Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

It’s amazing what kinds of surprises you get when dealing with cross-cultural preferences. My friend’s wife is Singaporean, and grew up in a house lit almost entirely with flourescent tube lights. The houses of everyone she knew were also lit this way.

Put her in a warmly and indirectly lit room, or in candlelight, and she’s beside herself with discomfort; it’s the same feeling I get when I sit under flourescent tube lights in an office or convenience store.

My brain literally cannot parse this preference of hers, since my own preferences for “better” lighting are so strong.

She also prefers websites with lots of animated characters and exclamation points!!! It’s like turning on the flourescent lights for her when she sees those things on a page: they are comfortingly familiar.

such a long article for such a small message? also, use words your audience will understand- i thought you would think of YOUR users’ usability first before writing an article about it. infact, i like the posting to this article more than the article itself.

Your article reminded me of my days in Tokyo, working as a web developer. A colleague of mine once told me to remember that the customer is like “god”. Yes, the customer may not be your end user but in this hierarchy of customer relationships, ultimately, the user will be the “god” of all “gods”. Putting my trust in this cultural framework really helped me understand how the Japanese collaborate.

Well, Ben, I’m sorry I couldn’t meet your expectations.

With regard to vocabulary: generally speaking, in my experience information architects are erudite and verbal, highly educated, and possessed of the wherewithal to use a dictionary if all else fails. So I think I have a pretty good fit of content to audience; you may simply be an edge case.

I’d also take your POV a leetle more seriously, had you had the guts to sign your comments with a valid email address or URL. Otherwise, well, it’s just sniping from the peanut gallery, and we all know that it’s easier to crit something than it is to build.

Everyone else: thanks for your insights. Andrew, it *is* incredible, isn’t it? The gulf between what we think of as normative and what others hold to be so never fails to amaze/amuse me.

Have a better one,
Adam

“Cross-cultural” only tells half the story here. I think this idea is a gem:

“In the end, I believe nobody won. By inflexibly holding the line on “best practices” regarding a label, and a few other similar disagreements, I contributed to a situation in which a site was built that shafts the hapless user far more thoroughly than any we might have created.”

Our hyperfocus on design issues can sometimes cloud the bigger issue of design in the context of people and society. If we can sometimes look at the flaws and ‘let it go’ we could retain the human relationship and possibly influence greater change in the long term. Also see http://www.IAwiki.net/EthicsForIAs

Adam, thanks for the honest take on this.

When I read your article I felt relief when I found out that finally one person touched the matter of cross-cultural problems developing projects for the web.
I work as a consultant in design, content development and IA for a multicultural company in Uganda, Africa and I am from Venezuela. My direct bosses are in Denmark, but the team is lead and conformed by Ugandans with another consultant from Denmark. People of 3 different continents working together in the same kind of industry is a situation very hard to overcome because the understanding of the industry is also very different. My approach is more American since my formation as a journalist in my country is under American influence and the experience and knowledge of the web in my case has being more influenced by the American gurus. The Danish experience is centred in Denmark. I can’t even say that is Europe but Denmark and is mainly technical without giving any importance at all to user centred interface design, IA or content development. Something that strikes me since Jakob Nielsen is originally Danish and Denmark is one of the countries that have given a lot to the development of design in the world. In Uganda, and I can make it extensible to the whole sub-Saharan Africa, the aesthetic is important and it’s African, meaning colourful, baroque, terror vacui kind of way. But the clients are open to all kind of propositions in terms of content and there is a big desire to equalize in standards in terms of design and content delivery with the rest of the world without loosing identity. This 3 scenarios placed together had given me a lot of learning about listening, patience and let the things flow at their own pace when the junction gets congested. Not only working with clients but at the office can be very tricky: timing for instance, a Danish can get really upset if a meeting is held 5 minutes late, in Uganda usually happens in the best scenario half an hour late… Protocol is other issue, Danish straightforwardness it doesn’t work, in Uganda always a speech, an introduction and a “diplomatic” way of saying things to the client with politeness up-front even saying the most harsh things…This is getting too long for just to say that cross cultural issues should be taken in consideration not only for IA on a web development enterprises but also when it comes to project management and teams that work online from different parts of the world or together at the same spot but from different backgrounds and cultures. I am sure you can tell a lot about that too.

Where do I start—“pick your battles”, “Web design circa 1996”, or what another commentor alluded to: “Kyaku sama wa kami sama desu” (the customer is god)? Wherever you start unravelling the thread of—is it really Consulting that we’re doing in Japan?—what I’ve experienced of client interaction here in Tokyo becomes exactly the kind of selfless, sometimes seemingly mindless, Zen of latter-day retainership that I can only imagine lead samurai to beat their heads against walls even as recently as 140 years ago. Japan still is a feudal country, and as much as I used to think that as Westerners we existed on a separate plane from the Japanese, now, after my first REAL client meeting last Friday, I’m feeling like I’m just a different kind of vassal-underling. A friend by chance emailed me your article Saturday, Adam, not knowing that a month of my IA and my team’s business and design work just got hit by a freight train of previously unexpressed client disagreement with our recommendations. Now we’re in serious revision mode in the midst of a schedule that doesn’t really allow for revisions. In other words, this feels like a variation on your story—in which for good or ill we don’t lose the client (end not yet known).

