User Interface for internationals useturoff/coursenotes/IS732/samplepro/... · Web viewJohn...

CIS 732 Final report User Interface Internationalization Jia Shen

--- CIS732 Final Project ---

User Interface Internationalization

Submitted to: Professor Murray Turoff

Submitted by: Jia Shen

Date: 12/17/2000

/ 21


Table of Content

1. WHY IS “USER INTERFACE INTERNATIONALIZATION"? 3

2. INTERFACE GLOBALIZATION ISSUES AND LEVELS 4

2.1 LANGUAGE 6

3. CULTURE AND DESIGN 7

3.1 WHAT IS CULTURE 73.2 CULTURE META MODELS 73.3 SOME KNOWN AND TESTED CULTURE MODELS 103.4 CULTURE AND METAPHOR 133.5 CULTURE AND ICONS AND SYMBOLS 13

4. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING FOR INTERNATIONAL COMPUTER PRODUCT 14

4.1 INITIATIVE 154.2 REQUIREMENT 154.3 DESIGN 154.4 INTERNATIONAL USABILITY EVALUATION 16

5. GLOBAL WEB SITE 17

6. FUTURE RESEARCH TOPICS 19

7. CONCLUSION 20

8. REFERENCE 20

/ 21


1. Why is “User Interface Internationalization"?

The answer is simple: Business Decision.

Ten years ago, user interface internationalization is not quite an issue as it is today. Computer products

made from America were sold all over the world without interface internationalization questions being

asked because there were not many local competitors out there anyway. Or the sales overseas was not

significant at all. Things have changed dramatically in recent years. The graphs below are survey results

of percentage of Internet users by geography:

Internet Users by Geographic Locations (1996 - 1998)

(Source: http://www.nua.ie/surveys/analysis/graphs_charts/)

1996 1997 1998

The yellow areas represent Internet users in North America in all the charts, and it is obvious even by

glance that its percentage is shrinking each year. Internet users from outside North America are

increasing significant as well as rapidly during recent years. The implication is that the demands for

computer hardware and software and other related appliances are also increasing, exponentially.

/ 21


Vendors now understand entering a new market takes more than supplying a product that is just

technically superior, aesthetically pleasing, or relatively inexpensive. ([Elisa M. del Galdo, 1996]) Each

culture has its own needs and desires when it comes to products. Only those who address these needs

can compete with local or national vendors and win the market. Computer product user interface

internationalization is not a moral decision, but a business decision.

2. Interface globalization Issues and Levels

The first step in addressing internationalization issues is to make clear what are the issues that are being

involved. Shneiderman [Shneiderman, 1998] says the issues include:

Characters, numerals, special characters and diacritical

Left-to-right versus right-to-left versus vertical input and reading

Date and time formats

Numeric and currency formats

Weights and measures

Telephone numbers and addresses

Names and titles

Social-security, national identification, and passport numbers

Capitalization and punctuation

Tony Fernandes [Fernandes, 1995] lists the following issues as a few:

Nationalism: What is considered an inherent part of a nation or culture and what is consider a

threat to it.

Language: a language and its various dialect

Social context: in many languages of the world, who made a statement has a much bearing as

what the statement was.

Time: Date and time format vary from country to country as well as calendars.

/ 21


Currency: symbols used to denote money vary from locale to locale

Units of measure: both the metric system and English units are used in the world

Cultural values: notion of quality, normality, cleanliness and property.

Symbols: food, animals and everyday objects can has symbolic meanings that may convey

unintended messages.

Esthetics: use of color, patterns, shapes and textures.

Below I am categorizing these issues into four categories with three levels of objectives. The following

table lists them from surface to bottom level.

