Sheheryar Naveed

Design Thinking Skills for Products

2018-02-10T06:30:00+00:00

Design Thinking Skills…

You might be wondering that this design thinking is related to what we call the way to present our product; that just makes one part of the whole course. There’s much more that makes the core part of it. Have you ever wondered how much important is the idea and designing of your project? Probably not because when we first think about the project we need to work on our technical mind focuses only on the mechanization. One thing to note is that before working on your project coming up with a distinct idea is essential. One needs to be very meticulous while shaping the idea. In addition to it, the presentation skills are also very important. In fact, the skills required to come up with the idea and before shaping it into a physical entity is what we call design thinking skills.

Before I start, let me make it clear that I’ll focus on customer centric-problem solving methodology. You can obviously use these skills in various arenas of your profession including projects, hackathons, publicity, manufacturing etc. You might also have noticed that some people find it difficult to come up with idea and thus they regard themselves being less creative, however, that’s not the way design thinker thinks. After reading this whole excerpt you’ll have a boost in creative confidence for solving problems. You’ll have your thinking style completely molded in a way a design thinker thinks. But again this is what I am presenting to you after attending an eight ours long continuous workshop.

As an introduction I’d like to make you clear with a few keywords on which this reading will be based on i.e. Empathy, Define, Ideate, Prototype, Test. These are the five stages of design thinking methodology. These four words forms the crux of the material that you’ll go through after this. The order in which these are written is also quite significant. Not only the order, the shape of the figure shown below has a deep lying ideation. For e.g. The down sloppy shape of define after empathy states that if the define part is not properly built then we need to start over the five-staged process again.

The first stage of design thinking process is “EMPATHY”. It is paramount to know why and how to be empathetic when designing solutions for customers. Sometimes very deep learning is required to fully understand the problems the customers are facing. You don’t need to follow the customer-facing problem fully because sometimes they even don’t know the problem they are facing. So the skill is to indulge yourself fully and probe into what might be the reason the customer has to face problems. To do so some practicality is required such as observing, engaging and soaking into the complication. Interviewing the customer, journey mapping customer’s experience, priorities of customers, customers’ personas etc. are some of the ways renowned companies including massive airlines companies have adopted to explore different issues that customers face.

Second stage is what we call “DEFINE”. The fact that this stage is most important of all stages is that if you fail to develop this stage you need to go all the way back to the first stage. It happens quite often that the problem that seems to e the problem is not the problem and in fact something else is causing troublesome situation. Blending the knowledge obtained from the first stage and distilling it to a specified outlook is what we construe DEFINING in design thinking process. A good analysis of the given available resources is required to DEFINE the absolute obstacle on the way.

Some of the techniques involved in this process includes organizing large amount of data with respect to the surface trends which was collected in the empathizing stage. A design thinker is expected to translate multiple observations into concise and meaningful instincts. An appropriate way of doing this is by dividing the task in ‘Insights’, ‘Do’, ‘Think’ and ‘Feel’. All these steps have a pivotal role because one needs to frame a challenge that needs to be solved.

Next yet critical stage is “IDEATION”. This stage is what most people blame their creativity for. Nonetheless, ideation is not all about creativity. There are certain ways to ideate and think further beyond the scope that we’ll be focusing in this subject matter. An important principle to keep in mind is that the first idea is often not always the best idea. In the ideation process, one is expected to give permission to others to express themselves, thorough study of the pros and cons of the given idea and at last yield the best idea.

There are multitudinous frameworks that needs to be explored for this part. Placing constraints on thinking process to drive ideation deeper is one way to tackle the ideation part. Considering the goals that could be met with the following idea and the drawbacks that might arise in the idea assessment criteria is required. After the applying extensive reasoning and scrutinizing the initially obtained scenarios and information a solution pops up which is parallel to business objectives, radical for customers, very professional and technically achievable.

“PROTOTYPE”, a stage that comes before the final part. It is basically the continuation of previous stage Ideation. The goal of this stage is to construct as many prototypes artifacts as possible with the aim of getting opinion from the users regarding the issue under exploration. This step involves re-engaging the customers in process to look for the extent of validity of the solution proposed to the specific problem.

