February 11 Newsletter

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HFI User Experience Design Newsletter

Secrets to Setting the Context for Usability

Message from the CEO, Dr. Eric Schaffer

February, 2011

Human Factors

I n te r n a t i o n a l

Newsletter


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Table of Contents

Secrets to Setting the Context for Usability 3

by John Sorflaten, PhD, CPE, CUA, HFI Writer

Message from the Author of Innovative Solutions 11

by Apala Lahiri Chavan, MA, MSc, CUA

Message from the CEO, Dr. Eric Schaffer 12

by Eric Schaffer, PhD, CPE, CUA, Founder and CEO

HFI User Experience Design NewsletterFebruary, 2011

HFI Newsletter February 2011 2


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Have you ever come into a room where an intense conversation commanded theair?

Imagine it ending with these phrases:

A.B.: Ill never believe in that person again.

L.M.: The facts are clear, its all over. Nobody can deny it.

What just happened? Were you witness to the end / take-over / bankruptcy of

your organization? The untimely demise of a project? YOUR project? (Of course,

we always take the worst case, thinking it applies to us, right?)

But wait a minute. Were letting our imagination run wild with minimal data.

Keeping our cool, we ask Sushmita as she leaves, What was that all about?

Oh, nothing, she says. We were talking about the Super Bowl. Jason said the

Steelers were going to win. He was so, so wrong, Ill never believe him again.

But now that its all over, we know the Green Bay Packers are the better team.

Nobody can deny it anymore.

Notice how our first interpretation seemed ego-centric, concerned with our own

pre-occupations. Does that sound familiar?

Our mind naturally applies whatever we see or hear to ourselves. When window

shopping, what other pleasure do we get than imagining ourselves in those

clothes, or camping with that equipment, or driving that car?

Luckily, we had a chance to ask Sushmita who was on the inside of the story.

She had the context.

Our usability work involves getting the context of how end-users see their work.

So we interview them.

Secrets to Setting the Context for Usability

Yes, context matters

a lot


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But what if they are from a different culture? What if your end-user has different

sense of what individualism means when faced with a marketing proposition

that makes you stand out?

What if your interview participant wants to agree with you on everything! Or,

what if theyre just not good at verbalizing?

In these cases we also need help setting the context for our interviews. We need

to understand the context of even gettingthe context (!)

Lets check out the solutions to these problems in a 2011 book, Innovative

Solutions: What Designers Need to Know for Todays Emerging Markets, the

conclusion to our 2-part review.

The notion of other perspectives gets taught at an early age. We learn not to

take other kids toys and not to make fun of someone wearing glasses or who

looks different.

Accepting others becomes the foundation for civil discourse and just getting

along.

But when trying to understand how others perceive, react, and conduct their

lives we typically lack the wisdom that overcomes invisiblewalls of misunder-

standing.

The two editors of Innovation Solutions, Apala Lahiri Chavan and Girish V.

Prabhu, provide ample tools to help break down those invisible walls.

For instance, emerging markets include the BRIC quartet: Brazil, Russia, India,

and China. We learn early about Culture Is It Predictably the Same? The

answer comes to us in clear usability-informing metrics devised by early cross-

cultural researchers.

Power Distance The United States scores lower than the BRIC countries in

acceptance of an innate social hierarchy. We learn this influences how interview

participants respond to usability researchers who they perceive as being higher

in the social hierarchy.

Who is that OTHER in

the room?


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Individualism The US scores highest among the BRIC who are all more group-

oriented or collective in their behaviors. Individualism makes you stand out.This can be good for U.S. advertising. Not so good for BRIC consumers.

Masculinity On the whole, the entire world is more or less in the same range

when it comes to being more masculine than feminine.

Uncertainty Avoidance Brazil and Russia score high in this measure of risk

aversion, above the U.S. India and China score somewhat lower than the US.

This has implications for our understanding of how people accept new products

in these countries.

Long-Term Orientation The BRIC countries all scored higher than the U.S.where people seem to live for today. China and the U.S. appear on the opposite

extreme ends of this dimension, thus offering a clear contrast in cultural differ-

ence.

Figure 1. BRIC Geert Hofstede Scores.

