I guess It is true that many Chinese in China have no idea what Facebook is since they have the Chinese’s Facebook Ren Ren and other similar services like KaiXin, Peng You, Weibo & Jie Pang  a lot of people still do not bother to buy VPNs to circumvent the ‘Great Firewall.

According to Mashable, another creepy thing recently is the unborn baby photo and FB page, it might be good for parent to keep track on the children life and for people interact with a new life.

I wonder in the future will it be even a dead person’s fb? I do have a friend died in a horrible accident who is dead and all of sudden her FB just hang it there and sometime appeared when i try to browse my friend list, until now I am not sure should i keep it or delete it.

Besides using VPNs in China to log in FB, I also collected some interesting video link about FB & Social Media.

References: Photo from Mashable

There is many talk in BarCamp Shanghai 2012, a lot of people gathered in Markup room out of six different room just for Frog Asia’s talk and workshop, presented by Brandon Edwards (Creative Director and Co-founder: frog Asia) and Kajal Vatsa (Senior Design Researcher: frog Asia).

Same like UX day, they have weibo for people in the event interact with each other, you can send your weibo message to communicate with other. Another interactive way is scan your QR code to see the event and talk topic detail information, people using their phone and search for the talk they like.

3d printing

3d printing

3d printing

I like this speech the most, the American Chinese speaker interestingly shared the UX related case studies and got my full attention for entire speech and jot down lot of note regarding his sharing tips. May be one of the reason is he is also a former banker and current Apple retail owner, so I assumed his talk should be related to my interest in retail, visual merchandising and UX.

It is always good to use title like 6 lessons or  principle kinda headline to attract audience, you will instantly know this is a shortcut learning tips. Of course, his headline attract a lot people fully occupied the room.

Lesson 1 is about simple, navigator before arrive, not to get lost, and user experience in a space. bad UX like point & shoot, too complex, too many steps to get into menu. Good easy sharing photo UX like Instagram is growing up. Angry bird’s carton graphical yet simple UI, the conclusion is more visual and less ad.

Lesson 2 is create stickiness. He indicated DAT and Groupon bad UX, UI is not sticky to customer. Good example like Amazon is good for shipping, more you spend more you ship tactic drive sales to product. Also, like BBM, the more people in a network the harder to leave the community. Apparently, FB also strong in making log in user based to stick in.

Lesson 3 discussed about bad Barbie Doll’s store shopping experience compare to American doll from Chicago, which is more personalize, have a story behind, 14 years in US and it flagship in NYC.

Lesson 4 is about user exploration, he use Disneyland as example. Even people lost  in Disney land , they can always find the way back, and you will always notice where the castle is. The space planning with decent guide is the key. And IKEA, always a common case for comparison even in other talk. Always easy to find a way moving to the same direction and lead the user well. For the bad space planning such as Vegas Casino, bad in making user have no sense of time in a dark lighting space and get hang over; ATM  is everywhere may be just good for the owner.

For social media networking site Facebook, you can do everything in FB, with forum, News, Photo, Farm games, mutual friend and likes then always see the home button to go back. The booming Pinterest, the freedom of sharing and keep a photo, always get you back in a second.

Lesson 5 explained fashion brand like Zara have a good “Limited Pieces” strategy, user come back after 2 weeks might not see the same pieces display and always back with surprises. Gilt luxury label created the sense of season product, invitation only deal. Finally Microsoft VS Apple, Microsoft’s future vision strategy always release the next interaction or product VS Apple never announce early before product launch in the market, created the curiosity for Apple fans and make them wait and wait and urged for the new i-product.

Lesson 6 transcend the physical using Amazon selling e-book compare to physical content as good example and how wikipedia using the certain amount of interaction.

6 UX principle

Anything related to Objective C will draw my attention too, his talk is based on the *Sh*t Coder never say” concept.

