Did anyone forget Usability is both a science and an art! Coming down the post-industrial age linage of American romance with systems and machines, the User Centered Design or more popularly known “Human Factors Engineering’ is on its way to the mystical plateaus in the east. May be the ’science’ of it had to give way to a new magical and spiritual essence in order to accommodate the ‘Other World’, half way down the globe.

And more so while the whole world is eagerly waiting to watch the phenomenon of ‘Emerging Asia’ happen in the awakening of two Asian giants, India and China. Albeit millions of people in these two countries gradually embracing the western consumerism has been a major sail wind and it is only getting stronger. While merchants from the developed west come calling with their ware to the mass markets of emerging Asia, more often than not they found themselves puzzled with inexplicable consumer behaviors and erratic usage patterns.

Academicians quickly applied their math of cultural modeling to solve the puzzle and found these models, based on western socio-psychology, woefully inadequate in providing the right direction. Though certain models were able to successfully gauge the dynamics of the people and their cultural dispositions to some extent, See publication by Aaron Marcus and Emilie W. Gould. Among others, there are Ajzen & Fishbein (See figure below for a model called “The Theory of Reasoned Action”).

To accommodate the Asian dynamics, this model was further modified by Chol Lee.

It has been argued that, in the Asian context, the Fishbein model falls short because the social component simply assesses the subjective perceptions of others’ opinions rather than the social pressure of those opinions. As we have already seen, in Asian culture and specifically in those cultures influenced by Confucianism, a persons’ behavioral intentions are greatly influenced by the social influences of group conformity and face-saving pressures. Thus the social component of Fishbein’s model appears to require modification when applied to Confucian consumers. Additionally, the Fishbein model does not take into the account the fact that, in the case of Asian consumers, social influences (that is, subjective norms) will affect personal attitudes (in other words, attitudes towards the purchase). — Chol Lee

Yet, after many attempts by the eminent pundits, the neo-consumers from Asian continent remained elusive to any theoretical definition. There are still many open issues in the complete understanding of their attitude, behavior and motivation. Many novel cultural techniques for eliciting the user data from the consumers in the Asian countries, entrenched so deeply in their respective culture, have generated much attention and interest . In the cross-cultural user data gathering methods some of the most significant contributions have come from Lahiri, Apala, Li, Sun & Zhang, Torkil Clemmensen and Tom Plocher et. al.

Today the UCD community is standing at an interesting cross road in the definition of usability as a ’science’ and an ‘art’, in order to traverse the horizon of culture.

Together these definitions stress two important aspects of culture: (1) culture is shared by the members of a given society, and (2) culture is, by its very nature, dynamic and transmissible. Cultural differences strongly influence consumer behavior. In the west, an effective brand name will be short, distinctive, and memorable, indicative of the product’s functions. In Asia, which currently accounts for a quarter of the world economy and half of the world’s population, however, a strong belief in luck and fate means that additional qualities, such as whether the characters which make up a product name are “lucky” ones, have significant effect on brand attitude. Successful sales and marketing strategies in Asia must be rooted in an understanding of the cultural differences which affect Asian consumers’ buying patterns.

The widespread application of ‘Culturability’, ranging from ‘consumer behavior’ towards ‘global products’ to ”User attitude’ towards ‘information consumption and utilization’, has compelled the experts to dive deeper into the Milieu of the diverse Asian (and others) Cultures, studying deeper forms of ‘meaning’, ‘values’ and ‘relationships’. They are studying socio-cultural constructs from ancient philosophies and scriptures, popular mythologies, ‘Totems’ & ‘Talismans’ that lend the specific culture a distinct flavor.
Even the strict science of ‘Task focused user evaluation’ is being modified to accommodate more…

From Nisbett’s culture theory, there are two kinds of orientation: task-focus
orientation and socio-emotional relational orientation. Task-focus orientation means people’s effort is directed towards task-related goals, and attention is focused on monitoring the extent to which these goals are being accomplished. Socio-emotional relational orientation means people’s effort and attention are directed towards the interpersonal climate of the situation, and they strive to maintain social harmony.

References:

• Nisbett, R.E. and A. Norenzayan, Cultural and Cognition, in Stevens’ Handbook of Experimental Psychology, third edition, D.L. Medin, Editor. 2002.
• Hertzum, M. and N.E. Jacobsen, The evaluator effect: A chilling fact about usability evaluation methods. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 2001. 13(4): p. 421-443.
• Marcus, A., User Interface Design and Culture, in Usabillity and Internationalization of Information Technology, N. Aykin, Editor. 2005. p. 51-78.
• Vöhringer-Kuhnt, T., The influence of culture on Usability. Master thesis., in Dept. of Educational Sciences and PsychologyFreie Universität Berlin, http://userpage.fuberlin.de/~kuhnt/thesis/results.pdf, July 2004. 2002: Berlin, Germany.
• Chavan L. Apala, Ajmera R., When in Rome… Be Yourself: A Perspective on Dealing with Cultural Dissimilarities in Ethnography. HCI 2007, Beijing.
• Henry Been-Lirn Duh, Vivian Hsueh-hua Chen. Emerging Issues in Doing Cross-Cultural Research in Multicultural and Multilingual Societies. HCI 2007, Beijing.
• [White Paper] Apala Lahiri. Around the world with 14 methods - Innovation & Culture. http://www.humanfactors.com/downloads/whitepapers.asp