(Bar diagram from theUniversity of Iowa Center for International Finance and

Development.)
http://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/faq/faq_docs/emerging_markets.shtmlhttp://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/faq/faq_docs/emerging_markets.shtmlhttp://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/faq/faq_docs/emerging_markets.shtmlhttp://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/faq/faq_docs/emerging_markets.shtmlhttp://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/faq/faq_docs/emerging_markets.shtmlhttp://www.uiowa.edu/ifdebook/faq/faq_docs/emerging_markets.shtml


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These cultural dimensions provide the starting point for defining your user

profiles and cultural personae. How would you plan your data gathering inter-views or usability testing, knowing what you read (above) about the gulf in

understanding between your own cultural expectations and the expectations

of your participants?

Chapter Five, by Apala, shows us how to compensate with the following sample

innovative solutions.

1. Interviewing amidst cultural differences

For example, cross-cultural researchers have long asked whether they should

ask questions of their informant using the frame of reference (rules, vocabulary,

logic, etc.) of the end-user, or instead, acknowledge their own outsiders perspec-tive. Apalas experience suggests the latter. She calls it the Stranger in the

Strange Land technique. She writes:

The feeling that participants get of Oh, this chap is a foreigner and

therefore its ok that he is asking such strange/stupid questions makes it

much easier for us to ask questions that would normally be thought of as

awkward or even a strict no-no, and equally easy for the participants to

answer what would otherwise be considered embarrassing or very per-

sonal questions.

2. Getting honest assessmentWhen eliciting frank comments about a new financial Web site that was being

introduced in China, users refused to say anything negative about the web site.

Her team purchased sets of little pewter statues of characters from Chinese folk

tales that were very well known to all. She called this technique Jungian

Archetype Folk Probes.

What we did was to write down the names of the various Web site fea-

tures we were evaluating on little cards. Next, we asked each participant

to match each card with a pewter statue of their choice... In fact, the

features that had proved frustrating for users were the first ones to beassociated with the statues with negative attributes.

3. Testing for frank usability

Apalas team found that users would generally take the middle ground, saying

that every product was good. If there were any problems with the product,


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they would say it is the users responsibility to solve the problem. She used the

Bollywood Style to add flavor to the normal think aloud usability test method.

When watching a Bollywood film, every member of the family (irrespec-

tive of hierarchy) suddenly feels free to voice their opinion about every

aspect of the film... We created a dramatic (veryBollywoodish) story line

and each task became a part of the plot. The idea was to immerse the

participant in a familiar story (woven around the product to be tested) as

if they were a character within the story and thereby make them forget

their normal hesitation to be critical.

4. Getting comments from the inscrutable

When comparing new product concepts in Asia, asking for peoples feelings in aneutral environment gave little new information. Instead, Apalas team simulated

the dynamics of a normal mercantile environment called The Bizarre-Bazaar

Method.

We provided a set of stalls with vendors (trained HFI facilitators) who

were selling mock-ups of selected concepts along with distracter items.

The vendors described the concepts as if selling them to the participants

and then gauged their reaction. In the fray of bargaining we gauged peo-

ple's ability to grasp the concepts, appreciate the functions, and assign

value to the designs."

By now, you have the flavor of this new volume, just released in 2011. I tried to

give a sense of what Innovative means in the context of finding cross-cultural

design Solutions. The book avoids the pedantic tone of academic writing. But it

does not sacrifice factual data and research-oriented recommendations.

The wide range of contributors also leaves me with the sense that the book

represents a healthy amalgam of design experiences. This contributes to feeling

more confident that Im not reading the lucky experiences of one or two people.

The range of contexts, experiences, data, and recommendations helps us gener-

alize to our own design challenges. Based on the variety of situations, we gain

confidence that when the time comes, we have background to start finding our

own innovative solutions for investigating context.

Setting contexts for

gettingcontexts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywoodhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywoodhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywoodhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bollywood


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While thinking how to make this review exciting (as well as informative!)

I searched on Innovative Solutionsin Google Books. What did I learn?

Well, I learned the book does a good job at representing current thinking. Also,

you can sample pages by reading portions right in Google Books! we gauged

peoples ability to grasp the concepts, appreciate the functions, and assign value

to the designs.

