Culture, Internationalisation and Usability - III - 4 March 2008

 Read this article in Chinese (translated by Liu Fangfang)

Authors:
Zhengjie Liu, Andy Smith, Kerstin Röse, et al.

3.3.2 Cross-Cultural Usability Engineering Process

The session allocated to discuss XUE process and methods continued with the same participants for the UE session since all of them have experienced different aspects product design and development for international markets.

All participants agreed that the general structure of the XUE process was very similar. However, key differences and issues for XUE were raised at the session.All participants agreed that access to end-users and context of use is the most important issue affecting all the methods presented in UE. This generated a discussion of more specific points, presented below.

Language barriers and local facilitators: an obvious but critical issue that needs to be overcome well in advance. The successful application of methods is normally subject to the use of facilitators local to the target market of the product.

Obtaining the right vision for a product:  participants confirmed that it takes longer to understand the vision of a product to be used in a different culture. This is why accessing users is not only about achieving physical presence in the target context of use, but about accessing users’ interpretive frames in order to understand their assumptions, knowledge and expectations of technology.

Thinking aloud as a requirements elicitation technique: this technique was presented as definitely sensitive to cultural differences, which makes it not very useful for cultures where people may feel uncomfortable about disclosing their thoughts about the product being tested.

Cross site parallel testing: this type of testing was identified as really useful in all stages in projects in which the same product is about to be released simultaneously in different sites. The value of doing is the immediate identification of key cultural differences and unmet expectations that could lead to product rejection.

Remote UE Methods: these are methods that seek to overcome the physical distance between the evaluator and the users. Popular methods mentioned were the use of power point slides on mobile phones, which users can be sent prototypes easily, remote monitoring including performance and data logging, especially in the case of websites for e-commerce.

Diary studies, in which users cam be sent a diary to register their experience with a high fidelity prototype, were presented as cheap and easy to setup. However, they also have the problem of reliability and accuracy as users are unsupervised.

In addition to issues derived from access to and contact with users, there were other points made about characteristics and skills needed for XUE professionals.  

Cultural competence of designers: how UE professionals and other members of the project team perceived the foreign culture was discussed as an important bias factor for designers, hence the increased need for field studies.  Perception of foreign culture in the project team should be assessed as a reflective exercise to avoid flawed requirements and interpersonal misunderstandings. To avoid this, designers suggested the visit to the foreign culture if possible and the involvement of local experts.

For the above reasons, cognitive walkthrough should be avoided, unless it is done with end users from the target culture. This technique requires the evaluator to make a number of assumptions about the user’s perception and understanding of the interface and its behaviour. Cultural differences in, for example, the interpretation of icons can cause different interpretations and, hence, misleading results (Bourges-Waldegg and Scrivener, 1998).

Based on the experience of participants, the need for ‘cultural bonding’ between the client and the UE professional was discussed as fundamental and necessary to have the right vision for the product.

Interestingly, the use of Hofstede’s model of national culture (1991) and related research in HCI and internationalisation (e.g. El-Shinawy and Vinze, 1997, Calhoun et al., 2002, Smith and Dunckley, 1998) was reported to be as next to zero as these were seen as not meeting the practical needs and constraints of everyday work.

As a final point, all participants converged on the need for the clarification of legal and market differences from the outset as these exert an important influence on the UCD lifecycle and resulting product.

Table 5 illustrates the results of the Delphi exercise in which the most useful methods for the XUE process were ranked.  Field studies remain the top method despite access difficulties. As expected, the involvement of local facilitators to overcome language barriers was considered the second most important activity, which confirms that direct access to end-users and their context is a critical objective for XUE.  

Parallel testing and desk research about the target culture were ranked as useful methods for the XUE process. While desk research and watching shot video clips of foreign users are considered as the most useful remote methods on top of others mentioned such as diary studies.  

Table 5: Favourite Methods for XUE process (less points mean higher rating)

4. Conclusions

This project was intended to reveal state of the art usability-engineering and cross-cultural usability engineering processes as well as methods applied with them for China, the United Kingdome and Germany. Intensive focus group sessions were conducted with usability professionals from within the respective countries regarding their current approaches to UE- and XUE-processes as well their opinion regarding best practices. Hence, participants collected applied usability methods for the development of domestic markets as well as for markets abroad and rated their applicability and usefulness as a group.

Two levels of distinction regarding results can be made for processes and methods: One is results across countries – that is differences in processes and methods between China, Germany and the UK. The other one is results across domains within countries – that is differences between UE and XUE processes and methods for each country.

Regarding the first level, results suggest a more matured process of usability engineering in Europe than in China which should not come as a surprise recalling the rather brief history of the usability-profession there. Mainly, this more mature process is manifested by the stronger emphasis on iterations of the UK and the German process. Different levels of process maturity are also supported by the fact that the UK as well as the German processes seem to be more embedded throughout the “real-life” development process, whereas findings regarding Chinese processes can rather be described as standard text-book approaches.  

Furthermore, the validation of first product ideas and concepts is more important to usability professionals from Europe than from China as both European groups explicitly integrated a specific process stage for that. This suggests that in the early stages of development product concepts appear less fixed in Germany and the UK than in China. Findings from the UK focus group particularly support this. The idea of a product vision negotiated between usability professionals, end users and clients was a constant theme there.

