Firstly, some of the crazy colours and sizes you might expect, although tiny phones are not popular in Japan.

This phone has mobile Payment, or Saifu Keitai as it’s called, built in, as indicated by the little symbol. Interestingly, if you ask Japanese people, many say they prefer not to have the payment system in the phone. They don’t like the privacy implications, or the risk of losing phone & payment card in one go.

This keyboard is made up of entirely soft keys, they change according to orientation of the device. In these photos you can see the qwerty keyboard and the numeric.

Solar powered …

UV checker …

And finally, some interesting display types.

This form factor and size dominates the market, possibly because the large screen is good for TV viewing, which is popular. On a purely anecdotal basis, I’d say that if ten people in an underground train carriage have their phones out, 8 or 9 will be this shape and size. Being Japan, of course everyone else is asleep.

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.

(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.

Upcoming conferences in Asia

User Friendly 2010 – 12-14 November 2010 – Nanjing, China
http://www.upachina.org/userfriendly2010/

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.

(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.

More on Hiragana and Kanji.

It’s interesting how it seems almost made for numeric keypad entry.

Quite confusing … Conde Nasty even.

The tube lines that you can use are shown in grey. The suspended lines are in colour.

I really like this still image showing the reference points on St Martin in the Fields.

Click here to see the interactive version

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.