The core problem in this article, disagreement over which label to use and the dynamics around how that disagreement were resolved, is correctly identified as an issue of cultural differences.

"As it turns out, there is a grain of truth 
in the idea that every audience is different 
and that this difference demands a variant
construction of usability."

This idea is more than a grain: it is an entire container ship full of truth grain, riding low in the Pacific.

Communication across and between cultures causes conflict, misunderstanding and other problems largely due to unrecognized differences of opinion over how to interpret symbols, labels and relationships. How can usability not be profoundly influenced by the culture of the person viewing a web site?

Differences over prefered ways to conduct business were also a cultural factor in this situation. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel on how to successfully operate within Japan: there is a huge amount of literature available about American companies operating and partnering in Japan.

Learn from those who have gone before, and take advantage of some cross-cultural training if you haven’t already.

Great article, thanks! I always enjoy practical war stories from the cultural frontiers!

i’ve been fighting with these same issues on my most recent project, a web-app for lawyers. while there are no international cultural boundaries I’m crossing, the legalese of contracts and the persona of a lawyer has been quite a task for me to grasp. it all just seems so overly complicated.

one issue your article addresses is our attraction to High-Modernist values. i too, apperently like amny information architects on the web today, am often drawn to values of simplicity and clarity. myself being a more of a post-modernist -maybe more of an expirmentalist/conceptualist/pragmatist- i justify this as a personal preference. A preference that I am not tied to, but just happen to be leaning on for the moment while i am still learning how people react to this new medium.

anyhow, i find the tie between high-modernist values and information architecture to be an interesting one. i’d be curious to hear more about your feelings on that.

thanks for the good article.

Your article is very interesting. Unfortunately, and I may be missing the point entirely by saying this, your client was exactly right. In Japan, the word “sommelier” is very common and I’m sure that most any Japanese person visiting the site would know right away what was intended. As a test I asked my Japanese wife what she thought a “book sommelier” would be on a site about books and she guessed it immediately. Which isn’t to say you shouldn’t have stuck to your guns. You probably did the right thing.

Sorry for posting twice, but I think there is a really interesting cultural difference between Japan and the US that I’m just not quite able to capture. It has to do with food and excellence. Japan is a country obsessed with excellence. I’m sure you will all jump all over me for this one, but I think the US is obsessed with “ease”. Everything has to be “easy to use”, “easy to setup”, “no fuss”, “no bother”. In Japan, the more difficult something is the more people are impressed with it. People who are good at something frequently go far beyond what is needed to impress. That isn’t to say that, in the end, the Japanese are any better at anything than someone in the US. I don’t believe that. I’m merely talking about what impresses people. In the US it’s how easy something is. In Japan, it’s how difficult something is. Japan is also obsessed with food. And here’s where I’m going to get flamed a second time: in my opinion, the US has no interest in food. There are people in the US who like good food. But in Japan it’s everyone everwhere. And so you put the two together and you get a country that is obsessed with excellent food and the people who prepare it (think Ryouri no Tetsujin). Thus, the fact that a word like sommelier is a common word that everyone knows is not surprising at all.

No need to apologize, Will. Nor do you miss the point of the sommelier anecdote: instead of insisting on what I think is correct, or going head-to-head with an equally stubborn client, far better to solicit the opinions of actual users.

While I personally feel comfortable with audience samples substantially > 1, you did just what I should have done, which is to get out of the way and ask someone who resembles the intended audience far more than I do.

Lesson learned.

Impressive article. And I agree with your response to “Ben” about vocabulary. I am never offended when someone uses what some might consider “big words”. There’s a beauty to our language and vocabulary that we should all embrace and feel compelled to learn. If I run across a word I don’t know the meaning of, I look it up. Simple as that. How could you not want to learn new vocabulary?

In terms of the article itself – while I haven’t had the opportunity to work on a cross-cultural site, I am working on a site which has a unique user base. I am currently constructing the IA for a site which assists users with disabilities (blind/low-vision, deaf/hard of hearing, cognitive disabilities, dexterity disabilities). The single biggest lesson I learned from your article is to go out and test the actual audience rather than hypothesize about what sorts of nomenclature or navigation schema I think they would want to use. It’s a great challenge.