Some effective prototypes are created easily within a short span of time with lowest viable design. Although there are different ways of portraying your idea with different types of prototypes. A most common type is the story telling using a prototype to give the end user an experience. It’d be a great idea to build low fidelity prototypes by mockups, acting and story-telling. From what I remember when I did the prototype part during my workshop was to make a television using the pizza boxes, looking old using masking tapes on carboard and placing it on my head, making a hat out of a disposable plate etc. Although it looks crazy but not only it was fun doing this part but also it was a great experience of my first prototype.

Last but not the least is TESTing. Testing anything is vital in any practical work so it is in the Design Thinking process. The sole purpose of this phase is to gain as much amount of feedback from the users about idea and solution as possible. It’s not abut testing the finished product but rather it is about advancing empathy with the customer and remodeling their insights and mindset in return.

With the successive powerplay of all the above mentioned stages the process of design thinking comes to an end eventually leading to the production of a sophisticated product which is perfectly in sync with the needs of the people thus eradicating the complication that led to the initiation of the whole process. For those who were not aware about the process, just make sure you fully benefit following the skills learnt through this reading and following the steps carefully.

My Mentors:

Steve(twenty years experienced graduate of Stanford University in Executive Education Programme of Design Thinking) and Kia(Brown University graduate with extensive facilitation experience in Design Thinking workshops provided to a number of organizations in Hong Kong, including Asia Miles, Cathay Pacific Airways, Pfizer, Swire Properties, HKUST, PolyU and Google).

HK-The world’s most tourists visited place of 2017

2018-02-10T05:30:00+00:00

The actual site where the article got published could be seen here.

London which was considered to be the most popular city in the world is no longer the city with most tourists. Hong Kong(HK) has stolen the English crown of being the most tourist visited site in 2017. Interestingly, Hong Kong was not even in the top ten according to the 2016 survey which makes Hong Kong’s current elevated position all the more surprising.

One of the major causes of the rapid surge in Hong Kong’s tourism industry was the ‘Golden Week’ Holidays celebrated from 1st of October to the 8th in the account of the National day of China. However, this year one extra holiday was added to it due to the Mid-Autumn festival coming along its way. It is believed that Golden Week Holidays were one of the principal reason for the sudden rise of Hong Kong’s tourism industry and is further supported by the statistics released by Tourism Board according to which in October 2017 there was a 6.6 percent year-on-year increase to 5.28 million visitors among which roughly three quarters were Chinese.

Yet another quite common reason for the increased tourism is the abundance of tourist hotspots in Hong Kong. Places such as Ocean Park, Disneyland, “Ngong Ping” cable cars, retail entertainment Centre, and “Tian Tan Buddha”, which is a landmark hilltop statue of Buddha, are some of the more treasured places, which foreigners find appealing in Hong Kong. These places teem you up with energy when you arrive, and it never lets up. The ferry rides, innumerable shopping places to get lost in, the mouth-watering traditional Chinese cuisine to indulge one’s taste buds, the horizons and myriad of historical places to be photographed and much more mean that you are never out of things to do.

Furthermore, an uncommon cause of HK’s increased tourism is the growth of international students in Hong Kong. With the modernized era taking its shape, more international students are seeking the opportunity to study outside their home country, and in doing so Hong Kong is their preferred choice. With Hong Kong’s more than five universities placed comfortably in the top hundred institutions of the world, Hong Kong holds a firm position as an international education hub. Moreover, the fact that Hong Kong shares border with the most populated country of the world China means that it is quite convenient for Mainlanders to come to Hong Kong to pursue their higher studies.

It is believed that HK’s tourism industry still has some room for growth in future. Although it was believed that the densely populated area has an acute shortage of land, HK’s skyline is dotted with a lot of hotels which means that accommodation of overnight visitors isn’t a problem. The available opportunities combined with HK’s potential to accommodate internationals, a greater surge in HK’s tourism industry is expected to be seen very soon.

A Guide to MS AZURE Machine Learning

2018-01-15T04:30:00+00:00

A Guide to MS AZURE Machine Learning Studio

Machine Learning is a very expansive topic; it isn’t too easy to deal with as well. Nevertheless, it is an interest catching topic. This excerpt is based on a very pithy introduction of Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio. Before I begin you may have an idea of what I am going to be talking about for the next few minutes here.

