UX Day Shanghai – Workshop hosted by Nurun, WK, IDEO, Frog Interactive Design agencies

Techyizu, the organizer for Demo Day, Bar Camp, debuts UX Day, a first of its kind User eXperience interactive workshop in Shanghai today.

Conceived by Steph Rymer of Nurun and contributedby speakers from IDEO, Wieden+Kennedy, and FROG, these 4 multi-national UX focused agencies are on a mission to educate and enhance user experience in the city of Shanghai today.

I was told by Kevin Chen, one of Techyizu’s organizer, that they were worried about low turn-out due to the nature of 1 full day workshop on a topic that’s not as talked about in Shanghai, but this worry quickly disappeared as online registration reached full capacity in just 2 days without much marketing.  Mental note to self, if you’re interested in learning from the best UX practices in the world for free, get to know one of the techyizu organizers or RSS to their event feeds to register early.

The whole day schedule was arranged as such

1. Morning workshop features speakers from IDEO, W+K, and FROG
2. Team formation and selecting challenging
3. On site research including People Square Marriage Market, tianzifan and hospital
4. Return to base for synthesis, ideation, prototyping
5. Sharing and after party

Here are the key concepts delivered from each speaker:

Greg shared with the group on different ways to be inspired, conduct human-centered design research, and how to look for patterns from user behavior.

“Focus on the observation of details and then blur out to see these patterns, you’d be surprised how much pattern form from random details”

Hatti shared with us the advantages of convergence and/or divergence and under what conditions these apply best.

“Divergence is about finding and using new methodologies; it is a method more for large companies to step back and rethink strategy”

“Convergence is about taking a process that’s already been implemented and incrementally improving it via repetition.

Ryan shared examples of prototypes that accurately simulate the input mechanisms, surrounding environment, product ecosystems or even the emotion that will be experienced when using the final product.

“High fidelity design is a macro design and simulation to user’s environment”

“Low fidelity design is a micro design process much like back-of-the-envelop design”

The framework to think about ux is such

1. Who are your users? Who are you designing this for?
2. What are their needs?
3. What are other parties involved and what is their relationship to one another
4. What are some suggests or solutions you can come up with

The majority of the teams observed how the people in the marriage market interacted with one another.

One group worked on expediting the hospital visit and one group tackled Tian Zi Fang to smoothen overall shopping experience.