ONE CULTURE’S IMPACT ON DESIGNRedesigning the Costa Rica UPS website

Prepared by Rachel Peters

forDr. Carol Barnum

November 22, 2008IDC 6060 | Fall 2008 | Southern Polytechnic State University

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

“From a marketing-strategic perspective, a company that defines itself as cross-cultrually aware knows (or should know) that creating appealing and efficient websites for other cultures is no longer just a matter of language and modification of time- and date-formats” (Wurtz, 2005).

Costa Rica is a high-context, collectivist culture with high uncertainty avoidance. Many Costa Rican sites emphasize nature, people, and government. A website designed for them should focus on the following:

Clarity and predictability. Cooperation and feminine characteristics. Government authority and regulations where applicable. Nature and family.

The UPS site for Costa Rica is well-designed, but there are details overlooked that could greatly improve the site. In this report I review three pages: Home, Tracking, and Support. I suggest redesign options for each that help to de-clutter content, place focus where it belongs, and emphasize values important to Costa Rican users. When viewing or redesigning the current UPS pages, ask the following questions:

Does the information hierarchy always highlight what’s most important? This design element is crucial for a high uncertainty avoidance culture.

Do the images and animation focus on nature? On cooperation? And on feminine aspects? These are subtle details that speak to the audience along cultural lines. For example, users may not explicitly state that they want to see images of nature, but research shows they are drawn to it. Any design efforts should focus on incorporating values considered important by the target culture.

Is the page overwhelming? Good design calls for creating pages that display information in a visually pleasing manner. Adequate use of white space, alignment, font style, and more all prevent a page from looking cluttered –even when a lot of content is present.

Can users guess what happens next? Controls, links, videos, drop-downs. Everything must be predictable. Users must have a good idea about what will happen when they click something on the page.

Screenshots are provided of the original pages and the suggested redesigns. The changes respect the corporate template employed by UPS, while offering a more culturally-sensitive design. Culture is in design, and design is in the details. Understanding culture’s impact on design and its importance in reaching out to a global audience is essential to success in today’s market.

INTRODUCTION: CULTURE AFFECTS DESIGN.Every company has a website now, and as companies go global their sites must follow. At first, making a site global just meant translating its content into different languages. But now companies are seeing that designing for other cultures is more than just translation. Wurtz’s description of the relationship between culture and web design also acts as a justification for cultural awareness in web design:

“Nowadays a website is not just a collection of text; it is a conglomerate of images, multimedia, interactive features, animated graphics, and sounds. From a marketing-strategic perspective, a company that defines itself as cross-cultrually aware knows (or should know) that creating appealing and efficient websites for other cultures is no longer just a matter of language and modification of time- and date-formats. Cross-cultural web design nowadays requires dealing with design issues that include culture-specific color connotations, preferences in layout, animation, sounds, and other effects that are characteristic of today’s generation of websites” (2005).

UPS is a global company, and they offer individual country websites. In this report I review and offer suggestions for redesigning UPS’ Costa Rica website. First, I analyze the audience – what are Costa Ricans’ expectations for a well-designed website? Next, I review several Costa Rica sites to determine what heuristics are in play on the web today. I also draw on heuristics researchers have found to be successful in cultures like Costa Rica. Finally, I analyze the current UPS website and offer redesigns for three of its pages.

AUDIENCE ANALYSIS: WHAT DO COSTA RICANS EXPECT FROM A WEBSITE?My first step in analyzing Costa Rican culture is to review their dimension scores, based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions (2005):

Power Distance: 35 (a relatively low score; close to the U.S. score) Individualism: 15 (suggests a more collectivist culture) Uncertainty Avoidance: 86 (a relatively high score) Masculinity: 21 (suggests a more feminine culture)

Based on these dimensions, Costa Rica is considered a high-context culture. Wurtz lists communication characteristics of high-context communication as “indirect, ambiguous, maintaining of harmony, reserved and understated” (2005). Particularly, the “maintaining of harmony” points to collectivism in that it shows a need to keep harmony with others. Costa Rica’s low power distance score probably offsets this aspect of collectivism a little, but their low individualism score places them among other collectivist cultures. Additionally, using indirect and ambiguous communication removes focus from the writer (the self), so this points to collectivism too.