Internationalization Issues and levels

Objectivity

Levels

Internationalization

Issues

Example Current Research

Examples

Comprehensibility

Usability

Desirability

Language Product language

localization

Unicode;

Machine Translation;

Microsoft knowledge base

for common computer word

translation

Institutional matters Time zone, date format,

currency, measurement

Environmental

factors

Esthetics, Icons and

symbols

ISO symbols for interface;

Microsoft knowledge base

for international color use

Social conventions Forms and values. Culture model

As Del Galdo and Nielsen [Elisa Del Galdo and Jakob Nielsen, 1996] described, the three levels are:

/ 21


1. Comprehensibility: A computer interface that is capable of displaying the user's native language,

character set, and notations, such as currency symbols.

2. Usability: A computer interface that is understandable and usable in the user's native language.

3. Desirability: A system that is able to produce systems that accommodate users' cultural

characteristics.

Companies have started to recognize the need to address issues on the first two levels. Issues such as

language translation or date and currency format have been considered in some products. Current

research work is concentrating on automatic machine translation, using Unicode for programming [David

A. Schmitt, 2000], or establishing knowledge base for product internationalization, such as Microsoft

Developer's network which includes a database for common computer word translation. Further research

is needed in understanding the deeper level of culture issues and their influence on computer product

desirability. Let's first briefly discuss the issue of language, then the next part is devoted to discussion on

culture and design.

2.1 Language

In the past, people dealt with computer were assumed to know English. Products rarely needed to be

translated. Nowadays, with the proliferation of computer all over the world, people with all ages and

culture background started to use computer. The assumption is no more valid.

Language is usually the first issue we encounter in product internationalization. Programming languages

are designed that better support making international software easily. Languages such as Java, Visual

C++, Visual Basic all have supporting features, such as character coding, and operating systems such

as Windows are adding functions to better support internationalization.

Besides translation, there are some other issues in this area such as language ambiguity. Trash can in

the United States is called waste basket in Great Britain and rubbish in New Zealand.

/ 21


A billion means a thousand million in the US whereas in Great Britain it means a million. So language

internationalization should also deals with these issues.

3. Culture and design

There is no denying that culture influences human-computer interaction. The task is how to study culture

effectively to address the needs of users worldwide in computer product design and implementation. To

do this, let us first look at what is culture, its layers of issues that could possibly influence product design,

and then some well known culture models and their impact on computer product.

3.1 What is Culture

Our working definition for this article is: culture is learned behavior consisting of thoughts, feelings, and

actions. [Hoft, 1996] There is no agreement to a specific definition of culture. In 1954, for example, A. L.

Kroeber and C. Kluckhohn reported over 300 definition of culture (Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts

and Definitions, New York: Random Hourse). The definition used here is simple and seems to be in

agreement with much research on culture.

3.2 Culture Meta models

A culture model helps to identify levels of issues being involved in this complex problem by using

international variables, or dimensions of culture. International variables are categories that organize

cultural data. [Hoft, 1996]

Before we study any specific cultural models, let's look at cultural meta models that help us to

understand how and where culture comes to influence our lives in a profound way. There are four meta

modals of culture that were reviewed in [Hoft, 1996], which are

Objective and Subjective culture

The Iceberg Model

The Pyramid Model

The Onion Model

/ 21


Overall these models are all telling us one thing: culture has multiple layers and what we can normally

observe is only the most external layer which counts for about 10% of its total influence. There is much

more profound influence of which we may not even be aware. The Iceberg Model and the pyramid model

are most helpful to illustrate this point.

1. The Iceberg Model:

The Iceberg model is a popular metamodel that is often used in cross-cultural research. Below is the

graph that shows the models.

The Iceberg model

The analogy drawn in the Iceberg model is that just as 10 percent of an iceberg is visible above the

surface of the water, only 10 percent of the cultural characteristics of a target audience is easily visible to

an observer (us). It follows that just as the remaining 90 percent of our cultural characteristics are hidden

/ 21


from view and are therefore easier to ignore and more difficult to identify and study. The model identifies

three metaphorical layers of culture:

Surface: visible, obvious rules such as number, currency, time and date formats.

Unspoken rules: obscured, need context of situation to understand the rules

Unconscious rules: rules out of conscious awareness and difficult to study.

2. The Pyramid Model

Another model that is well known was developed by Geert Hofstede was called the pyramid model.