Another one of the interesting talk by Toine Rooijmans, in his talk also attracted the crowd and he shared some interesting fact about Chinese housewives, and SEO optimization , everybody collecting point for no reason, 95% user return daily and only 5 % actually collecting rewards page.

His strategy is using small fee delivery, landing page for big UI button, colorful interface and weibo style and people using DianPing link and how housewives helped to promote by giving them some reward, even RMB 1 or 2 can leverage Chinese user to do anything according to the system generated task.

One of the awesome kid present his thought in the event and teach you how to build a robot, I like when he asking around with his English accent :” Anybody have any question?”

The use of game design technique and mechanics to solve problem.

After party

After party

It will create frustration for user like me if every time i need to google “word press log in” and spend a few second to search the right site to log in, sometime even need to click on a few site then i can only log in to my blog.

Thanks god after watching the how to find a log in tutorial, which is a easier way to log in by typing wp-login.php. Still, I’d prefer just add a button for me to log in.

Yes, this is possible! After attended my first ever the home-style workshop at Taipei, just like The Social Network movie, the only different is we are not in dormitory but a house.

Final work of the day

Original Idea

I thought the most crazy workshop I’ve tried in the past event is 12hr Mobile App Hackathon but this one is 48 hours for a brand new service design workshop. Compare to the 27 hour real life company I organized before in Taiwan. 48 hour is really a bit long for service design, 48 hour should be enough for 2 workshop in a company. Since this is a global event which is globally 2,061 jammers participated from 85 cities in almost 40 countries.Nearly 350 brand new service designs and published them for the world.

36 dedicated jammers with 11 nationalities split into 5 teams

One man’s trash is another man’s treasure

We have a cool talented B-boy musician/rapper Filosopher who is also got a moniker Mr.Ikea came out the topic and bring all of us together to form a group, the original group name is something like trashy treasure, but then we all agree to changed group name to Cookies Pirates.

Day 1 is mainly Service design introduction & group announcement, topic announcement and group brainstorming. I was suppose to join the Dream team but realized too many people in that group, after walked around different other group, My instinct tell me this is the group I should join, after mingle around with other trash treasure member, I decided to stick with the trash related group.

Once the group member is decided, we all started the brainstorming section and quickly throw out a lot of idea and topic based on “One man’s trash is another man’s treasure” orignal idea. At the beginning, everyone briefly introduce and share what we are good at, this section is good for us have an idea what is the final outcome we can produce.

And then we all have to come out at least 10 ideas without thinking too long, total of 70 ideas is created at the first stage and we all talked about own idea and group the similar ideas together.

Total 70 ideas from each team member.

We used Group Ideation, Brain Writing, Trigger Method （1）and 3 type of way for nurturant ideas phase （2）.

After filtered all the potential ideas, we selected 3 main ideas and decided stop discussion and vote for our favorite, each people  have only 1 vote.

The final ideas is below:

1. Travel

2. Home/ Homeless

3. Changing people behavior 

The final 3 main ideas.

Even my home ideas got 4 point, we continued discussion the next day based on this result.

Everyone talked about a big long run thought about environmental friendly and back to nature, we decided to focus this final service in Shanghai. It seems a bit too hard to continued with this topic with 48 hour, in the end this topic is rejected. It will good if this is a week workshop so it might be a good impact to talk about environment protection issue in China.

Rejected ideas

References：

1. http://personalexcellence.co/blog/25-brainstorming-techniques/

2. http://www.usabilitynet.org/tools/brainstorming.htm

There is a lot creative event recently named China first…event, after first UX day in China, this is another social event which I think is a lot better and bigger than other regular social networking event. They creatively decorated the event with illustration card board, and make people who attend the event look fabulous like a celebrity event, nice food, exhibition and lucky draw which is a lot of fun! Definitely worth to go again for second time.

You can drop your name card for lucky draw and get your badge which represent you the most.

