Boeing’s Dreamliner delayed because of cultural differences?

BusinessWeek’s Bruce Nussbaum on questions raised by the most recent delay of the Boeing Dreamliner project:

How much autonomy do you give partners in a global collaborative effort? How much direct control do you need? What about trust? How do you account for differences in culture?

[ Link ]

It is exactly this latter question that this blog aims to explore. These issues affect not only global managers; anyone involved with designing and deploying artifacts on the web is a participant in a global conversation and must take cultural differences into consideration.

Posted on January 16, 2008
Filed Under Collaboration, Culture | Leave a Comment

Does brand consistency trump efficient communication across cultures?

There was a recent discussion on the SIGIA mailing list about Google’s testing of a new homepage design for Taiwan and Hong Kong that features animated icons. Some folks in the list seemed surprised that Google would forego its traditionally minimalist UI — an important brand differentiator — in favor of what may seem like gratuitously animated widgets.

It’s important to note that the new design is for the iGoogle homepage — not the traditional Google homepage most visitors see. (iGoogle allows the user to customize their homepage by adding widgets that summarize news, email, etc.) Google’s traditional homepage for Taiwan and Hong Kong remains similar to the standard US version. Also, the animated widget being discussed is not exclusive to the Chinese sites; it is also available to users of the US version. (However, it is not installed by default like it seems to be in the Chinese sites.) So in many respects, this discussion is a case of “much ado about nothing”.

However, it raises an interesting question: does brand consistency trump efficient communication across cultures? In other words, if it happens that 1) Google’s minimalism is an essential part of its branding message, and 2) some cultures do not react as positively to minimalism as others, which should have the upper hand when Google enters a new market?

Let’s look at the second question first: is a preference for minimalistic UIs culturally conditioned (as opposed to universal)? Research suggests it is. Elizabeth Würtz has published an examination of website design across different cultures using the framework proposed by anthropologist Edward Hall. Würtz hypothesizes that designs produced by “High Context” (HC) cultures will tend to feature more imagery (including animations and other effects) — and less text — than those aimed at “Low Context” (LC) cultures. She also proposes that HC websites tend to have more diversity in their layout and color schemes, what users in LC cultures may perceive as “clutter”. Asia and North America happen to sit on opposite ends of that HC-LC axis; this may explain Google’s use of animations in their Hong Kong / Taiwan homepage. From this perspective, it seems that minimalistic UIs may not be the most effective everywhere. (I’ve written an article for Boxes and Arrows that looks into Hall’s framework and other implications it has for IA.)

Now onto the first question: is minimalism — as represented in Google’s UIs — an essential part of their branding message? In other words, does Google stop being Google if it foregoes minimalism? Google’s UIs seem designed to support their stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The first part of that mission — organizing the world’s information — doesn’t seem to have immediate user-facing UI implications. The second part — making this information accessible and useful — implies that the Google UIs should strive to provide the shortest, easiest possible path to information. This seems to suggest that they need to be minimalistic.

However, if we consider the implications of Würtz’s paper, we can argue that this shortest path can be best achieved with a direct, minimal, no-fuss UI in cultures conditioned to LC communications. Because Google’s culture of origin is LC (the US), their original UI is minimal and sparse; it is designed to support their stated mission in their culture of origin. The flipside: we can hypothesize that if 1) some cultures communicate better with non-minimal UIs, and 2) Google’s UI strategy and branding should support their corporate mission (and not the other way around), then for “Google to be Google” it behooves them to explore less minimal UIs when entering markets with HC cultures.

It will be interesting to see what happens as the major brands of the western LC countries start to enter HC markets like Asia (and vice-versa). Dominance in one market does not guarantee dominance in all, especially when moving across wide cultural divides. I suspect that in order to communicate effectively, established brands like Google will need to explore UIs strategies that may seem jarring to the folks back home.

Posted on July 31, 2007
Filed Under Culture | Comments Off

Appealing to ethnic niches

Rohit Bhargava profiles the new global cinema service Jaman. He makes an interesting observation about the most successful ethnically-focused web services, which tend to be dating or social networking sites:

The problem with [appealing to an ethnic niche] is that most of these sites are not inviting others outside a particular ethnicity to interact and learn about a culture.

Jaman, on the other hand, is focused on bringing a portion of the world’s cultural artifacts (in this case, movies) to the world, thereby encouraging cultures to explore each other. This is yet another example of a bogie — providing a common denominator (in this case, a medium: cinema) — to help explore the differences and similarities between cultures. I find it particularly interesting that for a service that is focused on cross-cultural exploration, Jaman’s site is presented exclusively in English, and seems to target the US market initially. (I imagine this will start to change once the service leaves beta.)