The Pyramid Model

Geert Hofstede introduces three layers of culture in Pyramid model.

Personality: specific to a person and is learned and inherited

Culture: specific to a group or category of people. It is learned not inherited.

Human Nature: common to all human beings. It is universal and is inherited, not learned.

These meta models provide us with a sense of which layer of culture we would like to look at to test

international computer products.

/ 21


3.3 Some known and tested culture models

The purpose of reviewing some known and tested culture models is to provide what has been known in

this area. They may serve as starting point to develop your own culture model for your needs. These

models are based on questionnaires, surveys, extensive interviews, focus groups, and years of

experience and observation.

Four well known models of culture

Author Focus of Culture Variables identified

Edward T. Hall Determining what releases the right

response rather than what sends

the right message

Speed of messages

High context/ low context

Space

Polychronic/Monochromic Time

Information flow

Action chains

David A. Victor Determining the aspects of culture

most likely to affect communication

specifically in a business setting

Language: fluency /accents etc.

Environment and Technology

Social organization

Context

Authority conception

Nonverbal behavior

Temporal conception

Geert Hofstede Determining the patterns of

thinking, feeling, and acting that

form a culture's mental

programming

Power Distance

Collectivism vs. Individualism

Femininity vs. Masculinity

Uncertainty Avoidance

Long-term vs. Short-term

Fons Trompenaars Determining the way in which a Universalism vs. Particularism

/ 21


group of people solves problems

Collectivism vs. Individualism

Specific vs. Diffuse

Achievement vs. Ascription

Attitude to time

Attitude to environment

The international variables being identified in these models tell us how different people from different

culture are. Current computer products are not sophisticated to support cultural diversity to this degree,

and thus not achieving the "desirability" level in our hierarchy. Some of the variables are directly related

to observations done by some study in comparing Japanese and American computer users. Below I am

summarizing a few interesting examples given in [Masao Ito and Kumiyo Nakakoji, 1996]

When difficulty is encountered in using a system, whom to blame: users or designers?

Japanese tend to conclude it's their fault for not reading manuals carefully before hand.

Americans tend to blame the system and its designers for not being considerate.

Learning style:

Japanese: read manuals first very carefully before start using a system.

Americans: immediately start using a system to see "what will happen"

Sequence of operations:

Japanese: first identify the object, then the action on the object, such as (file; delete). This is said to

stem from Japanese grammar, which is subject followed by object followed by verb

Americans: accustomed to first specify the action, then the object as English grammar is: Subject +

Verb + Object

Thus Japanese users find the sequence of a typical GUI operation (e.g. first select an object then specify

an action) more natural than American users.

/ 21


Group collaboration

Japanese: parental management style, stress on teamwork, not individual contribution. Harmonious

meeting.

Americans: Consultative management style, appreciate individualism, encourage different ideas

Reading habit:

Japanese: Last sentence is always topic sentence.

Westerners: Topic sentence can be found in each paragraph in English.

Another interesting observation is that it has been said that Japanese use face marks (emoticon) in on

line communication much more than westerns. The reasons are twofold: Japanese, like Chinese, are

used to look at pictograms, and second, Japanese tend to use facial expression and context to judge

another person’s meaning. Saying everything up front is considered to be impolite. Using Edward T.

Hall's culture model, Japanese is a high context culture where the context of conversation carries as

much weight in the communication as the message itself, if not more; whereas countries such as

German are low context and thus things are expected to be articulated clearly. But instead of using

emoticons, such as , Japanese prefer to invent their own symbols: (^-^) for happiness. They also

invented their own such as (^o^;>) for Excuse me. The triangular shape on the right apparently

represents a protruding elbow and stems from the fact that an embarrassed or apologetic person will

sometimes scratch the back of his or her head.

As we can see, culture model is effective in studying culture in a meaningful way for the purpose of

computer product design and implementation. One has to develop his own culture model to

accommodate his own needs. To this end, he must determine the layer of culture issue that he wants to

study, and develop his model and then collect data to test the model. The goal for any culture model is to

understand the difference in culture and thus base the design on the culture.

