Culture and Usability Feature: Culture as a Design Heuristic

In a rich discussion of how cultural issues affect HCI and interaction design, "Culture: Predictive or Heuristic?" Emilie W Gould of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute made a key contribution to the CHI panel on "Evaluating Globally: How to Conduct International or Intercultural Usability Research".

She started by outlining some opposition to using culture as a basis for evaluating HCI. Criticisms of cultural models were based on discomfort with stereotypes, the wide range of individual differences ('We all know people who don't fit the cultural mean'), that cultures "drift", while people adopt – and adapt – technology on a personal level to their own needs and culture may be embedded in technology but technologies also change culture. In all, culture is more explanatory than predictive.

But culture may be more useful as a design heuristic than as a user demographic, she argued. User subgroups within national populations are often unrepresentative, she said, offering three examples:
• German and Russian computer programmers
• Middle-class Indian consumers
• Brazilian women caring for abused children.
It is possible to measure individual (not culture-level) values but still difficult to generalise, so it is better to focus on identifying selectable design alternatives.

She gave two examples of how US designed interfaces had failed: Group Decision Support Systems in Asia where Singaporean groups started with more consensus but showed less change, as group harmony undermined individual problem-solving: the system was designed on the assumption that individuals would begin with wider variations of opinion; and technology transfer in Africa, where as take-up depended on endorsement by top management, people wanted to know who "owned" ideas before passing judgment.

'When you are embedded in your own culture, how do you identify alternatives?' she asked.

Culture theories can elicit design alternatives, help us ask the "right questions" and help designers think about new implementations and new interfaces, she said. To be predictive, cultural theory requires constrained target audience, but it can still be productive.

She suggested that country rankings establish qualitative differences for crosscultural design. 'It is easier to design for an urban Chinese audience than for "Southeast Asia" (Malaysia, Philippines, Thailand, and Indian and Chinese expatriate populations within those countries) but it is still possible to say that these countries will be more group-oriented than the United States or the UK.'

She asked the audience to consider cultural uses of time:
– Monochronic vs polychronic activities
– Present vs. future time horizon
– Interruptability/ respect to superiors

And suggested that considering time in this way uses culture to create design opportunities:
– Phones for immediate interaction
– Phones for asynchronous interaction
– Disposable phones
– Phones that know when to interrupt you

She did the same exercise with individualism and collectivism:
– Individualists put their own interests first
– Collectivists put their group first
– Importance of text vs. context
suggesting that thinking this way opened the opportunity to propose and evaluate:
– Phones as subnetworks
- Games (and other competitions)
- Emergency phone trees
– Buddy lists vs 1:1 calls
– Nonverbal ways to respond to phone calls in restaurants

She went into some detail about intercultural communication theories based on:
• Perception (individual-level, psychological models of cultural influence)
• Values (and their intersection with social resources)
• Communication style, and
• Communication pragmatics

She broke these down into several lists, which show the richness and depth of the field. 'Each contributes a different perspective; valuable to different products in different development stages,' she said.

Perception
• Subjective vs. Objective Culture (Stewart & Bennett)
– People learn fundamentally different ways to interpret "figure and ground"
– Subjective culture underlies tangible expression of objective culture (eg. different theories of leadership result in different styles of national architecture)
– Culture as an "onion"
• Language vs. Perception (Sapir-Whorf)
– Language constrains what can be thought about
• Classic psychological variables:
– Internal vs. external locus of control
– Introversion vs. extroversion
– Induction vs. deduction
– Variables measured at the individual level; different means may reflect cultural tendencies

Intersection of Values/Social Resources
Various existential questions:
• Primacy of group vs. individual needs
– How important are inclusion/ exclusion for social identity?
– Independent vs. Interdependent self-construal
• Power
– How is status earned in the society?
– Ascription vs. Achievement
– Models of leadership (authoritarian, paternal, etc.)
• Human action
– How do people interact with their environment?
– Mastery vs Harmony (urge for control)
– Importance of the material vs. natural world
– Malleability of social roles (including gender)
– Tolerance for risk and uncertainty
• Time
– Is time a resource like air or like money?
– What is the time horizon?
– How many things can one do at once?

(Value theorists include:
• Kluckhohn and Strodtbeck
• Condon and Yousef
• Hofstede and Bond
• Triandis
• Gudykunst and Ting-Toomey
• Schwartz
• Trompenaars)

Communication Style
• High vs. Low Context Communication (Hall)
– In any interaction, where does the message reside?
In the social context?
In the text?
• Politeness Theory (Brown and Levinson)
– Whose "face" is threatened?
– Whose "face" can be enhanced?
• Neutral vs Affective Communication Style (Parsons/ Trompenaars)
– Do words speak for themselves?
– Does expressiveness = sincerity and credibility?

Communication Pragmatics
Necessary (if not sufficient) requirements for usability:
• LESCANT (David Victor)
- Language
- Environment and technology
- Social organization
- Contexting
- Authority conception
- Nonverbal communication
- Temporal conception
• Infrastructure (literacy, access to networks, credit, etc.)

'These theories may overlap, but each contributes a different perspective on the intersection of technology and culture,' she said. With products moving from the desktop to the pocket, there is an opportunity to reinvent various functions. 'Culture theories can identify design alternatives or options that may create new value.'

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