I remember a few meetings trying to sell usability and UCD to clients in Hong Kong. The same discussion would come back again and again. The client would ask:
“Aren’t people in Hong Kong and China different from the rest of the world? Don’t they like clutter and pages full of content and links? All the sites are currently designed in this way, it must mean that people like it.”
Below is a prime example of a very popular site that just overwhelms users with content and flashy stuff:
Notice how much space the navigation area takes and how many links it includes. Also note this is the gaming area of the site, but the main content inthe middle at the very top is a news digest. See it live at http://games.sina.com.cn.
So, in this article I decided to use two examples from real life to try to show that industry standards and the status quo are not always there because they are best and that with a bit of faith in the concept focusing on really pleasing the user/customer can help you make a difference.
Chinese Restaurants in Hong Kong
Hygiene has been a ubiquitous problem in Hong Kong for ages. Tales of food poisoning pop up in the newspapers regularly. Yet hygiene inspectors and the government seem totally useless in trying to solve the issue. As a result, the norm now in Hong Kong when people go to their local “Dim Sum” restaurant is to start by washing bowls, spoons and chopsticks with tea before they are deemed safe enough to eat with.
Some might point to this habit as part of the local folklore, but as a user experience practitioner I cannot help but being revolted by a situation like this. Restaurant hygiene everywhere in the world is taken for granted, so why would Hong Kong people have to be worried about it and take matter in their own hands. Is that the best solution to this problem? Will we soon have to bring our own chopsticks to restaurants because of hygiene reasons?
In Hong Kong the traditional "Dim Sum" starts with a cleaning session
Yet, everyone around is just used to this situation and now this cleaning process is part of the going to a Chinese restaurant experience, deeply embedded into people’s habits. Does it mean new restaurants should not care about hygiene in their kitchen because of the current status quo?
Real Estate practices
Hong Kong people spend a large amount of their time hunting for flats. In a sense you would think that something so important for Hong Kong people would have long been optimized so that anyone could take part in it with very little learning required. On the contrary, many rules and ways have to be learned first before hunting for a flat in Hong Kong.
One such rule concerns square footage. Simply looking at square footage on a advertisement for a flat is useless in Hong Kong. The information is only meaningful when looking at the combination of the square footage with the building where the flat is located. That’s because the advertised square footage is gross (it includes walls, public areas and lots of other things), so depending on the building where you want to purchase your flat, the net square footage might be actually somwhere between 70% and 90% of the gross one.
Knowing the real size of a flat requires learning the utilization rate in all buildings in Hong Kong. Great to train memory, but...
So, it is impossible to go out and shop for say a 800 sq. ft. apartment and just look for this number on advertisements. You have to look at flats with a higher square footage and calculate yourself depending on the utilization rate of the building what is the actual usable size of a flat. This is the standard in the industry and people who took the time to learn the rule take pride in having mastered this trick. Still, this obscure rule makes it very hard for many people to actually know the size of their apartment. Not very user friendly.
Conclusions
I see two conclusions to draw from the above two examples. First, standards are not right just because they exist. Historical factors, bad regulations or bad designers may be the reason for such standards to have appeared. If nothing is there to challenge the status quo things remain and the end user suffers, while company fail to differentiate and offer better services.
The second conclusion, very important in Asia, is that the culture here is one of adaptability. People are used to made do with what they are given, instead of rebelling against it and trying to change things. As a result (and because of many more cultural traits) it is naive to think that users or customers in general are going to openly criticize an existing situation or design. As mention above, it takes a leap of faith, but focusing on users and their needs is bound to pay off here, as everywhere else.
Right. There’s a difference between “are accustomed to” or “are tolerant of” and “have a preference for.” But the counter-argument is to consider examples where what seems undesirable in one culture is indeed desirable in another. An Indian may find the social isolation in an American city to be heartbreaking; an American may find the crowds and heavy interaction in an Indian city to be overwhelming.
Your article reminds me of the book, “The Geography of Thought.” (http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261183938&sr=8-1)
Let me quote…
“There is an Asian expression that reflects a cultural prejudice against individuality: ‘The peg that stands out is pounded down.’ [...] Maintaining harmonious social relations is likely to take precedence over achieving personal success.”
“Social psychologists Heejung Kim and Hazel Markus asked Koreans and Americans to choose which object in a pictured array of objects they preferred. Americans chose the rarest object, whereas Koreans chose the most common object. Asked to choose a pen as a gift, Americans chose the least common color offered and East Asians the most common.”
Thanks for the comments guys.
@Steve: Very true. I did not mean to imply that there are no cultural differences, and I realize that citing two examples does not prove any point at all.
) What I meant is that research is needed in any case to assess the situation. It’s useless to argue over a meeting with clients without doing the homework or to just follow the status quo. Proving our point regarding usability is made hard by the lack of good and conclusive research (to my knowledge) on the topic.
@Ada: Great quote and so true as well. This shows the difficulty we researchers can have doing our job in Asia. To me, it reinforces the importance of observation based research techniques, as well as one-on-one interviews, as opposed to say focus groups which although it is the most used research method, in most cases does not lead to any good objective results. (But it makes Focus Group a great tool for marketers who want to bias their research to prove their or their client’s point. So dangerous.)