Happy 2012

Time flies, days pass, and another new year approaches, with the very late holiday greetings!

It has been a crazy year that flew by fast. It’s also an extraordinary hard year. But all’s well that ends well.

My mom is doing great after her gallstone laser operation. My dad still plays ping pong in his spare time, and won several province-wide matches. Many of my good friends have had their new-borns in this year of the Rabbit. So happy for them; and I’ve been upgraded to an auntie too!

I’ve been traveling a lot, as usual. With three international trips in a year, United decided to upgrade me on every flight I flew with them, so I quite enjoy being a loyal customer.

Work has been treating me well; cannot complain about free buffet lunches, and working with a bunch of fun and creative latte makers and yeti (our new stuffed animal toy at work) lovers.

I’m wholeheartedly thankful and appreciative and thank you all… for your love, care, support and understanding; and I would also like to extend very warm wishes to you and your families for a happy and healthy new year!

Retention

At a company, an individual contributor may know best how the company goes with their staff retention.

I read in one blog post that promoting people to the manager level may not do retention that effective as giving out movie tickets to employees. You may totally argue with this statement but there are many people out there who just want to be on the professional track, design and build stuff, as opposed to going to the nitty gritty people managing pond. And I smiled when the founders of lynda.com announced we are all going to Disneyland with friends/family and stay for night in the grand resort. I am not a big fan of California Disneyland, but, yay, we are going to Disneyland!

We don’t have those 5-15% year-end bonuses as many companies do but we feel content to see the company takes care of their employees, and share its story with this big family.

I was overjoyed to see in today’s company quarterly meeting that the executives share their stories with lynda.com and the evolution of this company from baby steps back in Ojai.

It was quite a retrospection. Back 4 years ago we only had 36 employees, and in this past quarterly, only, we hired 25 more new people. We used to have one building in Ojai, where the company started. And now we got offices in Carpinteria, Ventura, Calabasas, London, expanding like crazy.

Some quotes from the Quarterly:

“You never know what you gonna get.”

“Scrum: empower people, allow them to make decisions, allow them to fail.”

“Build people who can see them building their career levels.”

And I truly love the “great people”, the “passion”, and the “persistence” around here. I am proud to work for a company that takes care of its employees and for a product that members love. There is nothing more rewarding than building a product that people love and are willing to spread the word.

Funny to see a twit shared at the meeting: “just got my lynda.com account, now my to-do list is infinite now.” Shame on me not really utilizing the complimentary content I got for free. And yes, my to-do list is infinite too!

UX Week 2010

Been to many other conferences such as IA Summit, UPA, SigCHI, this is my first time to be at UX Week in San Francisco, witnessing the extreme weather change from 107 to 55 F during the course of the week. Quite an experience.

So different from those open participation forums, UX Week invites people they think as big and make sure the variety of the topics. So if I want to compare, say between UX Week and IA Summit, one is leadership talks, the other is grassroots talks, with a bit of the combo in each.

Most workshops are interesting, practical, and interactive. By the end of the day, everybody is winding down and done with talking.

Quite a bit social networking in the conference, not only at their website but twitter, flickr, and the tag “UXWeek2010″ are encouraged throughout the conference.

I may try some other conference for a different taste next year, but definitely this is a great one for UX practitioners.

And Happy End of the Day August!

Packaging the User Experience

I live and work just a few blocks away from the beach but I went to Hawaii over and over again and still want to go back. Why?

For me, it’s all about packaging the user experience, well, tourists’ experience.

It’s a swimming and surfing paradise. The water is warm, and pretty much all hotels provide you with the swimming towels. And the fine sands, I heard from our tourist guide, are man-made and brought to the beach for both their own residents and tourists. (Hawaiian islands are volcano islands so the beaches were lava flows.) And at the beaches where the water is less than peaceful, locals put big stones to circle an area and protect it from the torrent for kids.

It’s an education resort. Either Polynesian Culture Center, Pearl Harbor, or Hanauma Bay video guide, they are all excellent educational resources for people to absorb the history of the islands, the culture of Hawaiian ethnic groups, and the beauty of nature.