Research provides heuristics that have success along various cultural lines, and I draw on these heavily in my redesign process. However, I also perform my own analysis of current Costa Rican websites to discover additional heuristics.

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HEURISTICS FOR COSTA RICAN WEBSITES: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

St. Amant suggests a prototype approach to understanding interface aspects for other cultures (2005). He recommends reviewing websites of similar businesses in the target country. Specifically he says to look for characteristics in the following areas of the site:

Menu bar Buttons Color Hyperlinks Body text Search engine Images

I started my site review with UPS’ primary U.S. competitors FedEx and DHL, who both also have sites for Costa Rica. Each company’s U.S. site was nearly identical in structure to each other and to the UPS site. For the Costa Rica site, FedEx (as with UPS) used a similar site design to their U.S. site. DHL however used a different structure for their Costa Rica site. Upon further review though I discovered the structure was not unique to Costa Rica or even similar countries. Countries with very different cultures, such as Japan and Luxembourg, had the same site structure as well. Some sites were unique such as Mongolia and Iraq, so DHL paid some attention to cultural detail but not enough to consider it a good candidate for determining heuristics for Costa Rica site design.

I briefly searched for a Costa Rican shipping company, but I didn’t find much. To find more general information about the country, I reviewed the Wikipedia entries for “Costa Rica” and “Economy of Costa Rica” hoping to find a list of major businesses from that country (n.d.). I did not find a list, but the countries’ main industries were listed – tourism, agriculture, and electronics exports.

Using Google, I searched for Costa Rican sites in these industries. Specifically, I reviewed three Costa Rican sites, noting the design conventions used for each. Based on this review, I derived the following heuristics for Costa Rican site design:

Place the logo in the top left corner. Linking the logo to the home page is not necessary. Animation includes videos and graphic animations, including animated navigation. Images and graphics focus on nature, including animals, flowers, people enjoying nature, land. For color, blues and greens are used most often. This most likely reflects Costa Rica’s focus on nature

(green for plants; blue for water and sky). Menu bars are across the top and in the left side bar. Global navigation may be included in the left sidebar

as well as across the top. Hyperlinks are rarely used in body text. Hyperlinks used as submenus are somewhat common. Including a site search is common. Focus on government (particularly on the tourism site I reviewed) and regulations is common, especially

in the form of videos or letters from government officials or lists of rules and regulations. Spanish should be offered. English is optional. Although, this appears to depend on the audience. The

main tourism site used English, but it’s directed at people who are not native to Costa Rica. The local sites all offered Spanish.

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See Appendix A for a comparison table of my findings from each site. The focus on nature and government are also supported by Marcus’ findings as shown in his example of a Costa Rican site (2001). The main page of the site includes a large graphic of nature including a rainforest and animals, and one of the interior pages is a government notice about an agreement signed to prevent the exploitation of children (2001). I also encountered a video about this topic on the tourism site I reviewed.

DESIGN IN THE REAL WORLD: CONCERNING CORPORATE HEURISTICS

UPS is a large, international company, so corporate heuristics must be considered in any redesign. Each UPS site uses the same page template which includes the banner, footer, and utiltity links such as the site map (located at the top of the banner). This use of “redundant cues (color, typography, sound, etc.) . . . reduces ambiguity” and supports high uncertainty avoidance cultures (Marcus, 2001). Additionally, UPS is well-known for their brown uniforms, trucks, and logo. Removing brown from a UPS site removes their branding and recognition. Further, the use of brown lends the site credibility, similar to using the UPS logo. For example, user may not trust that a site is truly affiliated with UPS if the primary color used is green.

