual sphere.
The article set out to explain Twitter to those on the outside. It contained interesting facts, but in my opinion it failed to give insight into why Twitter is causing such a stir.
Firstly, Twitter is causing a mini-revolution in customer service. This was entirely missing from the article. It stated that “companies are latching on to the search facilities at Twitter to find out what people think of them”. Companies are not just stealthily dipping into Twitter, they have Twitter accounts. Dell have 28. They’re not eavesdropping, they’re having conversations. Sometimes they’re not having conversations, and that has been even more dramatic. An example like Motrin Moms would illustrate this and give non-Twitterers an insight into what’s happening.
Twitter is also causing a revolution in news. Twitter had pictures of the Hudson plane crash before CNN got hold of it.
Janis Krums, an average Twitter user was on a nearby ferry and posted a photo to Twitter. CNN and the rest caught up later. It’s in no doubt that traditional news organisations like CNN are now taking Twitter extremely seriously. None of this came across in the article.
The article compared Twitter to SMS, suggesting that with unlimited mobile data plans “Twitter will at least provide a free texting service”. SMS and Twitter serve totally different needs. Twitter can serve similar needs via its direct message function, but so could email or IM. It’s not why Twitter is important. In a previous blog post I explained the difference between Twitter and Facebook status updates. Once understood, I think this give a far greater insight into Twitter. Likening Twitter to cheap SMS allows people to miss far more important aspects.
There’s an awful lot of fuss about Twitter. It’s a social phenomenon. I felt that the article could have shared deeper insights than it did.
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