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¡¡ Whitney Quesenbery
President, Usability Professionals¡¯ Association

I would like to congratulate everyone in the UPA China and UPA Hong Kong chapters on the success of User Friendly 2004, held in Beijing on December 18-19, 2004. I was honored to be part of this event.

It is a mark of the strength that you were able organize such an ambitious event in such a short period of time. The arrangements went off flawlessly from beginning to end, creating a friendly atmosphere for learning and networking.

It is also a sign of the depth of interest in usability in China that this conference could bring together so many people. I was impressed with the enthusiasm, the knowledge and the skills evident in the audience, and met many people I will value as colleagues.

The presence of so many important companies was impressive. I hope that this demonstrates a continued commitment to usability as part of their product development process.

With such an exciting beginning, the future of UPA China can only be positive. I look forward to many more successful activities to promote usability in China.

Best regards,


¡¡ Gerry

In December '04 I had the pleasure of speaking and presenting workshops at the UPA China conference "User Friendly 2004". My attendance was sponsored by Apogee ("Usability in Asia").

As this was my first visit to mainland China, it was a very exciting opportunity for me to see Beijing, and I was very impressed with the city and its people. It was also a chance for me to practice my Chinese (which is still very bad).

What impressed me most, however, was the conference itself, which was very well organized and provided the opportunity to meet with many Chinese people interested in usability and user-centered design.

Many of the questions and concerns expressed are similar to those I hear expressed in Australia and elsewhere - about communicating the value of usability, about how usability teams should be structured, and about what techniques should be used at different times of the development process.

I was delighted with the enthusiasm of the attendees, and the level of interest in designing usable systems. I got a very strong impression that the practice of usability in China is gathering momentum.

With the growth of the Chinese economy, and the ongoing need to be competitive in both the domestic and international markets, usability will be a significant differentiator of products and services. I think that as this need for usability becomes more recognized, the Chinese usability practitioners will be in a good position to sell their skills to a wide ranger of employers.

I have no doubt that the usability profession in China will soon be world-leading, and UPA China can play a major part by supporting the local practitioners.

¡¡ Daniel

Thank you to UPA China for inviting Apogee Usability Asia Ltd ( www.apogeehk.com ) to speak at the first "User Friendly" conference. We hope that this will be first of many "User Friendly" conferences in China and in coming years we can invite other usability communities from Asia Pacific to speak including Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand to name a few.

As President of UPA Hong Kong, it was also pleasing to see such a positive synergy between UPA China and UPA Hong Kong. When the small starter team (Qin, Jason, Daniel and Josephine) first proposed the idea, it was difficult to imagine we would be able to get the conference started in such a short time.

I was also pleased we were able to get the support of the international and local speakers and cover a good beginning range of topics. I would like to take this opportunity to especially thank Whitney (US), Gerry (Australia), Carl (Singapore) and Patrick (US) for making the effort to travel to Beijing to attend the conference.

It is very exciting to be part of a growing usability community in China and to meet people who share similar thoughts, concerns and desire to improve and design products around the needs of target users. I was also impressed with the quality of the questions from people on both day 1 and day 2 ranging from tools to communicating results to teams in their respective organisations.

There is great opportunity for China to promote usability as part of its product development to make it a real competitor on the world stage. By looking at some of the products being developed showed to me by some of the attendees of the conference, including web and mobile, this is already happening. China also has a real opportunity provide innovation around product development and an open door to provide the rest of the world with more useful information about user behaviour and interactions with products in China by people in China.

It was also pleasing to be working with such an enthusiastic team from UPA China.

We now look to planning "User Friendly 2005" and with better insight of the needs of the China UPA community, developing a program that will continue to inform and challenge everyone.