/ 21


3.4 Culture and metaphor

Many computer interfaces adopt real world objects to help users understand the task and the system.

Unfortunately the world is usually American real world. Though the idea is valid, users' real worlds vary

from place to place yet user interfaces don't. [Tony Fernandes, 1995]

An interesting example is given in [Masao Ito and Kumiyo Nakakoji, 1996] where typewriter is being used

as metaphor for word processing software in western world. Concepts and notions such as tab-stops

and margins have been well known and naturally understood by those who have experience using real

typewriter. However, it was not the case in Japan, where Japanese and Chinese character sets are

being used and typewriters were rarely encountered in daily life except for professionals and English-

major students. In Japan, they typically use rule-lined writing pads with 20*20 grids and one character

was written in for each grid from top to bottom and right to left. Given these differences, an appropriate

metaphor for Japanese word processing without influcence of American software would be ruled writing-

pad. But Japanese still use the western typewriter metaphor because they got accustomed to it and

changes to other metaphors may see awkward. So this is a case of "acclimatization" overwrites culture

difference.

3.5 Culture and icons and symbols

As the saying goes, "a good picture worth a thousand words." Most of today's software use icons and

symbols to communicate with users. Icons are signs that are familiar, concrete representations of objects

or people. Symbols are more abstract and require specific instructions to learn. For international

computer interface, the design of icons and symbols pose great challenge. Similar to metaphors, the

problem here is what is meaningful and natural to one group may be ambiguous, unintelligible, or

arbitrary to anther. [Aaron Marcus, 1996] Some well known examples include the design of Windows

folder icon, garbage cans, and mailbox. The typical Windows folder icon looks like this:

/ 21


Though the yellowish color and the tab suggest to western users that apparently it is a file folder that

they use everyday, it is rarely seen in some other countries, China for example. The folder used in China

is usually a rectangular one made from thick brown paper without tabs. So for Chinese users, they are

forced to associate this unfamiliar object to folders and remember this association. It is definitely extra

work which should not be the intention of using icons and symbols.

There are other issues that are associated with culture and interface design such as culture and color,

culture and computer mediated communication, culture and groupware etc. As a complicated topic, the

current study of culture for product design is far from fully-fledged. But there are companies who realized

its importance and carried out research in this field. Hewlett-Packard once conducted contextual

research for their Inkjet printer to enter international users' families. [Susan Dray and Deborah Mrazek,

1996] Though based on limited time and budget the study was carried out only in four America cities and

two European cities with 20 families, the results were extraordinarily valuable for HP to see how their

products were actually being used in their families. The data collected played a significant role later in

the product design. The idea is a thorough study of people and an understanding of their cultural

background is a prerequisite for a successful international product.

4. Software Engineering for International Computer Product

Interface design issue is part of computer product design and thus to do things right, a proper method

needs to be proposed to incorporate internalization elements into the processes of software

development cycle.

4.1 Initiative

The first step is to understand why you need to do internationalization. Don't customize for the sake of

customize. As pointed out at the beginning of this report, this is a business decision rather than anything

/ 21


else. So do market research and data analysis and decide whether customers from other parts of the

world are making significant profits for your company, or have a great potential. In most cases the

answer is yes. As Jakob Nielsen said, the age for internationalization has arrived (since 1998). [Jakob

Nielsen, 1998]

4.2 Requirement

Understand the target culture and develop a culture model of your own.

To get requirement from international market is not an easy task. Before you start out you should have

culture model of your own with international variables that are the dimensions that of most interest to

you. Say in your product you want to know whether people from different culture have different

expectations for response time and information richness. Then in your model response time and

information richness are two variables to measure. After this, you will collect data based on your

resource limits. Then you need to determine whether the differences are significant enough for you to

customize product for different culture. If the answers are positive put them down in your requirement

specs because in the next step designer needs to take them into consideration. In the Microsoft

development example[15], things such as leave extra space in menu table or pop up dialog boxes since

translation into other languages may take more space is not a afterthought. They need to be

documented before design starts.

