Who is that OTHER in the room?

The notion of "other" perspectives gets taught at an early age. We learn not to take other kids' toys and not to make fun of someone wearing glasses or who looks "different."

Accepting "others" becomes the foundation for civil discourse and just getting along.

But when trying to understand how others perceive, react, and conduct their lives we typically lack the wisdom that overcomes invisible walls of misunderstanding.

The two editors of Innovation Solutions, Apala Lahiri Chavan and Girish V. Prabhu, provide ample tools to help break down those invisible walls.

For instance, emerging markets include the BRIC quartet: Brazil, Russia, India, and China. We learn early about "Culture – Is It Predictably the Same?" The answer comes to us in clear usability-informing metrics devised by early cross-cultural researchers.

Power Distance – The United States scores lower than the BRIC countries in acceptance of an innate social hierarchy. We learn this influences how interview participants respond to usability researchers who they perceive as being "higher" in the social hierarchy.

Individualism – The US scores highest among the BRIC who are all more group-oriented or collective in their behaviors. Individualism makes you stand out. This can be good for U.S. advertising. Not so good for BRIC consumers.

Masculinity – On the whole, the entire world is more or less in the same range when it comes to being more masculine than feminine.

Uncertainty Avoidance – Brazil and Russia score high in this measure of risk aversion, above the U.S. India and China score somewhat lower than the US. This has implications for our understanding of how people accept new products in these countries.

Long-Term Orientation – The BRIC countries all scored higher than the U.S. where people seem to live for today. China and the U.S. appear on the opposite extreme ends of this dimension, thus offering a clear contrast in cultural difference.

These cultural dimensions provide the starting point for defining your user profiles and cultural personae. How would you plan your data gathering interviews or usability testing, knowing what you read (above) about the gulf in understanding between your own cultural expectations and the expectations of your participants?

Chapter Five, by Apala, shows us how to compensate with the following sample innovative solutions.

1. Interviewing amidst cultural differences
For example, cross-cultural researchers have long asked whether they should ask questions of their informant using the frame of reference (rules, vocabulary, logic, etc.) of the end-user, or instead, acknowledge their own outsider's perspective. Apala's experience suggests the latter. She calls it the Stranger in the Strange Land technique. She writes:

"The feeling that participants get of 'Oh, this chap is a foreigner and therefore it's ok that he is asking such strange/stupid questions' makes it much easier for us to ask questions that would normally be thought of as awkward or even a strict no-no, and equally easy for the participants to answer what would otherwise be considered embarrassing or very personal questions."

2. Getting honest assessment
When eliciting frank comments about a new financial Web site that was being introduced in China, users refused to say anything negative about the web site.

Her team purchased sets of little pewter statues of characters from Chinese folk tales that were very well known to all. She called this technique Jungian Archetype Folk Probes.

"What we did was to write down the names of the various Web site features we were evaluating on little cards. Next, we asked each participant to match each card with a pewter statue of their choice... In fact, the features that had proved frustrating for users were the first ones to be associated with the statues with negative attributes."

3. Testing for frank usability
Apala's team found that users would generally "take the middle ground", saying that every product was good. If there were any problems with the product, they would say it is the user's responsibility to solve the problem. She used the Bollywood Style to add flavor to the normal "think aloud" usability test method.

"When watching a Bollywood film, every member of the family (irrespective of hierarchy) suddenly feels free to voice their opinion about every aspect of the film... We created a dramatic (very Bollywoodish) story line and each task became a part of the plot. The idea was to 'immerse' the participant in a familiar 'story' (woven around the product to be tested) as if they were a character within the story and thereby make them 'forget' their normal hesitation to be critical."

4. Getting comments from the inscrutable
When comparing new product concepts in Asia, asking for people's feelings in a neutral environment gave little new information. Instead, Apala's team simulated the dynamics of a normal mercantile environment called The Bizarre-Bazaar Method.

"We provided a set of stalls with vendors (trained HFI facilitators) who were 'selling' mock-ups of selected concepts along with distracter items. The vendors described the concepts as if selling them to the participants and then gauged their reaction. In the fray of bargaining we gauged people's ability to grasp the concepts, appreciate the functions, and assign value to the designs."

Figure 2. Setting the context for Innovative Solutions in "usability" for emerging markets.
This figure shows that Google Books indeed provides an important context for appreciating our current review topic.

Figure 3. Getting context for evaluating books through Google Books preview service.