China Launch Sprint – paving the roadmap

Last week I was invited to Beijing to take part in the China Launch Sprint. The focus of the sprint was to identify action items in our product roadmap for the next devices that will ship Ubuntu Touch in the Chinese market later this year.

I am a lead UX designer in the product strategy team currently doing many exciting things, such as designing the convergence experience across the Ubuntu platform. I was invited to offer design support and participate in the planning of the work we will be doing with our industry partner, China Mobile, after reviewing the CTA test results.

What is CTA?

CTA stands for China type approval which is a certificate granted to a product that meets a set of regulatory, technical and safety requirements. Generally, type approval is required before a product is allowed to be sold in a particular country.

Topics covered:

• CTA Level 1-4 test cases and developed a new testing tool for pre-install applications.
  We reviewed the content and proposed design for all five of Migu scopes with design team’s input.
• Also, we discussed the new RCS (Rich Communication Suite) integration with our Messaging app and prepared demos [link] for MWC Shanghai, Asia’s biggest mobile event happening at the end of this month.
• And explored ideas around the design of mCloud service integration with our storage framework.

Achievements

The sprint was very productive and a great experience to sync up with old and new faces. We were all excited to explore ideas and work together on the next steps for China Mobile and Ubuntu.

Downtown in Beijing

I had some downtime to explore the city and have a taste of Beijing’s most interesting local dishes and potions with people I met from the sprint…