Part 2: Cultural Bias, Icons and Japanese Tea

Let's move to the cultural considerations on a company's website. Why is it vitally important to be aware of cultural differences when designing your website?
Globalization of websites means that most of the earth's population has potential access to a website's contents. Most of the world does not speak English as a first language, but currently most websites are in English. This situation will undergo significant change in the next five years.

Already, major corporations are preparing their sites for localization. Dealing with many countries and cultures means more than just localizing the language. All of the UI components that you mentioned need to be considered for localization.

For example, even key branding messages may be understood differently in different cultures. People in different countries react to colors, metaphors, use of pictures, use of abstract representations or diagrams, and kinds of content in very different ways.

We showed in an article we published recently how different countries naturally bias their websites according to fundamental dimensions of culture. We used Hofstede's dimensions, the result of a cultural anthropologist testing users in over 50 countries.

The differences show up in these five ways: attitudes toward discrepancies of power among different people, individualism vs. communal societies, gender-role differences, discomfort with uncertainty, and orientation to long-term time.

If websites are not designed with culture differences in mind, users may feel that the website is odd, strange, foreign, frightening, or not trustable. These are not emotional reactions that the site developers want to promote.

Consider the current Fed-Ex home page for Saudi Arabia. The image shows an Asian woman in short sleeves, in stark contrast to the typical Saudi office worker. The DHL home page for Saudi Arabia shows a typical Arabic-looking young man, an image more typical of the target culture.

Another example: We helped Arabia Online redesign their website. They had forgotten to think about appropriate screen orientation for English-speaking users who might be tourists and business travelers.

Their screens were organized to read from right to left, just like the Arabic script. Even small arrows pointed left instead of to the right, which most viewers would have thought more appropriate. The designers were too influenced by their own culture. This layout could have led to significant confusion on the part of users.

How did you help Sabre, in regard to designing the icons employed on the site to reflect the different backgrounds of users?
Sabre asked us to help them develop a revolutionary approach to the system travel agents around the world had been using virtually unchanged for 20 years. They intended to issue one of the world's largest extranets in six languages. We designed prototypes of icons for them that would reflect different expectations of users.

For example the email icon that shows a white rural mailbox with a little red flag raised is familiar in the USA, but it is virtually unknown in many places in the world. In the United Kingdom, urban mailboxes are large red vertical boxes; in Greece they are yellow. We suggested that they consider having a collection of appropriate symbols, even images of people that could be shown as appropriate to the user community.

To develop an appropriate set of culturally diverse components requires expert guidance from representatives of that culture. We rely on published resources or information. We also rely on our own staff resources. We originate from more than ten nations and speak at least 15 languages, including: English, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Czech, German, Russian, Tagolog, Hebrew, Spanish, Finnish, Swedish, French, Italian, Polish. We also rely on informants from particular target cultures and have developed relations with partners who can quickly interview particular kinds of users in India, Japan, Korea, Israel, Germany, and South Africa.

And how will the themes addressed in regard to user-interface and information visualization design change in the next decade?
I believe that user-interface design, somewhat like cinema, will become the focus of large teams of people from diverse disciplines creating some of the most complex storytelling we have ever fashioned.

Rich in music, voice, textual, and verbal content, able to communicate to people in many different cultures and to link them together, these user-interfaces, including their information-visualization techniques, will need to incorporate good choices for all the key components: metaphors, mental models, navigation, interaction, and appearance to bring the power of computation and communication to their highest possible levels of quality.

Otherwise, we shall sink into larger and larger amounts of babble and meaningless content than ever before. The struggle some of us face with junk email clogging our business and personal communication will only be magnified if we don't pay close attention to human needs and desires, separate from those driven by technology and marketing.

Is there a design challenge you see in the next decade, in regard to the impact of advances in technology?
One significant challenge facing us for the next several years is how to make small areas of visual display space extremely meaningful and useful. If much of our computer-based communication is in fact ported to a wrist-top device, how can we enable people to understand content adequately with such limited means? This represents, for me, an extremely interesting and complex challenge of user-interface and information-visualization design.

Finally, how is a Japanese tea ceremony a reflection of the future of user-interface?
For many years, I have used the Japanese tea ceremony as a reference to the future of advanced user-interface design: a complex ritual that can be appreciated from functional as well as aesthetic/cultural perspectives. The ceremony involves the exchange of tokens, of contents, of a kind of transaction. All of it takes place in three-dimensions and over time. Every component is beautifully shaped to fit the circumstances: the clothing, the tea serving implements, etc. In the future of virtual or augmented reality, with human-like agents representing clusters of processes, functions, and data, the Japanese tea ceremony stands as something against which to measure our efforts to achieve humane designs.

Thank you for your thoughts on design and usability!