This figure shows that Google Books indeed provides an important context for

appreciating our current review topic.

The phrase innovative solutions returned search solutions for graphic design-

ers, software methods, and of immediate interest BoP Markets. Note that BoP

refers to Bottom of the Pyramid when referring to market categories.

If you are looking for a clear amalgam of these hot topics as they apply to your

usability work, then read Apalas and Girishs Innovative Solutionsbook. As stated

in Chapter One of their manual (I would call it).

Figure 2. Setting the context forInnovative Solutions in "usability"

or emerging markets.
http://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22innovative+solutions%22&btnG=Search+Bookshttp://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22innovative+solutions%22&btnG=Search+Bookshttp://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22innovative+solutions%22&btnG=Search+Bookshttp://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22innovative+solutions%22&btnG=Search+Bookshttp://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&tbo=1&q=%22innovative+solutions%22&btnG=Search+Books


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Today, the majority of designers do not personally come from the BOP

and so lack the overlapping life experiences that can help them under-stand the context of BOP users. However, businesses are increasingly

motivated to develop successful models for BOP and are engaging the

design community on the BOP challenge. (p. 5)

Drilling down into Google Books brings you to the famous Google preview

materials (see circled link). I found a satisfying sample not only of the InnovativeSolutions book, but also other books with which I could do comparison shopping.

As a demonstration of the value of setting context for getting context, here we

see how Google Books helps you to rapidly get contextfor deciding what to

read about innovative design.

Check out Innovative Solutions: What Designers Need to Know for Todays

Emerging Marketswhen you need a reality-tested context for your next

challenge in defining and serving emerging end-users.

Namaste!(Context matters.)

Figure 3. Getting context for evaluating books through Google Books

preview service.

And you can sample

the chapters!
http://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&dq=%22innovative+solutions%22http://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&dq=%22innovative+solutions%22http://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&dq=%22innovative+solutions%22http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define:+namastehttp://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define:+namastehttp://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define:+namastehttp://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=define:+namastehttp://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&dq=%22innovative+solutions%22http://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&dq=%22innovative+solutions%22


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Chavan, Apala Lahiri and Prabhu, Girish V. (2011).Innovative Solutions: What

Designers Need to Know for Todays Emerging Markets. CRC Press, Taylor &Francis Group, New York, London.

References
http://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=falsehttp://books.google.com/books?id=7i8OdC5CK_8C&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false


11/13



In all these years of working on cross cultural projects, the one thing that has

helped me the most is the "vuja d" attitude! Yes, it's the opposite of dja vu

and what that means is that I never assume that I know the deeper meaning

behind a particular environmental attribute, artifact, or behavior that I observe

during user research, no matter how familiar the attribute, artifact, or behavior

seems to be!

It's certainly not easy to maintain the vuja d attitude since cultures often have

astonishingly similar manifestations of what turns out to be completely differentunderlying structures / norms / motivators. So don't get taken in by the decep-

tive similarity that will lull you into assuming that you know the context, and

hence will not probe deeply enough. This can prove disastrous.

I hope you enjoy reading the book as much as Girish and I enjoyed putting it

together!

Message from the Author of Innovative Solutions, Apala Lahiri Chavan


12/13



Today UX experts are frequently asked to design for different cultural contexts.

This is driven by globalization and the emerging markets growth.

But it turns out that mastery of UX does not necessarily include mastery of cross

cultural design. As such, practitioners in our field can fail because they do not

understand this very specialized space.

In some cultures we find that time is not necessarily linear. We find that little

may be black and white. And no, hiring someone who grew up there does notwork. In fact local staff have trouble SEEING cultural differences, just as fish

cant see water. They are too deeply immersed. They dont know where to look.

For those who are interested, I encourage this journey through the looking

glass of different world views, different realities, and different conventions.

After growing up in New York, Ive been spending most of my time in India.

And it is amazing to see Apala sort through the differences and break through

communication barriers to reach the core design insights.

Managing international data gathering and design is not for the faint of heart.

We had one research team held up at gunpoint. And I cant count the number of

fake participants uncovered in our process. But to be effective we need to go

deep, because that is where the powerful design insights hide.

Message from the CEO, Dr. Eric Schaffer


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