There’s something we call data science work flow. The work flow goes as follows: Discover and gather data -> ingest data -> understand data -> transform data -> create model -> deploy model -> monitor and maintain mode. The AI (Artificial Intelligence) consists of four parts namely ingest, store, prep and train, model & serve. The last two parts is what Azure Machine Learning is meant for. Despite the alluring work, there are some key challenges that one needs to face: going back and forth with experiments over time, selecting the best models, spending time over selecting and arranging data sets (about 80% of the time is spent on this task), scoring predictions and managing the model etc.

AZURE MACHINE LEARNING STUDIO

Azure machine learning provides an extensive platform to construct and deploy experiments. It is suitable for both Python and R developers. Moreover, it contains a large number of configured modules that actually helps in data preparation and evaluation. Other than model management services (creating containers for models and managing and deploying models) and experimentation services (track of projects, run history tracking etc.) we can use Azure to train and deploy our project using Azure Virtual Machines, Azure IoT Edge, Machine Learning Server, SQL servers and GPUs etc.

For experimentation services we can use any type of IDE (Integrated Development Environment) such as Tensor Flow, VS Code, Git, Docker etc. Microsoft ML Spark is another important feature of Azure. Some of its benefits includes that it runs on any platform and language that is supported by Spark, it provides machine learning algorithms on spark namely deep learning, computer vision and text analytics, it uses SparkML DataFrames as common format and much more. Additionally, it can handle different data types such as text, images etc.

Antecedent to our work in AZURE ML Studio a design of workflow is important to follow. First one is supposed to acquire and rectangularize the data (reading heterogeneous data, sample, flatten and distill the structure), understand and make the data valuable (infer type and entities, clean and transform) and at last prepare for consumption when we aggregate, compare and validate our data.

Some of the classified steps of dealing with data using ML are:

Ingest and Sample: Data can be stored in Azure Blob storage or SQL DB. File types include SQL, JSON and Parquet. In addition to it we can have delimited files with formats such as CSV, TXV and TXT. Sampling strategies include Top N, Random N, Full file and random %.

Prose: It powers Microsoft Excel Flash Fill. It is used in data preparation to derive, combine and split column by example.

Transforms: Column (duplicate, remove, keep), append rows and columns, adjust precision, join and summarize.

Data Understanding: For data understanding we have a lot of metrics to leverage such as mean, variance, data profile, kurtosis, skewness, median, quartiles, NaN values and much more. There are all together twenty-eight metrics available.

Inspectors: This includes box plot, histograms, scatter plot, time-series, map and column statistics.

Custom Scripts and Extensibility: We can add columns, advanced filter, transform data flow, transform partition.

We want experimentation and model training in ML and for that the Azure ML workbench provides some exclusive features. We can use VS and VS Code Tools for AI: access Azure ML functionalities from VS and VS Code, view list of jobs, view job details, preview and download artifacts from experiments. One also has the option to use Command Line Interface through which AZURE ML functionalities could be accessed.

Furthermore, notebook integration is available. It is fully interactive, with complete markdown and code cells as well as their rendered output. It can also be accessed through local web host browser. There is a Run History and metrics feature available on AZURE ML platform as well. AZURE ML tracks history of experiments using run history service. We can use Azure ML logger to track evolution of metrics across the run. View panel can be customized as well.

One can promote and download the artifacts. Promote means to transform an artifact to an asset (accessible in AZURE ML). Promoting is a way to create association between an asset and a version. One can promote a trained model so that it can be referenced in the scoring script. An asset can be downloaded locally to be then used for creating of image used to serve your ‘Dockerized’ web service.

Transparent compute is the last step of experimentation and model training. Experiments are organized in a way that they can be executed on many compute targets. Compute Target is where the target is run such as Remote Docker, Local Docker, HD Insights etc. Run Configuration is configuration on compute target. The last stage of machine learning process is operationalization. It includes model management, deployment targets(docker based deployments), latency and scalability(for smart-routing and auto scaling), and model data collection(detecting data drifts and loop back while retraining).

This was just a brief introduction and much more learning could be done from AZURE portal itself.

My instructor: Delon Yau, Software Engineer, Commercial Software Engineering, Microsoft.

