Usability Challenges in Asia

Dmitriy Volkov talks to Apala Chavan in the lead up to User Experience Russia 2009


- Dmitriy: So, what’s going on in the usability world in Asia? What are the major projects that you’ve been working on in the last few years? What are the most recent developments?

- Apala: I think there’s a lot of work going on in Asia because it (technology) is major part of the emerging economy there. A lot of work we’ve done has been with people who’d normally not bother with any kind of technology. So to companies in the Western developed world, these people are usually not considered very important for them to design products and services for.
But in emerging countries like India and China, for example, where large numbers of people are poor by Western standards, everybody is very interested in designing products and services that can fit the requirements for this section of society. So that kind of design requirement is very different, it’s very challenging and very interesting. There’s a lot of work going on in terms of designing for the disadvantaged, for the bottom of the pyramid, whatever you choose to call this section of society.

The second project is the one I really want to talk about which is emotional design. This means to design not just for efficiency, which is what usability does, but makes the design very efficient for the user. However, now there’s an increasing need to design for emotional satisfaction as well. And that is very, very interesting because emotional satisfaction can sometimes require the designer to produce something that actually contradicts a usability principle. It’s a very interesting new area in which I see a lot of work being performed not just in Asia but across the world. But there is a lot of that happening right now in India and in Asia in general.

- Dmitriy: So, what are the more recent findings of your cross-cultural studies? Are there other interesting insights as to how people differ in terms of how they use websites, or how they use products?

- Apala: We’ve found some very interesting examples when we examined the cultural differences between Americans, Chinese and Indians from the same property /income category to see how these cultures embrace and use entertainment technology. There are differences in the way people in these countries look at home entertainment.

It was fascinating because we found that in China, although the section of the population we were looking at was the lower-middle class, their homes were full of the very, very latest home entertainment gadgets, the largest plasma TV screens you can think of, multiple television sets, multiple computers, multiple CD players, and so on. But even though the apartment was very small and in fact quite shabby, the kind of home entertainment devices, my God we were amazed!

However, for the same income group in India it was quite the opposite story. People had just one television set, usually an old one, and they had very few entertainment devices, all shared by the entire family. It was not like they had multiple DVD players, multiple CD players and radios – it was not like that at all. The main objective for families in India was to spend money on educating their children. So they would rather spend all their money trying to get a good education rather than spend on anything like technology and media devices.


Apala Lahiri Chavan is Vice President, Asia; and the entrepreneurial leader of HFI in India. She has led hundreds of projects including expert reviews, structural design, localization, standards, and detailed design. An award winning designer, she has led teams spanning design, development, testing, and deployment of software products. She has a special interest in the issue of designing for emerging markets and internationalization of products and has presented several papers on the subject.

Associated Link: More interviews on User Experience Russia 2009

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