4.3 Design

The design process is an iterative one which goes back and forth between design, testing and then

redesign and testing. This is because there is never enough design guidelines that you can follow to

make sure the design is internationally acceptable. You have to test with real people from diverse

cultures. Based on the test results, you probably need to modify the design. Radical things should be

found and done early in the process to eliminate overhead. Another point is to have an international

design team, which by itself may represent user diversity.

/ 21


Technically there are already rules for designing international products such as put your application logic

and interface contents, such as menu choices and warning pop up Windows notice message separately.

By laying out a good architecture, later you may be able to easily customize your product such as

translation. Coding scheme for character set also needs to be specified. Also state what international

standards you will use, if any, for your product, such as ISO standard symbols etc.

4.4 International Usability Evaluation

Like mentioned earlier, there are two steps in ensuring the usability of interface: follow guidelines and

doing testing. Following guidelines alone normally doesn't do the work because they can not be

comprehensive, so you need evaluation. Jakob Nielsen did detailed work in explaining how to conduct

international usability evaluation. Basically there are two approaches: [Jakob Nielsen, 1996]

International usability inspection: Simply have people from multiple countries look over the user

interface any analyze whether they think it would cause any problems.

International usability testing: Use real users of the system to do real task without getting any

help.

International usability inspection results in "educated guesses" as no real tasks are being involved.

Preferably local usability specialists should be hired as users. They may point out major design issues

such as people don't do things that way in that country. So this should be carried out early in the cycle.

International usability testing, on the other hand, result in detailed real data as you are using real people

and real task. There are several ways to do testing:

Go to the foreign country yourself

Run the test remotely

Hire a local usability consultant to run the rest for you

Have staff from local branch office run the test, even though they are not trained in usability

Have the users perform a self-administered test without supervision.

/ 21


Given resource limits, sometimes only small-scale tests are feasible. But the key point is that to do

something is much better than doing nothing at all. In terms of international usability testing, even limited

data can help significantly in entering into a new market.

5. Global Web site

Back to the survey we mentioned at the beginning of this report, there is a growing number of users on

the Web that are not from North America. Make web sites international is a challenging as well as a

rewarding task. Jakob Nielsen predicted that the year of 1998 was the year that international web site

was going to happen as a major trend, and he said it turned out to true. That's why I make it a special

topic in this report.

Basically there are two ways to make global sites: internationalize and localize. Internationalize means

one sites accommodate all users, localize means customize sites for different locations. Jakob Nielsen

offered lots of practical advice in terms of building sites for international use [Jakob Nielsen, 1999]. For

example:

Log files of your site can be used to see geographical distribution of user groups and thus facilitate

decision on whether a translated site is necessary.

If you are making multi-language choices on a staging page, make your choices stand out.

Use text for language choices, not just national flags as it may be ambiguous and not appropriate.

Date format used on the web should take different time zones into consideration. For example: The

press conference starts 1:00 p.m. In New York (GMT - 5), corresponding to 19:00 in Paris and 3:00

the next day in Tokyo.

Let's use Yahoo as an example. The main site (http://www.yahoo.com) offers a list of regional sites called

"Local Yahoo!s" on the purpose to serve people more effectively based on their region. Yet the choices

are listed at the bottom of the major yahoo.com site, which is not a very obvious choice to users. What

/ 21

http://www.yahoo.com/


caught my eyes were the two links that are both related to China, namely "China" and "Chinese". Only

after some extra clicks did I find out that the "China" site is for China mainland, while "Chinese" is for

Chinese people overseas. The charters on China site is simplified Chinese, while on the Chinese site it

is traditional Chinese. Also there are features that serve local audience.