I recall back in graduate school in my animation class and illustration class, my teacher always wanted us to draw everyday and every time take 4 hours a day to draw in a class, no matter in studio drawing, sketching, marker pen, water color or computer drawing class. Once you stopped you just feel like can’t draw anymore, that is why it is in one of my new year resolution list, and I just have to draw again.

I told my teacher I want to focus on more character design and I think i just have to start focus on this part again as my drawing direction. I started to collect more human figure and style in Pinterest as my inspiration, until now after 2 weeks I’ve quite a good collection already to move forward.

Here is some personal reason why I should learn French first:

1. I've met too many French or people around me who speaks French since 2008.
2. I've too many university mate who is French.
3. I've some French client past 5 years and they appreciated my design and concept.
4. French is a lovely language make me feel like speaking singing at the same time and it is romantic. 
5. Since 2009, my uni-mate Antoine give me lot of French movie in the university, and I promised him I'll learn French.

And I posted some fact I found below, get some interesting feedback from my friend:

Je parle un peu français..

French distinguishes between tu (familiar) and vous (formal/plural). French is the largest donor of foreign words in English, it is spoken as a native language in more than two dozen countries on five continents.

It is the second most commonly taught second language in the world (after English), making it a real possibility that speaking French will come in handy.

In 2003, the United States was France’s leading investor, accounting for 25% of the new jobs created in France from foreign investment. There are 2,400 US companies in France generating 240,000 jobs. American companies with offices in France include IBM, Microsoft, Mattel, Dow Chemical, SaraLee, Ford, Coca-Cola, AT&T, Motorola, Johnson & Johnson, Ford, and Hewlett Packard.

France is the second leading investor in the United States: more than 3,000 French companies have subsidiaries in the US and generate some 700,000 jobs, including Mack Trucks, Zenith, RCA-Thomson, Bic, and Dannon.

French is the 3rd most frequently spoken non-English language in US homes  and the second most commonly taught foreign language in the United States (after Spanish).

French is ranked the 2nd most influential language in the world.

http://french.about.com/od/francophonie/a/whylearnfrench_2.htm

Also, these are the creative video to learn a foreign language which i think is worth to check it out.

Why learn more languages?

Started from 2007, I spent my time in TamKang University to learn Mandarin and it was a fun experience to learn Chinese with foreign student, my classmate from German, America, Canada, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia and Japan. It is definitely a culture shock for me and it was one of my fun experience in life!

I think 2008 is my most international year ever, after become a full time student in National Chiao Tung University.

2008 New NCTU international student

Sometime I appreciated other people who record and write about something you don’t realize or care about, recently I find these people pretty inspiring and worth to check out how they respect the culture and foreign languages. And so far i think this guy did a pretty good job!

http://www.fluentin3months.com/about/

http://www.fluentin3months.com/

Benny Lewis – Fluent in Three Months – Rapid Language Hacking

Polyglot tour of flat in 8 languages and 6 dialects

Some other interesting people worth to check it out.

Mark Powers

A fun channel about westerner VS oriental

Gangway
Caboose
a la mode
Five finger discourt
beater
visit the can
pacifier
douche
rag baby
blacktop
horse sense
butterface- this is the most funniest.

Aubergine- eggplant

Bogey

Chav- a young lower-class person who behaves badly and wears designer clothes (usually fake).

Chuffed- Pleased, delighted. I am chuffed!

Flapjack-

Faff- to muck about, wasting time doing something not necessary. (I’ve been faffing about all day with my car)

Numpty- Stupid person

Humpty Dumpty

Spiffing- Very posh and dated word meaning excellent, especially as used by upper-class toffs and rugger buggers. (He’s a spiffing bloke)

Slash

Nosh- There was lots of nosh at the party

Fit- Sexy

Winkle- An alternative word for penis mainly used by parents when talking to their children.”Andrew, stop touching your winkle!”

So what i will do is start from French! Understand the culture and speak everyday! Although i still have many languages need to pick up and the 3 months 1 language is good idea to learn a new language.

This could be good start channel to learn