[:en]

A review of
Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating
Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users
by Huatong Sun
Oxford University Press

Increasingly, the work of user experience is global. There aren’t many websites, online services, or apps that don’t cross at least a few cultural or national boundaries. Even websites intended for a local audience can be used by anyone around the world and adapted for local use by people in different contexts and cultures.

This creates a design challenge that is difficult to solve with a few guidelines and patterns. In Cross-Cultural Technology Design, Huatong Sun takes a broader view by examining the challenge of understanding cultural expectations and local context. This is not a how-to book offering guidelines and tips. It is (as Sun says in the preface) a scholarly work, primarily intended for an academic audience; however, it’s well worth the time of any practitioner interested in cultural issues in design.

If you are intrigued by contemporary theoretical debates, the first section of the book is a review of the theoretical underpinnings of Sun’s work, including activity theory, British cultural studies, and genre theory.

If you are more comfortable with the concrete, start with the middle section, “Experiences,” which contains five stories of how people use mobile communications. These case histories are rich with detailed observations collected over several years. They include Sophie, an American business professional; Lili, a Chinese teacher; Brian, an American graduate student; Mei, a Chinese graduate student; and Emma, an American college student.

Their stories carefully unpack the way their social and cultural context affects their user experience of using text messaging in different ways, including how, when, why, and with whom they choose to communicate. Each story ends with the author’s reflections on what the case study reveals about cross-cultural design. Instead of deriving design rules from these case studies, Sun offers a framework for a design philosophy for making technology usable and meaningful to culturally diverse users.

The framework, Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE), emphasizes the need to integrate understanding of the different ways we experience technology as both actions and interpretation:

• Local culture is an ever-changing context made up of both practices and meanings.
• User experience includes both activity (situated in a context) and the meaning we assign to or construct for that activity.
• Design is both problem solving and engaged conversation.
• Technology is a tool to produce something and a means of communication due to what our choice of technology conveys.
• Affordance includes the physical design, the interaction, and the social meaning.

How people use technology, and what that technology means to them, is an ongoing conversation through which people make sense of their world. Culture is dynamic and constantly evolving, with local culture in dialog with global influences. Design must start from a full understanding of the local context and then integrate it into a larger, global view.

Do not let the somewhat academic tone of this book put you off. If you are wrestling with the challenge of global UX, this book is a thoughtful exploration of the intersection of global and local, of activity and meaning. Thinking globally, Sun suggests, requires both meanings of the word global: thinking of the different context and cultures around the world and thinking about a holistic overview in the design process.[:zh]

关于孙华同 (Huatong Sun) 所著《跨文化技术设计》(Cross-Cultural Technology Design) 的书评。本书对了解文化期望和当地环境所面临的挑战进行了分析。

用户体验工作变得越来越全球化。这带来了设计难题，很难通过一些指导原则和模式加以解决。在《跨文化技术设计》(Cross-Cultural Technology Design) 一书中，孙华同以更宽的视角探讨了文化期望和本地环境面临的挑战。本书并不是一本讲述指导原则和技巧的操作手册。它是一本学术著作，主要面向学术受众；不过，对于对设计中的文化问题感兴趣的任何从业者来说，本书也值得一读。

文章全文为英文版[:KO]

Huatong Sun의 Cross-Cultural Technology Design에 대한 서평. 이 책은 문화적 기대와 지역적 맥락의 이해에 대한 어려움을 살펴봅니다.

사용자 경험에 대한 연구는 점차 방대해지고 있습니다. 이것이 몇 가지 지침과 패턴만으로 문제를 해결하기 어려운 디자인 난제를 초래합니다. Cross-Cultural Technology Design에서 Huatong Sun은 문화적 기대와 지역적 맥락 이해의 어려움을 고찰함으로써 보다 폭넓은 관점을 취하고 있습니다. 이 책은 가이드라인과 요령을 제시하는 방법론에 관한 책이 아닙니다. 이 책은 학술적 저작물로써, 주로 학문적 독자를 겨냥한 것이지만, 디자인의 문화적 쟁점에 흥미 있는 실무자라면 시간을 할애할 가치가 있습니다.

전체 기사는 영어로만 제공됩니다.[:pt]

Uma resenha do livro Cross-Cultural Technology Design, de Huatong Sun. Este livro examina os desafios em compreender as expectativas culturais e o contexto local.

O trabalho da experiência do usuário é cada vez mais global. Isso cria um desafio de design de difícil solução com algumas diretrizes e padrões. No Cross-Cultural Technology Design, Huatong Sun adota uma perspectiva mais ampla ao examinar o desafio de compreender as expectativas culturais e o contexto local. Este não é um manual que oferece orientações e dicas. É um trabalho acadêmico, visando inicialmente um público acadêmico; no entanto, é válido para qualquer profissional interessado nas questões culturais do design.

O artigo completo está disponível somente em inglês[:ja]

『Cross-Cultural Technology Design』のレビュー、Huatong Sun著。この本は、文化的な期待や地域的な背景を理解する際の課題を研究したものである。

ユーザーエクスペリエンスの仕事はますますグローバルなものになっているが、そのため、少数のガイドラインやパターンを使っていたのでは解決が困難なデザイン上の課題が生じている。『Cross-Cultural Technology Design』の中でHuatong Sunは、文化的な期待や地域的な背景を理解する際の課題を研究し、より広い視野からデザインを捉えている。この本はガイドラインやヒントを提供するような実用書ではない。主に学者たちを対象にして書かれた学術的な書物ではあるが、デザイン面での文化的問題に関心のあるUXの専門家にとっては、読む価値が非常に高い一冊である。

原文は英語だけになります[:es]

Una reseña del libro of Cross-Cultural Technology Design, de Huatong Sun. Este libro analiza los desafíos de comprender las expectativas culturales y los contextos locales. 

[:]

Topics: Global UX
Published in: September, 2013 in [:en]UX Perspectives [:zh] UX 视角 [:KO] UX 관점 [:pt] Perspectivas sobre a experiência do usuário [:ja] UXの視点[:es] Perspectivas sobre la experiencia de usuario

Comments are closed.