User Centered Design Competition on World Usability Day
UPA Singapore and Autodesk jointly hosted “User Centered Design” Competition as a part of the worldwide celebration on this world usability day November 8th in 2007. Through 150 events in 35 countries and counting, World Usability Day brought together volunteers from corporations, organizations, and universities to focus on how healthcare is impacted by design. The events were lively webcasted worldwide. World Usability Day was founded in 2005, an initiative of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA), to ensure that the services and products important to life are easier to access and simpler to use.
Aiming at providing design tools that are easy to learn and use, Autodesk Plant Solutions supported this event to promote the usability awareness in design. The competition was hosted at Autodesk Singapore office with quite good participants from various companies along with students and C level executives. The competition was kicked off with a welcome speech by vice president of UPA Singapore Mr. Lim Chee Koon and a guest talk in Healthcare and Usability by Mr. Elwin Ng from OSIM.
The theme of this User Centered Design Competition is healthcare design and usability. Five teams were selected to present their designs along with prototypes on this world usability day. Each presentation was followed with a Q&A session for the audience to participate.
The judges for this competition were Mr Tan Kia Tong, the CTO of OSIM International Ltd, Dr. Corrina Liao, Usability manager in Dell, and Dr. Lin Qiu, Head of training and research at MicroUsability. The three best teams were awarded, though the judges mentioned that all designs were extremely good and it was tough to make a decision. Congratulations to all the teams who won the prize for their brilliant efforts. The three teams are:
Gold Award: Huiqi Duan (Autodesk), Alvin Wong (HP), Wu Jiajin (HP)
Silver Award: Zhang Hua (Dell), Lim Chee Koon (Motorola), Andrew McGlinchey (Muvee)
Bronze Award: Yuanfu Qiu (Autodesk), Yong Khang Chian (Dell), Peng Hong (NTU)
The event came to close by CTO of OSIM Mr. Tan Kia Tong addressing the gathering and by the President of UPA Singapore Chapter Dr Yuanfu Qiu from Autodesk.
This event is also supported by Human Factors International.