Last week, CBi China Bridge and LUNAR hosted a user experience design workshop. Spearheaded by Shiz Kobara, a UX veteran with over 30 years of experience, the workshop was targeted to improve the innovative processes surrounding what makes great user experiences.

The interactive workshop was held at a high level conductive for both non-designers as well as seasoned designers. Areas covered were methodologies to properly define the user scenario and how to enrich and develop user interfaces. In growing markets with opportunities for more well-defined user control and adjustment, the workshop guided participants through the processes needed in discussions with designers, programmers and product managers to discover potential needs.

Attendees of the training were from varied professional backgrounds, including UI design, solution architecture, developers, and solution managers.  Overall, feedback of the workshop was excellent, with attendees highlighting the participatory approach of the session and case studies as their favorite parts.  

CBi sat down with Shiz Kobara and discussed the changing nature of UX and the future for user interface design.  “Worldwide, there’s an explosion of UX, an explosion of capability and talent,” Shiz said.  ”From my early days of doing UX on computers, we didn’t know how far it could go.  The way that software is so capable now, there’s an explosion of freedom on how to express UI on all kinds of products.”

Shiz also discussed how China will be eventually shifting from simply manufacturing the world’s products to creating and designing products and services.  The aim of the UX workshop for him is to help the next generation think critically about the problems they’re solving.

For any queries about user experience research projects or other workshops hosted by CBi China Bridge, please contact us on info@shcbi.com

About LUNAR

LUNAR is a leading creative force in the practice of strategy, user experience, and product development, with offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Hong Kong and Munich. Lunar has designed products and user experiences in consumer, medical and high tech markets. Lunar designs with the user’s point of view in developing delightful, easy to use, market-leading products for their international clients. Website: www.lunar.com

About Shiz Kobara

Shiz currently serves as Director; User Experience at Lunar San Francisco and teaches at the Academy of Art University.To his credit, Shiz has designed the first easy to use UI for the worldwide UNIX system back in 1988 for the Open Software Foundation’s Motif user interface which is still in use today. Since then, Shiz has developed numerous user interfaces for HP’s products including PCs, printers, PDAs, enterprise management and storage systems, and future technologies in virtual reality, language translation, wireless device usage, and information document transfer.

His experience led him to be appointed as corporate wide Global Design Manager for Hewlett Packard in 2000 where he revamped the design direction for all product categories company-wide with great success in setting HP up to be internationally competitive in industrial design and ease of use. Later he served as Group Experience Design Manager for Intuit Inc in 2007 where he managed senior designers and researchers innovating Intuit’s financial software products Quicken and Quickbooks.

In his current role as director of user experience at Lunar, Shiz leads the user experience team in helping forward looking companies solve complex user experience and interactive problems where non existed before. His team designs user interafaces that allow non technical people to operate products and software in easy, intuitive, delightful ways.