I think Will raised a very interesting point. In my view, the appreciation North Americans have with “ease to use” translates to the appreciation for the creator’s ability to present complexity, as a perspective. Most North Americans understand and appreciates the dynamic nature of relationships between information. On the other hand, the Japanese believe that any complexity can be understood and mapped if a consensus can be reached. In other words, generally, I think the Japanese prefer using pattern recognition over simple heuristics when it comes to information search. I think this difference comes from the differences in the two education systems, but that’s another story… This difference should be taken into account when Information Architects design a usable web space, no?

Yes! PRECISELY!
The trouble is that there are maybe – *maybe* – ten people in Japan who are qualified IAs. Tops. There are tons of people with the job title on their meishi, and a great many hard-working and sincere aspirants, but in terms of people with any degree of experience or success, that’s it.

Ten people who are able to articulate the distinction you’re making, and among them, how many have the self-confidence to shepherd this realization through the tortuous Japanese-institutional development process?

i am in my final year and doing my thesis based on information design. my enquirey is “capabilities of information design within our genes” .

Please could you give me your views on the above statement and also point out how it can be effected by differences in culture? one of my case studies i be doing.
I appreciate your kind efforts.
thank you. inderjeet

I grew up in Germany and the U.S. I went back and forth many times. It was easy to see the boundary between the two, because the flight was long and there was always customs to go through. But, I lived in a third culture. It was invisible. I was never quite German, nor American. I’ll still tell people I’m from nowhere. But, what’s the point? There are many cultures. They are separated by gradients, border areas, rather than fences and nice crisp lines.

When I was in college, I went to the snak shop. An accounting student was talking with his tutor. The tutor asked the student, what were the transactions that occurred as a result of his purchase. This wasn’t a hard question. But, it was obvious to me that the tutor lived accounting and the student studied it to make a good grade. The student was a long way from entering the culture of accountancy. The student was on accounting. The tutor was in accounting.

What I took from that is that there are domain-based cultures—lots of them. Taken together you have line culture and functional unit cultures in firms. There is no one corporate culture. And, these cultures are as night and day different as the U.S. and Germany, or U.S. and Japan.

I remember being on an elevator one day going to lunch. It stopped on the floor where the sales reps worked. A sales rep got on. As we dropped to the lobby, he asked me if I was going to lunch. Then, he asked me if I was going alone. I said yes. He said he would never understand us developers. There was a vast cultural difference between us right there on that elevator.

I went to Tejuana with a friend from San Diego. As we got closer to the border that cultural gradient was physically apparent.

So as we explore the cultural differences of different countries, we should apply what we learn to those around us right now. More than likely they are from a different world entirely.

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What is this doing here???

I know it’s been a while since anyone has commented here, but I launch in regardless:

There is enough catalyst here for reams of commentary on my part—I’ll pick two overarching themes.

The first thing we need to do when practicing our profession cross-culturally is to leave the imperialism of western-centric thinking back in the states. Because the west generally was/is leading the technological ubiquity (thought sheer wealth of resources alone, if not brain power), because of this we take many aspects of out culture for granted. One example (of hundreds) is our linear way of thinking; eastern cultures are more circular. We think in terms of step one, then two, then three…then I have accomplished my goal. Eastern cultures think not so much about the next step but rather ALL possibilities related to a choice or action. In addition, they think not solely about their goal, but about how their goal impacts all those around them (boss, family, etc)

This kind of sensibility needs to live onscreen for these users. Think about those crowded Taiwanese interfaces that numb the American mind. Take another look and see what features or options are immediately surrounding a landing point on the page. You may find that features are loosely related, not ordered toward a western style of logic.

Second – a lot of what Adam is talking about (both successful and lessons learned) can be framed constructively using the idea of an “ecosystem” onscreen. You can read much more on this from Adruid Kerne (http://www.cs.tamu.edu/people/faculty/andruid) and Jodi Forlizzi from Carnegie Mellon (http://goodgestreet.com/). Culturally-responsible design and the onscreen ecosystem are closely related. Here’s how: essentially, Kerne defines culture as the tangible manifestations of a way of life, the behaviors, the rituals, and the social actions of a group of people—these are embodied aesthetics of that culture. Aesthetics are the way humans give form to the values of that culture.

Subsequently, aesthetics inform the ecosystem onscreen: the way that mutually interdependent elements make up a healthy “whole.” The onscreen artifacts of that culture make a user experience comfortable and concordant—thus effective—for members of that culture

If we IA our stuff (IA as a transitive verb!) to this aesthetic with the idea of creating an ecosystem onscreen, we’ll be much more successful in our cross cultural dealings. The sommelier issue is a perfect example, evidenced by the colloquial info provided in the comments that follow the article. What Adam thought was pretentious by American aesthetic was in harmony with the Japanese aesthetic.

Are there any models or techniques in someone’s IA arsenal that allows for an adaptive approach to IA-ing for another culture?