Microsoft GirlSpark Power BI session 2018

2018-01-03T04:30:00+00:00

Brief Introduction to Microsoft GirlSpark:

This is an event co-organized by Microsoft Hong Kong, LinkedIn Hong Kong, and The Women’s Foundation which includes a series of hands-on activities with the purpose of making full-time women seeking degrees in various universities well-aware of the diverse career pathways in the IT (Information Technology) industry and to utilize the technology to spark for a better future.

Among the various workshops being conducted in Microsoft, Cyberport for GirlSpark one of the most important one was on “Power BI” which is currently used by almost all companies worldwide. Before I tell you about the event, I think it’s imperative to mention what Power BI is all about.

Microsoft Power BI is a business intelligence cloud service meant for the non-technical business users to interact, visualize and share data. It’s absolutely free and is user-friendly. Using Power BI would make it easier for you to analyze data efficiently. It brings data to surface by connecting users through easy to use dashboard and various other features. If you are looking out for getting your data more interactive with yourself, this Microsoft application is surely what you need to look for.

The Day Begins…

Walking out of the bus terminal in Cyberport 3, I remember having a secluded feeling, however, within minutes I reached the lift lobby where I could see the girls clustering everywhere; I heard some of them talking about artificial intelligence likewise didn’t really feel the need to press the lift call button. A few seconds later we boarded in the lifts and flew all the way to the fifteenth floor of the building. It was kind of brouhaha everywhere. Some of the Microsoft employees were making arrangements while others were preparing themselves for the presentation. The girls were gossiping. I arrived a bit early so I grabbed a drink and started to look out for the Microsoft Surface Pro in the corridors. However, that reclusive feeling did not last long until I came to meet my friend and a partner, MSP Alison. Within minutes other MSPs started coming as well.

The workshop was conducted by Michelle, a Business Intelligence intern at Microsoft Hong Kong. The session started at about quarter to ten in morning. All the girls were from leading universities of Hong Kong some of which include Hong Kong U, HKUST, CityU, CUHK and PolyU. We were asked to disperse around and help anyone in need. Michelle started by first giving them a brief explanation on Power BI and where is it used. She gave a step by step guide to girls which they were supposed to follow. I could see many girls who knew about Power BI already. The girls were welcomed to raise any question and most of those were answered by the MSPs moving around in there. Some of the girls even encountered difficulties setting up power BI in their laptops, but MSPs were there to help around.

Some of the technical stuff taught to girls include making queries, editing those, changing the data type, addition of categories and subcategories, different ways of representing data i.e. on a map, bar charts etc., making data more interactive and much more. Michelle also tested them by giving them short questions or exercises may be to check out if they’ve really understood the use of Power BI.

The sheer interest of the girls in the technological field could be judged from the fact that some of them even asked me about the web development i.e. Search Engine Optimization to be more precise. It was more related to how can we make the website more popular and search for website becomes more optimized for various search engines and the techniques involved in doing so. It was fun talking them about these technological matters.

The best part of the workshop was that at the end of the session the girls were playing on with the data over power BI with ease. Though most of them were feeling anxious at the start and others a bit frazzled during the presentation as they were finding difficult to catch up, but eventually I could see the sense of satisfaction glimmering over their faces. It was a good day indeed.

Immersive Technology Workshop by UFO Schools and Microsoft

2017-12-10T05:30:00+00:00

Immersive Technology Workshop

It was an Microsoft hosted workshop meant specifically for Microsoft Student Partners(MSPS) to make them aware about Microsoft’s Hololens technology and UNITY. Since, it was too much to get covered in a day so the workshop was divided into two days. The first day was mostly teaching related to the subject matter and the second day was focused more on practical work followed by a final test to inspect our knowledge bank’s recent additions. In short, the main aims of the two days extensive workshop was to make MSPs familiar with production tool, acquainted with MR(Mixed Reality)/VR(Virtual Reality)/AR(Augmented Reality) and finally making a holographic application.

Immersive Technology-I

The workshop started with the brief introduction of Microsoft’s Hololens technology. It was in fact the best part of the workshop because each one of us was actually given the task to locate an object while wearing the Hololens and it was pretty fun doing so. Before that the instructor gave told us about the way the sophisticated device works. We finch the device by showering our fingers from a single point into a burst open circular shaped pool. The Hololens will detect the action and get started. Thereafter there are wide range of functions available in this tiny yet very pragmatic instrument. It can detect gaze, recognize gestures and can even identify voices. You can even use hand gestures to interact with the three-dimensional images by raising and lowering your finger. What makes this most convenient is its user-friendly functions.