For each redesign, I decided to keep the banner. I made one change to the template for the home page that I felt was particularly needed for Costa Rican users. The change is around the drop down menu for “UPS Web Sites.” I discuss this change in more detail later.

Keeping consistency in navigation across all pages supports high uncertainty avoidance cultures, because it will “prevent users from becoming lost” (Marcus, 2001). Although Wurtz suggests that a “more artistic navigation” may appeal to a high-context culture, I think Costa Rica’s high uncertainty avoidance negates this point (2005). So I kept the current, simple navigation scheme instead of altering it to be more discovery-based.

As I started the redesign process, I considered the heuristics I discovered on my own, the corporate heuristics employed by UPS, and the heuristics suggested in research.

REVIEW AND REDESIGN: IMPROVING THE UPS WEBSITE FOR COSTA RICAFor this report, I chose three pages to review and suggest redesign options for. These pages were accessed in November 2008.

Home (http://www.ups.com/content/cr/en/index.jsx) Tracking (http://www.ups.com/WebTracking/track?loc=en_CR&WT.svl=PriNav) Support (http://www.ups.com/content/cr/en/resources/index.html?WT.svl=PriNav)

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HOME PAGE

The home page included several design elements that should work well for Costa Rican users, including the placement of the UPS logo in the top left corner and a consistent global navigation near the top of the page.

FIGURE 1. ORIGINAL UPS COSTA RICA HOME PAGE.

Additionally, a video demo is featured that explains their internet shipping option. The demo loads another page, so reviewing it is out of scope for this report. However, it’s worth noting that the demo included a female narrator and video, which supports Costa Rica’s feminine culture and their need for less ambiguity and more clarity.

Other well-designed items include the search engine and the content selected for the Current News section. Notice there’s a story focused on regulations as well as one about women at UPS.

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SUGGESTIONS FOR REDESIGNOverall the page is somewhat cluttered. Two drop down menus, several boxes of choices, news, a demo. Where does the user focus first? Marcus suggests that high uncertainty avoidance cultures prefer “simplicity, with clear metaphors, limited choices, and restricted amounts of data” (2001). Besides offering too much information on one page, some information is repeated. For example, many of the quick links are also available in the “Looking for…” drop down.

To reduce clutter, I first removed the “UPS Web Sites” drop down. The options in this menu are focused on UPS corporate and not on shipping and tracking packages. This menu also creates ambiguity and competes with the “Site Guide” link. Users are not likely to predict where these two links lead. I changed “Site Guide” to “Site Map” to use a more commonly understood term, and I moved “UPS Web Sites” to the site utility links at the top and off the main content area.

FIGURE 2. REDESIGNED UPS COSTA RICA HOME PAGE.

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Second, I removed the “Featured Solutions” and “Quick Links” boxes. “Featured Solutions” is essentially an advertisement. It could be moved to an interior page, as many of the interior pages include these types of content in the left sidebar (which is not present on the home page). “Quick Links” is repeated in the “Looking for…” drop down, so it can be easily removed to give the home page more white space and visual appeal.

Next, I removed the “Internet Shipping” box, because there is already a graphic that links to this demo. Having an additional box on the page about it uses much needed realestate. With these boxes removed, I was able to move “Track Packages & Freight” to a more prominent position and move “Current News” below it, freeing up half the main content area. I decided to use this area for a nature-focused graphic.

The only graphic on the page besides the UPS logo and a few buttons is the internet shipping demo, which includes a woman sitting at a computer. While this image speaks to Costa Rica’s feminine culture, it does little to support their focus on nature. I replaced the image with one of a Costa Rican rain forest. I also added a tagline “Ship from anywhere, any time,” suggesting one could ship a package from the rain forest, as long as she has an internet connection. The slogan also speaks to Costa Rica’s collectivist culture, which often prefers a “rhetorical style that uses official slogans” (Marcus, 2001).