The German team repeatedly emphasized the need for accounting for different types of products and how this impacts the development process. For instance, new mobile-phone models, sometimes to be developed within months, require an approach  towards development significantly different from that of high-end tool machines that might be developed over years.

For China one can highlight two different approaches – the one of multi-nationals and the one of Chinese enterprises. Multi-national enterprises in China adopted the processes from its global processes set up in western countries. Chinese enterprises either adopted the standardized UCD processes and do some localization, or just added some usability components to the existing development processes.

One interesting finding in terms of UE- and XUE-methods is that, all experts acknowledged the importance of contextual inquiries and field-studies, particularly UK experts rated them as the most important UE- and XUE-methods. However, for Chinese experts the inquiry of contextual issues was considered more important when developing for markets abroad than when developing for the domestic market. German experts in contrast could not clearly separate UE- and XUE-methods. They however differentiated between methods that are efficient to apply and methods that are rather nice, joyful or interesting to apply.

Regarding the second level of results, findings suggest only a marginal deviation of the XUE- from the UE-process across all countries. The biggest difference between both domains is where and by whom (i.e. which team) the different process stages are to be carried out and which methods to apply. How far this finding really represents current practices is difficult to predict, as the German as well as the Chinese team was lacking explicit experience in cross-cultural research. Interestingly, only the UK team stressed the importance of avoiding cultural biases.  

Regarding the UE- and XUE-methods, it is worth pointing that no team was aware of and acknowledge the use of specific cross-cultural usability-engineering methods. In both cases standard UE-methods are applied. Which methods to apply, however, differed for the Chinese and the UK case – even though only marginally (for the German case no clear results could be obtained).

In general it can be summarized that differences in methods and applied processes differed more between China, Germany and England than for the different domains of UE and XUE. UE-processes in England and Germany looked more mature, flexible and integrated than in China. Specific processes for cross-cultural product development seem to be not existent as neither are specific cross-cultural usability-methods applied by any team.

This research is to be understood as a quick review of UE and XUE practices in China, Germany and the UK. Obviously it suffers from various limitations. First, findings are based on only a small sample of usability professionals, which is statistically by far not representative. Second, the background of participating professionals differ (i.e. some where consultants, some where employed by the industry), what significantly influences their view and approach towards UE and XUE, i.e. experts employed within the industry appear to be more constrained by factors such as company-practice, affecting operating units and management decisions. Third, most experts involved lacked specific cross-cultural development experiences. This however can be taken as a finding in itself. According to these findings, XUE-practices are most developed in the UK despite British experts not identifying an integrated XUE process.

This first endeavor to reveal current practices in UE and XUE provided – despite its limitations – some interesting insights into what practitioners really do and what the consider as best practice in the industry. These findings suggest that particular approaches for developing products for markets abroad are in its infancy since neither specific adapted processes nor methods seem to be applied.

References

1. Bevan & Earthy (2001) Usability Process Improvement and Maturity Assessment, Proceedings of IHM-HCI’2001, Cepadues-Editions, 2001.
2. INUSE (1998) Usability Maturity Model, Lloyd’s Register of Shipping project IE2016 INUSE Deliverable D5.1.4, 1998.
3. Hofstede, G. (1991) Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Berkshire,UK, Mc Graw-Hill.
4. Calhoun, K. J., Teng, J. T. C. & Cheon, M. J. (2002) Impact of national culture on information technology usage behaviour: an exploratory study of decision making in Korea and the USA, Behaviour & Information Technology, 21, 293 - 302.
5. El-Shinawy, M. & Vinze, A. S. (1997) Technology, culture and persuasiveness: a study of choice-shifts in group settings, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 473-496.
6. Smith, A. & Dunckley, L. (1998) Using the LUCID method to optimize the acceptability of shared interfaces, Interacting with Computers, 9, 335-345.
7. Bourges-Waldegg, P. & Scrivener, S. A. R. (1998) Meaning, the central issue in cross-cultural HCI design, Interacting with Computers, 9, 287-309.
8. El-Shinawy, M. & Vinze, A. S. (1997) Technology, culture and persuasiveness: a study of choice-shifts in group settings, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 473-496.

 Making Contact with SESUN

The project is managed in Europe by Andy Smith (Thames Valley University United Kingdom) and in China by Zhengjie Liu (Dalian Maritime University) The other project partners are Liam Bannon (University of Limerick, Ireland), Jan Gulliksen, Uppsala University, Sweden, Reinhard Sefelin (CURE) and Kersten Roese, University of Kaiserlautern, Germany.  The SESUN Project Co-ordinator is Christina Li based at Thames Valley University United Kingdom.
SESUN has an English language website at www.sesun-usability.org
The main points of contact are
Andy Smith andy.smith(at)tvu.ac.uk
Zhengjie Liu  liuzhj(at)dlmu.edu.cn
Christina Li   christina.li(at)tvu.ac.uk

Acknowledgement SESUN is part-funded by the EU Asia ITC programme. We thank Asia ITC for their support in enabling this work to be undertaken.

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