Interesting Times
Over the last six days I have had the pleasure of traveling, presenting, and sightseeing in Beijing. The occasion was the User Friendly 2007 conference, where over 700 user experience professionals from around the world gathered to present and share with one another. It was another excellent and enjoyable event. As per most professional conferences, there were good presentations, a few outstanding presentations, and also a few less-than-good ones.
But by far the most enjoyable part was the hallway chatter - the impromptu conversations, informal gatherings, etc. Looking back, I realize that nearly every conversation I took part in eventually touched on how much energy and growth user experience is seeing in China and Asia Pacific. The UPA China chapter has leveraged this by recruiting young volunteers, often fresh out of school, to help organize and run chapter events and the UF conferences.
In return, the young volunteers are able to network with potential mentors and more experienced peers from in-country, as well as UX professionals from outside China. Clearly this is a golden opportunity for UX practitioners at the beginning of their careers. I would’ve loved to have had this opportunity when I was coming up.
These are interesting times in the UX field. China and India are coming into their own. While most native people I meet who hail from and work in Asia Pacific are individual contributors or first-line managers, I fully expect that as UX becomes more integrated into the systems development life cycle processes I will meet more and more homegrown Directors, Senior Directors, and VP’s. The same progression has happened here in the US over the past 15 years. It is happening in these regions now.
The real interesting thing I am seeing is that the the UX communities in Asia Pacific are not simply adopting the old methods and processes. They are adapting them, changing them, improving them. I can’t substantiate this with quantitative data, it’s more a combination of gut feel and some anecdotal data. I promise to explore this in future posts. For now, I’m content to just set it down here and pick up on it at a later date.
