Of course I’m happy. The title was to just to attract your attention!! 
So I was one of the attendee at the First STC UX Conference held at WeSchool Bangalore (27th August 2011), and here’s what I’ve to say.
Apala Chavan, Chief Oracle and Innovator, Human Factors International (HFI) on 'Emerging Markets & User Research'
I arrived late and the third talk of the conference, “Emerging Markets and User Research – A Special Relationship” by Apala Chavan from the Human Factors Internation (HFI) had already begun. It was splendid, insightful and the statistical data was interesting. The other talks that I find interesting are “UX made for India” by Neha Modgil of Techved Design & Patrick Roupin of Kovent. Speaking roughly, Neha talked about the need to study the Indian social contexts and the results Techved has come up after their User Research on the same. Apart from that, I enjoyed the talks from Saurabh Kudesia on “Defining and Evaluating the Usability of CMS” and “Co-Creating User Experience” by Kshitz Anand.
Kshitiz Anand on "Co-Creating the User Experience"
Well, this post is not about the specifics on the talks of the day; rather my opinions on the Indian scenario on the Design world as I concluded from the conference.
Design in India, still is far off away from even the mainstream, let alone standing out and creating it’s own eco-system. No matter how we try not to accept it, the fact remains as it is (we are having the ‘first’ UX conference, UPDATE: First STC UX Conference). I started teaching myself designing, attended and given sessions on UX Design, subscribed design newsletters, did a little bit of design here and there and it’s probably been only around a year and I probably am nobody in the current design scenario but what’s astounding is that, I already find around 70% of the information shared in the conference mundane and un-revealing!! What I meant by that is, if you follow any design blogs, community discussions or read design newsletters, I bet, you’ll get more than half of the information already there. So, unless you are totally new to the Design World, you are sure to find several redundant information being re-shared in the conference (and I don’t think a newbie will pay 500 or 300 bucks to get in to attend the conference). Continue reading →