It’s a shopping paradise. If you want to go high end, there are Tiffany, Louis Vuitton, Gucci stores at Wakiki, enough to spend a day or two, just for shopping and the tax is only half of it in California; if you want to bring some local souvenirs back to friends and relatives, there are 60+ ABC stores on Hawaiian Islands; you can get 12 key chains for $9.99 for instance.

This is a combination of all you want to get in a vacation: diversity and flexibility. The only drawback, you got to fly 5 hours and half from the west coast, and 10 hours from the east coast, enough for an international trip to the other side of globe:)

Some fun facts about Hawaii:

• Tourist spot where it’s heavily packed, it’s so much like a metropolitan, e.g., wakiki
• Tourist spot where it’s for swimming and surfing, it remains peaceful and genuine. E.g., north shore, Hanauma Bay, Maui, Big island, and Kauai.
• Papayas and pineapples are ridiculously juicy and flavorful in Hawaii.
• Starbucks in Hawaii state costs approximately $1 more than in mainland US, despite the fact that HI is a big coffee producer.
• Footlong in Hawaii is $6 each, $1 more than in mainland US.
• Gas price is about 30 cents more than it costs in California.
• Souvenirs are surprisingly not expensive. Some of them, are expectedly made in China but quite a few made in Philippians.
• The guy who drove me to the airport is from Santa Barbara, the same town as I live and he went to HI just for surfing but stayed there since then. Met a girl, had a baby, one thing happened after another before he realized it. And he told me,
• Hawaiians go to the mainland for vacation and mainlanders go to Hawaii for vacation.

A July Calendar from my last year’s trip to Hawaii. Click here (pdf) for a 18-month calendar 2010-2011. This year’s, is going to be in 2012 calendar!

Change Sucks but Changes are Opportunities

Change sucks but changes are opportunities. When Jaimi Kercher, my former supervisor, left the company for Africa, her goodbye notes concluded with this statement about change.

In retrospection, my life has never being short of changes.

When I was on the right track in the M.A. program of Interpreting, a fellowship from Illinois Institute of Technology brought me to Chicago, 12 days after I accepted the offer. A year and half after I landed in this exotic country, I finished my Master’s and went to University of Washington for my PhD.

And in the meantime, I completely geared my career from language to user centered design. I was asked in a job interview how do you see the common area between the two. My answer was, they are all about communication, to sell your ideas and to bridge people/concepts together.

Well, if I were given some time to practice, I can do coding. I learned a little bit about BASIC, C, and Java even I was still in high school. But I am more interested in presenting ideas in a correct way. I like to make my users’ life easier.

And there it came not necessarily the biggest but definitely the most unexpected change to my life. My company is going to close business and I need to find a job right away, otherwise I have to leave the country because of my work visa.

The exact 30 days between the day my company announced the decision and when I had several offers in hand debating and struggling trying to figure out which one I should accept, it was a roller coaster for me, physically and emotionally, compounded by other incidents to my life. It was a hodge podge of everything. I lost 15 pounds from the last time I went to my physical and my physician was shocked (because I was never over weight even at my peak) and he thought it was an extremely tough year for me last year. Well, last year wasn’t that tough and I traveled like crazy.

But in the meantime, I had the chance to really think about my work, career, the career path that I want to go for. I had the chance to re-organize my portfolio and re-think my design philosophy. In other words, it was a knowledge management process. I had all these auto parts and loose diamonds and it’s time to get them organized and present the value. I am, amazed at how much I learned and grow in the past two years.

I will still be working on UXRnD at my new destination and I will work hard, play hard, and for the rest of the time, be happy.

I didn’t get the chance to upload my holiday greetings to this blog (pretty much because I wasn’t in the right mood since the announcement was right in the week of X’mas). Here you go, a late happy holidays from all places I traveled in 2009! Well, we still have Valentine’s Day and Lunar Chinese New Year coming up, so it’s not that late.