This rain forest image could also represent a video about internet shipping, as users in high context cultures such as Costa Rica usually appreciate video or some kind of animation present on a site (Wurtz, 2005). However, if used as a video, a play button should display when users roll over the image. This reduces the chance that users will be surprised that clicking the image plays a video, appealing to the users’ higher uncertainty avoidance.

Additionally, the video should include images of both men and women working together to understand internet shipping. For example, a woman narrator can be used or a family can be shown as they use internet shipping to send a package to one of their loved ones. The video should also include visuals of the beautiful rain forests, beaches, and other natural wonders in Costa Rica. These elements (men and women, family, nature) appeal to a feminine, collectivist culture by showing “mutual cooperation” and using “visual aesthetics” to illustrate a UPS service in action (Marcus, 2001).

Finally, I changed “Looking for…” to “What do you want to do?” for clarity purposes. This question is more direct so users can better “reveal or forecast the results or implications” of their actions, which is particularly important to high uncertainty avoidance cultures (Marcus, 2001).

TRACKING PAGE

The UPS logo, global navigation, and banner are carried over to the Tracking page. These elements make up the corporate page template. Additionally, since this is an interior page, a sub-navigation is included on the left sidebar. This location of the sub-navigation was common among the Costa Rican sites I reviewed and is supported by the heuristics suggested by Marcus and Wurtz (2001, 2005 respectively).

Additionally, the most important element on this page is entering tracking numbers. The box for this process is well placed in the center of the page just below the heading. It’s clear that this area serves the main function for visiting this page. The placement of this element reduces ambiguity by clearly providing an area to submit tracking numbers.

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FIGURE 3. ORIGINAL UPS TRACKING PAGE

SUGGESTIONS FOR REDESIGNThe Tracking page is not poorly designed, but it should focus more on supporting users through the tracking process. The page offers a few support items, but they lack prominence relative to the other items on the page. First, the link to Tracking FAQs is buried on the left side bar below an advertisement for another UPS feature. Second, the help icon next to the “Tracking Numbers” label is tiny and easily missed.

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FIGURE 4. REDESIGNED UPS TRACKING PAGE.

In my suggested redesign, I moved the link to Tracking FAQs above the advertisement, just below the sub-navigation. This places the link closer to the main content area without giving it more importance than the navigation (which is of course more important than support). I also removed the small help icon and added a list of FAQs next to the box for entering tracking numbers. The FAQ links should open in pop-up windows so users can see the Tracking page while reading about what kind of data they need to enter.

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Finally, I added a chat window so users can ask a customer service representative for more help. The chat option may not appeal to all users, due to the high uncertainty avoidance present in Costa Rica’s culture. Chat options are still a new technology, and users may be unsure whether they are talking to a real person or how the chat option even works. However, it’s important to provide a high UAI culture with “mental models and help systems that focus on reducing ‘user errors’” (Marcus, 2001). My redesign includes three ways to find help with tracking numbers: a link to a set of FAQs, a list of the top FAQs with links to answers, and a chat option.

The chat option also includes a picture of a woman as the customer service representative, which supports a feminine culture. However, I recommend using a picture of a man when the representative on duty is a man.

To make room for the list of FAQs and chat option, I moved the “More Ways to Track Shipments” box below the Tracking Numbers area. It’s helpful to alert users that they can track shipments multiple ways, but this information is secondary. If users have their tracking numbers, they are less likely to care about other ways to track their packages. I kept the color scheme for this box to set it apart from the other two boxes in this area, which I think are of even less importance.

The “No Tracking Number?” box is another support tool, although less direct than the previously mentioned tools. I kept it along the left edge so users will see it as they scan the page. I also left the box for “Integrate Tracking Tools,” but I altered the last paragraph a bit. The original design included “Business Solutions” as a contextual link in the paragraph. This style is inconsistent with my findings from reviewing other Costa Rican sites, and it’s inconsistent with the second paragraph in the same box. I removed the sentence and contextual link and replaced it with a heading that serves as a link. Now both paragraphs are consistent in style and tendencies found on other Costa Rican sites.