Posted on February 23, 2007
Filed Under Culture | Leave a Comment

What’s culture got to do with it?

Juli Ann Reynolds writes in the Tom Peters blog about the importance of aligning an organization’s culture and its strategy:

A beautifully crafted strategy can fail when the employees in various divisions within an organization clash. Logically, we think that strategy should drive behavior, but, in reality, it’s the culture—underlying norms, values, belief systems—that dictates how effectively people work together.

Culture is not just about countries; any group of people that comes together to perform any kind of human activity will in time develop an identifiable culture. Within one organization, there may be multiple cultures co-existing and co-operating.

In some cases, these groups may have different enough cultures that they require interpreters. I sometimes describe my job as “an interpreter that allows marketing people and technology people to understand each other”.

Posted on February 16, 2007
Filed Under Culture | Leave a Comment

Advantages of an “alien” perspective

Inc. Magazine has an article from last May called The Thinking Man’s Outsourcing. It’s an interesting, if somewhat run-of-the mill, overview of a few companies that are outsourcing their software development overseas.

However, it includes an interesting story about Brian Reale, CEO of a business software company called Colosa. Mr. Reale outsourced his company — and himself — to La Paz, Bolivia, where he could climb mountains and hire developers for 1/8th the cost of their US counterparts.

The interesting bit is that culture shock led to the creation of a new product for the company:

Reale and [co-founder Robert] Vernon launched Colosa to build an online marketplace for insurance companies. But while overseeing that product’s creation, Reale found himself coping with really long lines. In Bolivia, “you see lines of people three or four blocks long waiting to fill out a form or get a license,” says Reale. “The Spanish word for that is tramite. We saw an opportunity to build a system to reduce tramite.”

They built this system, and it turned out to solve bigger problems for companies wanting to do business in Bolivia and beyond. They now have more than 1,000 customers in the U.S.

There are opportunities in 1) understanding there is a problem, and 2) having a viable framework to resolve the problem. Having an “alien” perspective could allow you to see problems that “locals” may not, and may provide you with frameworks that may help solve them.

Posted on February 14, 2007
Filed Under Culture | Leave a Comment

Understand cultural differences by focusing on common elements

It’s difficult to understand other cultures objectively with your own standing in the way; we are surrounded by our culture, and its biases creep into our understanding in subtle ways. This is one of the challenges that makes cross-cultural design difficult.

One method I’m exploring for studying other cultures more objectively is to focus on a single “alien” element that the other cultures (and my own) share in common, and then try to understand the ways in which they engage with this element. I call this alien element a “bogie”: it could be an icon, a tune, a concept, or any other cultural artifact that isn’t common in either culture, or an element that has been inherited from a third culture, but that must be localized to both. (I see this often when designing for Latin American audiences; many common elements of the web vocabulary — the “Home” link, for example — seem rooted in American culture, but are expected of most websites.)

This principle is beautifully illustrated in a blog post that has been circulating in the past week that features the Super Mario Bros. theme played in a variety of different musical instruments. Because these performers are all playing the same tune, and because this tune is recognizable yet also quite alien to their traditional repertories, hearing it performed wiith different instruments gives us a better understanding of the instruments, their performers’ styles, and the tune itself.

The Mario theme is a perfect cross-cultural bogie because videogame culture is primarily non-verbal and therefore travels more easily across cultural boundaries. It is also very recognizable and fun, at least to people of a certain age. (Actually, this music is more localized to an age group than to a culture.) However, the key to the viral nature of the Mario theme meme is the whimsical and slightly irreverent idea of playing videogame music with a traditional instrument. (Check out the kid with the balalaika.)

How can we apply this principle to cross-cultural design? The web doesn’t (yet) have many sacred cows to make hamburgers from, so finding our own bogies may be more difficult. We can look for a common element that is alien (yet central) to all the locales being served, and we can key our design approach to cultural responses to that one element. (For example, the “Home” page link mentioned above.) Or we could set up a design excercise with the different parties involved to introduce such an element into the design process, if only to break the ice and provide some initial understanding. The idea is to have some common element that allows the differences between the locales to surface.

Posted on February 13, 2007
Filed Under Culture, Design, Strategies | Leave a Comment

Design at a Global Level

metropolismag.com has a report on the recent Icograda conference:

...there was a lot of upbeat talk about opportunities for designers in a global marketplace. But some voices offered more measured views, focusing on the complex politics and the dynamics between design, social responsibility, and profit.

Posted on November 10, 2006
Filed Under Culture, Design | Leave a Comment

Recently


Categories


Archives