On January 5, 2007 I gave two talks at the Easy7 conference in Bangalore, India. This is an annual conference organized by the CHI-SI group. All the speakers were excellent. Jeremy Ashley,Vice President of Applications User Experience at Oracle provided insight into how he tells senior management at Oracle what user experience design is. He called his talk "debunking the ultimate design myth" and clarified what goes into a "successful" user experience design, including the importance of multi-functional teams. Good design does not come from one designer.

Bill Scott, AJAX Evangelist at Yahoo! delivered a highly interactive presentation (I decided to rework my presentations after seeing his!) about Patterns and Designing for AJAX, thereby addressing two hot topics in one clear presentation. I sometimes struggle with UI patterns, and found his talk offered clarification.

Surya Vanka, Manager of User Experience Excellence at Microsoft, provided one talk divided into two parts on product innovation. Based on years of experience and much research, he showed what some of the essential ingredients are for creating an innovation culture, and validated many of my own findings.

One of the best aspects of the conference (other than the food) was the participation. All talks gave ample time to questions, and so we had excellent exchanges throughout the day. Many people talked about how new UI design is to India yet the discussion was anything but beginner.

As a bonus, I had the good fortune to visit ThoughtWorks in Bangalore. After learning how to eat pan (an unique experience!), I talked about user-centered design so that we could discuss how it fits with Agile Development. ThoughtWorks has a carefully thought out way of carrying out Agile Development, and I appreciated the overview from Deven Tolia (job title: "hustler") and Marco Jansen, a project manager.

India was magic, and it was fascinating to see the rapid transformation happening in Bangalore.