Finally, I removed the “Flex Global View” tab. This section does not apply to all users and is an alternative option for tracking packages. Placing it as a tab next to the most important element on the page (entering tracking numbers) sets it as nearly equal to the element. The label is vague as well, because it uses a UPS-specific term. This may confuse users because they can’t predict what information is on the tab, and the tab looks important. This option belongs in the sub-navigation on the left sidebar, which was already included in the original design.

SUPPORT PAGE

The Support page is important to all users, but it’s particularly important to a high uncertainty avoidance culture. The use of links leading to sub-sections of the support is consistent with my own findings and with the heuristics outlined by Marcus and Wurtz for reducing ambiguity. In contrast, the U.S. support page offers a knowledgebase where users type in a phrase or question and search for answers. This model places more responsibility on the user, requires more tolerance for discovery (as opposed to a more explicit content structure), and would most likely frustrate Costa Rican users. The design UPS chose for their Costa Rica site is straightforward and leaves no question about how to interact with the support page. Users know they can click a link, and a topic sharing the name of the link will display.

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FIGURE 5. ORIGINAL UPS SUPPORT PAGE.

SUGGESTIONS FOR REDESIGNUnfortunately, designing a support page that uses links instead of a search tool often results in a cluttered page, as seen on the UPS support page. The problem is – where do you put all the links? If each link is listed, the user may be overwhelmed (the current design). But if you hide some of the links, the user may be uncertain about what content lies behind a link. The fewer links present, the greater the chance that the user won’t see her question listed.

I decided to use expanding text to tackle this problem. First, I removed all of the secondary links from the page. Then I created one list of the primary links along the left side. Users can click to expand each section to see the secondary links associated with it.

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FIGURE 6. REDESIGNED UPS SUPPORT PAGE.

Some clarity and usability are sacrificed, because users now have to click each main heading to see what topics are included in that section of support. However, this design offers “simplicity, . . . limited choices, and restricted amounts of data” desirable to high uncertainty avoidance cultures (Marcus, 2001). To further help users, the plus and minus icons next to each heading act as a “clear metaphor,” allowing users to predict what will happen when they click these headings (Marcus, 2001).

This change freed up half the page, so I added a large chat window where users can ask specific questions. I’ve already discussed the benefits of having a chat option, but an additional benefit is present on the support page. No matter how many links are added to this page, users are still likely to have questions that are not covered. These can range from situation-specific questions to general questions that users simply can’t find the answer to. Chat can help with these scenarios by offering “relational support,” a characteristic encouraged in a feminine culture. Chat is relational in that it offers a way to work out a problem with another person, instead of expecting users to figure it out alone (Marcus, 2001). And of course, chat works great for users who don’t have (or don’t want to take) the time to look for the answer.

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Another problem in the support page’s design is the search option. Search is present on all of the UPS pages, because it is part of the corporate page template. This placement for search is smart, because it’s visible and consistent from page to page. However, on the support page it presents a unique problem. Does the search look for content throughout the entire site or just within the support pages?

I chose to leave the search as is for two reasons. First, its current placement and design are part of the corporate template. Moving it for one page breaks the template and may confuse high uncertainty avoidance users who respond better to consistency of layout and color (Marcus, 2001). Second, the support content is not presented as a database, but as a series of pages instead. Therefore, a generic page search still applies. If the search were designed as a knowledgebase (such as on the U.S. site), then this issue would be more important because two kinds of searches (the knowledgebase search and the site search) would compete with each other.

While research supports the changes I suggest for this page, research also supports the original design. Therefore, I recommend usability testing of both designs to see what works and what doesn’t. No third-party research can fully predict the tendencies and preferences of a specific target customer base. For this reason, I strongly suggest testing these designs with Costa Rican UPS customers to identify those preferences unique to this group.

