UNDER DEVELOPMENTUCD in Chinese IT enterprises

market globalization process, usability and UCD are rapidly emerging as professions in China. More and more leading Chinese enterprises have started practices in this area. To better understand the current situation, in January 2007 we conducted a study on UCD practice in China as a component of the SESUN (Sino European Systems Usability Network) project (www.sesun-usability.org) funded by EU Asia-IT&C Program. Thirteen IT enterprises (multinational companies were excluded) with experience in UCD were selected for the study, including hardware vendors, software vendors, solution providers, and service providers from different regions in China. They represented the leading players in UCD amongst Chinese IT enterprises. For each enterprise we conducted an in-depth interview with a usability practitioner who has at least one year of experience in UCD in that enterprise. The interviews focused on the key areas of UCD according to the UMM model [1]. UCd Groups Usability groups in these 13 enterprises were set up in recent years with the earliest dating back to late 2001. Nine of them are under the R&D divisions of product lines, and two are directly subordinate to the top management of the enterprises. Those not part of the product line were used to support platform or market divisions. The team size in most cases ranged from five to 20 people, with the largest having some 70 members. Most of the team members were transferred from other professional positions like interface designer, developer, or tester. As for the origin of UCD teams, 10 were transformed or evolved from the design departments, with only three cases in which top management set up the team directly. As for the daily work of the UCD practitioners, it is usually a mixture of interaction design and user research. The projects for UCD teams usually come from product lines. Only in a very few cases were they able to initiate their own projects for some prospective research. A typical UCD project (involving interviews or usability testing study), from planning to reporting, usually lasts one to two weeks. The longer ones could go on for up to a maximum of four months, depending on the specific project circumstances. Enterprises usually have a routine staff training program. However, most of the interviewed enterprises did not cover UCD in their training; only members of UCD groups are eligible for UCD training. UCD teams occasionally offer UCD training to the project teams before the project …