Stranded in Hong Kong and UX HK
I've been meaning to blog about my UXHK experience for quite a while but because of work schedules i've had to put on the back burner till Sulit (now OLX.ph) finished project birthday. Be forewarned though this is hardly a knowledge sharing piece nor does it actually constitute one exact topic but its a blog none-the-less.
I went to UXHK 2014 with Mica, Ely and Robert feeling a little bit of place since essentially I was part of the Engineering department as Sulit organises its team in such a manner. True enough I'm a designer by trade and I design day to day as it is my job as a UI engineer but my self-confidence has been a bit shaky lately specially about what my job title constitutes and the responsibility it holds. Though i generally believe that UX isn't a job title nor is it the responsibility of one sole person/one department but a culture adapted across an organisation, that mindset isn't something that is easily swallowed by most people. A part of me was really wondering if I actually deserved to be to a conference like this (specially since it was paid for by my office). In any case, traveling abroad, much less traveling abroad because I was sent there by my job wasn't something I was gonna pass up as to me it was in some ways a landmark achievement in my career.
I've been to a number of tech/design related conferences before including TedX but this is the first time Ive ever been to a UX conference much less a conference like UXHK. The caliber of the people who attended was something I didn't really expect. To sort of shatter my self confidence even further, here I was, someone who didn't even have "UX" in his job title sitting beside people who were doing this for decades day to day as part of what was expected of them for companies like IBM, GE, Heath Wallace and etc. Add to this I do tend to have a youngest sibling "bunso" mentality in these situations where I feel like my brain reverts to a 4 year old helpless kid. I was really expecting to just sit most of it out and watch while other more "deserving" people dictate what I needed to do, but again this a UX conference with UX practitioners I don't think that was part of the mantra of anyone who attended that conference. Opening talks
My first glimpse into uXhk was the opening talks where each speaker would give a short introduction and summary of the workshops they'd be giving for the next couple of days. I have a tendency to build fandom over people after hearing a few quotable lines and something between Kim Goodwin's demonstration of organisational values (possibly because I have a fascination with Schelerian philosophy) and Samantha Soma's short quick deep lines stuck in my mind. I love Samantha Soma's quote on building design teams. "Your teammates are your users, maybe you are the broken interface, maybe you are the missing affordance" - Samantha Soma
I've recently had to deal with having to reel in and own up to my design decisions for OLX.ph's mobile apps and this really struck a chord with me. I've been so focused on getting experiments out, finding if they we're valid and just coasting along afraid to actually put my foot down and take a step that maybe, I was looking at design problems in the wrong place. Second Day, Jim Hudson: From Customer Insight to Great Product. My first workshop was from Jim Hudson who used to work with Paypal. he described and showed a lot of mental models which could help us better fascilitate UX cultures and design better products for our organisations. Root cause analysis or asking 5 why's really shows us how most often than not, the first answer and to be exact even the first question we ask ourselves isn't even the real question to actually find a solution to and is probably the easiest to adapt to any workflow. It's very common specially for designers and more product oriented people to think purely about the product and jump straight to nitty gritty things without even asking ourselves what really is the problem to begin with.
My group was pretty interesting and I guess I was sort of lucky that I got paired up with mostly younger people so I didn't feel so awkward about being really young or being a conference newbie. It was really interesting to hear from my group mates Kaisen, Samantha and Alice who were all essentially designers who've gone through the same sort of "red tape" just get their ideas out. I also got to meet a lot of other people in the room who made me feel a little more comfortable about being a "jack of all trades" and not really grounding or calling myself by a UX title. It helps that people generally appreciated my varied geekyness and career exploits.
Third Day, Dave Malouf: Interaction Design as the Language of Story: Contexts + Characters + Plots = Design
Dave Malouf's workshop was definitely something more technical but definitely something I've been wanting to grasp for quite a while since Ive been debating about what my actual responsibilities are. If UX consists of the entire story Interaction design is the language it uses to relay itself. The exercises we're all pretty interesting and fed into my general need to doodle as we we're using comics and panels a lot to fuel our stories. Its essentially a lot like what I do in my head where i create a sort of narrative manifesto which aligns and shapes different portions of the products I design for only it felt very different having to actually put it out on paper and come out with an actual product with like minded individuals who were basically thinking of the same things I was thinking of.
The great adventure.
I have no idea how to start this whatsoever as it was something that I still can't fully grasp in my head. Somewhere between getting drinks at Wanchai on my second night, eating at causeway bay and leaving the innocenter the day before the pouch where I left my coloured pens along with my Passport went missing. So here I was stranded in another country, no family nearby, no passport, a limited budget and no actual plan yet on what to do. Here is where UX conferences essentially differ from other tech conferences. Probably the most humbling experience I've ever had was when Daniel Szuc, one of the organisers of UXHK offered to help me find my passport and asked me to come with him to each of the workshops to describe my missing pouch bag and essentially ask any of the participants if they've seen it. Its hard to describe but it felt like being a little helpless kid again, except you'd expect these to be really scary total strangers who wouldn't care one bit but that was far from what was happening. Another one of the organisers accompanied me to the Police station so I'd have a local who could speak cantonese help me explain to the officers and file a police report. Even more amazing was how people at the conference, total strangers were asking how I was and empathising with me. The only way I could describe it was unreal. People we're so nice for that extra night that I was stuck in HK that a couple of participants asked me come with them to Soho and actually experience something more than Mcdonald's and Cafe de Coral.
That experience was just so humbling that I can't really find any words to better share what was going through my head in those 24 hours of being stranded in HK. It was a huge slap in the face of how much I needed to learn and how much of my life has been wasted in a comfort zone.
The trip and the conference changed me so much (and I don't normally do these things) that on my last hour at the Hong Kong airport I was rushing to find something give back to people who we're kind enough to care about the clueless ponytailed filipino boy stranded in HK.
PS. If anyone's wondering how much I've changed since coming back:
1) I've been taking the trains again
2) I tried out parkour
3) I've sat on a motorcycle
4) I'm currently planning a shoestring budget backpacking trip
5) I'm currently planning to get a tattoo by the end of the year :) YES YOLO.