CONCLUSION: DESIGN IS IN THE DETAILS.Overall, the UPS website for Costa Rica is well-designed. Attention to culture is obvious in several areas, but as with most things there’s still room for improvement. When designing for Costa Rican users, the following cultural characteristics must be considered:

High uncertainty avoidance. These users need clarity. Keep things simple and easy to follow. For example, the original home page design includes competing items that cause confusion – the “UPS Web Sites” drop down menu versus the “Site Guide” link. To further confuse users, “Site Guide” is a less common term than “Site Map.” Making small changes such as these are not very costly, and the gain in clarity is key to supporting high uncertainty avoidance users.

Focus on nature. Costa Rican websites often place emphasis on nature (Marcus, 2001). My change to the home page addresses this point by adding a large graphic of a Costa Rican rain forest and suggesting that users can ship packages from there.

Feminine culture. A feminine culture blurs the gender roles (Marcus, 2001). Images of women are helpful, such as the lady featured in the chat option. The link on the home page for “UPS Women Lead the Way in Latin America” is a great example of feminine values apparent in web design.

Collectivism. These users focus on the group, not the person. Emphasis is on relationships, official slogans or regulations, wisdom from the elders (Marcus, 2001). My suggestions for the video on the home page focus on this issue. Graphics and videos should show people working together to achieve a result (i.e., sending a package). Also, government regulations, such as the link on the home page for “U.S. Food Import Rules,” are important to a collectivist culture.

The people of Costa Rica are not likely to create a list of web design principles they prefer. That’s our job. By understanding the culture customers live in and how it impacts design, we can create websites that are intuitive and easy to use. And if the site is designed well, users won’t even notice the design conventions in play.

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APPENDIX A: COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS FINDINGSI reviewed the following Costa Rican websites to find additional web design heuristics for this culture.

Website Navigation Color Images and Animation Body Text Search Engine Hyperlinkshttp://www.correos.go.cr/ Logo placed at top left, but does

not link to the home page

Global navigation across the top below the banner

Additional navigation in left side bar which included the global menu options and a few others

Blue (primary) and red (accent)

Background uses a blue gradient

Use of animation in the site banner

Global navigation options designed to look like buttons

Icons used for the menu items

A poll included in the right sidebar with “vote” buttons

Background color for body text is white

Text is black

Search is located on the left side bar below the navigation

Hyperlinks use browser default colors

Used mostly for sub menus

Not used very often in the middle of a paragraph

http://www.csv.go.cr/ Global nav across the top (appears to be the less important links)

Plus a navigation on the main page graphic (appears to be the more important sections)

The graphic nav becomes the secondary nav on the left sidebar

Background is blue-gray

Lots of yellow and black accents

Heavy use of animation (graphics)

Main navigation was part of an image

Buttons also used in a few places

Includes a search option

Hyperlinks again used as menu items on interior pages

http://www.visitcostarica.com/ (main tourism site for Costa Rica)

Logo at top left Background is black

Green, red, orange all used in graphic

Costa Rica logo is primarily green

Video of government official talking about children being abused on the home page

Graphic is nature-oriented

Interior pages include images of nature, animals

Offered in English

Government welcome shows up on interior page (Minister of Tourism)

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REFERENCESCosta Rica. (n.d.). Retrieved November 17, 2008, from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Costa_Rica

Economy of Costa Rica. (n.d.). Retrieved November 17, 2008, from Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Costa_Rica

Hofstede, G. & Hofstede, G. J. (2005). Cultures and organizations: Software of the mind. New York: McGraw-Hill.

Marcus, A. (2001). Cultural dimensions and global web design: What? So what? Now what? Emeryville, CA: Aaron Marcus and Associates.

St. Amant, K. (2005). A prototype theory approach to international website analysis and design. Technical Communication Quarterly, 14(1), 73-91.

Wurtz, E. (2005). A cross-cultural analysis of websites from high-context cultures and low-context cultures. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 13.

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