Other than the practical fashion of using the equipment, in-depth knowledge of what is going beyond the user’s scope was what we looked into throughout the first phase of the day. “Spatial Mapping” and production of “Holograms” was what we intensified on. Hololens is loaded with surfeit sensors to sense any type of movements which is then displayed to the viewer using the colored glasses which you one can explore with different angles and different aspects. An incredible feature present inside those goofy glasses is the inclusion of a camera that captures all various types of objects present and loads extensive data related to all those objects thus making the interior view of those objects available for viewing which means that the material which the object is made from and the central shape could be determined with this miniature tool thus making it distinct among all other technical devices.

Ranging from video calling and watching movie to fixing a wire everything has become to easy to deal with after the invention of such a fine technology of Microsoft Hololens. One can now view what the person is looking towards using the camera on eye of the person while talking to the second person on video chat. After getting a full grip on Microsoft Hololens, we learned UNITY. UNITY is an application which has various uses such as Film Engine, Game Engine, AR/VR/MR Engine etc. It has a wide range of functions, nevertheless, our main task was to focus on holographic application. In order to build that first we were required to become fully proficient in the UNITY’s functions. Even though most of the MSPs were already quite well-aware of UNITY’s operations but still some of those needed a brief introduction.

As far as I remember we were given basic knowledge of some of the tabs such as Hierarchy, Inspector, Project, Scene, Console, Asset Store and Output. Under these tabs there are diversified tasks that we can make use of in the project we are working on in UNITY. A succinct description of each of these markers is as follows:

Hierarchy: The purpose of Hierarchy is that it provides an outline view of object in the scene including the duplicates, It shows object that are included in the scene. We can use it to view objects, prefabs, create object, parent and search and modify object by name etc.

Inspector: The functionality is to work with components of a particular object in the UNITY editor. We can use it to reset a component of a game object.

Project: It is the place where everything in the game will be sorted and categorized so that we can access and use them optimal. We can discard or store files and search using filters. We can even scale the UI.

Scene: It is where we assemble the part of the game. We can navigate around the game and get what we want easily. We can orbit around the scene, pan side by side and even zoom the scene view. One can use axis to spin the scene around and filter the scene view such as enabling lighting and sound, turning on and off different gizmos, shifting to 2D/3D modes.

Console: It helps with debugging. It lists logs, warning and errors across building of games. It gets everything running smoothly and optimized for platform.

Asset Store: It contains a variety of assets which maybe paid or free of costs. Type of assets includes 3D models and scripts. Some of the benefits of the specifically UNITY’s asset store includes that the assets pre-built and saves much time and effort, are licensed per team, achieve good results with small teams, cheaper than hiring a developer ad artist and assets are free to distribute in games. Additionally, assets are download integrated which means that they will get downloaded and automatically transferred to the UNITY without the need to open the web browser.

Output: There’s a section in unity called Build where can export our project to form a separate shortcut. After getting a terse intro on UNITY the day’s planned schedule was completed.

Immersive Technology-II

Most of the learning outcomes were already achieved on the first day; the second day was more about applying the knowledge to a practical task and testing the knowledge delivered to us during the first day. We made an AR application using “UNITY” and “VUFORIA”.

We used UNITY to impose different features(using the C# scripts) in our Unity Chen Object which was downloaded from the asset store.

VUFORIA is a platform that is used as an AR/MR tool recognition. It can recognize 2D imaged, 3D models and complex environments(terrains). Other than Vuforia we can also use ARKit, ARCore, OpenCV etc. So first of all, we get our license on Vuforia then created our first target database and eventually created our first AR application.

Finally, we were given a small theoretical and practical test ensure that we’ve fully understood UNITY’s core function and steps to make an AR and Holo application.

Note: This workshop was led by an instructor of UFO Schools which is a profound and revolutionary IT academy. It is one of the Microsoft Partner Learning Centers. It offers both online and offline IT Technology training based on the official curriculum from Google, Microsoft, UNITY and Autodesk.