Yahoo! China Site

The Yahoo! China site serves Chinese people live in Mainland China. Features include:

Use simplified Chinese

English-Chinese dictionary

Chinese Astrology

Local news

Yahoo Chinese

/ 21

Chinese Astrology

English- Chinese Dictionary

China Local News


The Yahoo! Chinese site aims at serving Chinese people living in North America. Features include:

Use traditional Chinese. (The most popular character set used among Chinese in North America)

News include those happened in both North America and China.

Canada and American map

6. Future research topics

It's always easier said to be done. For a developer or manager planning international software

development, the issue is how to write programs for more than one language easily. In industry, Unicode

has been proposed and programming languages such as Microsoft Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Sun's

Java are adding features to make development of international software easier. Future researches need

to be done in:

Machine Translation

Establishing effective culture model

Get International requirement

Incorporate internationalization into software development cycle

Effective icons and symbols design for international use

/ 21

Canada/US Map

Chinese Medicine in North America

US News related to China


A knowledge base for international standards on global interface design

7. Conclusion

The age for computer product internationalization has arrived. This is a complex issue that can result in

different levels of satisfaction. Currently vendors have realized its importance, but their efforts are mainly

focused on language localization. Culture issues need to be studied in an extensive way to result in

better internationally satisfactory products.

The bottom line is that it's better to do something than do nothing. And the effort may make a big

difference in your computer product, internationally speaking.

8. Reference

Books:

Reference [1]-[7] are from International User Interfaces, edited by Elisa M. del Galdo and Jakob

Nielsen, Wiley Computer Publishing, John Wiley & Sons Inc., 1996, ISBN: 0-471-14965-9

[1]. Jakob Nielsen, International Usability Engineering

[2]. John Connolly, Problems in Designing the User Interface for Systems Supporting International Human-Human Communication

[3]. Nancy Hoft, Developing a Culture Model

[4]. Elisa M. del Galdo, Culture and Design

[5]. Masao Ito and Kumiyo Nakakoji, Impact of Culture on User Interface Design

[6]. Susan Dray and Deborah Mrazek, A Day in the Life: Studying Context across Cultures

[7]. Aaron Marcus, Icon and Symbol Design Issues for Graphical User Interfaces

[8]. Jakob Nielsen, Designing Web Usability: The practice of simplicity, New Riders Publishing, 1999, ISBN: 1-56205-810-X

[9]. Virginia Howlett, Visual interface design for Windows, Wiley Computer Publishing, John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1996 ISBN:0-471-13419-8

[10]. Ben Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface, Third edition, Addison Wesley Inc., 1998, ISBN: 0-201-69497-2

/ 21


[11]. David A. Schmitt, International Programming for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Press, April 2000, ISBN 1-57231-956-9

Papers and Proceedings:

[12]. Tony Fernandes, Global user interface design, CHI 1995 MOSAIC of creativity – May 7-11, 1995, Pages 363-364

[13]. P. Russo and S. Boor, How fluent is your interface? Designing for international users. Human Factors in Computing Systems, INTERCHI'93 Conference Proceedings, ACM, 1993, 342-347

[14]. W. A. Kellogg and J.C. Thomas, Cross-cultural perspective on human-computer interaction: A report on the CHI'92 workshop. SIGCHI bulletin 25, 1993, 2:40-45

Online references:

[15]. Localization: Done right, it's part of the spec, not an afterthought. Microsoft Corporation. 1999. http://www.microsoft.com/misc/backstage/column_3.htm

[16]. Survey resources are from NUA.com at http://www.nua.com

[17]. Japanese Emoticon: http://www.nytimes.com/library/cyber/week/0812smile.html

[18]. Blissymbolics: http://home.istar.ca/~bci/intro.htm

[19]. Jakob Nielsen, International Web Usability, Alertbox for August 1996, http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9608.html

/ 21

http://home.istar.ca/~bci/intro.htm

http://www.nua.com/

http://www.microsoft.com/misc/backstage/column_3.htm

User Interface for internationals useturoff/coursenotes/IS732/samplepro/... · Web viewJohn...

Documents

Transcript of User Interface for internationals useturoff/coursenotes/IS732/samplepro/... · Web viewJohn...