UI Design Newsletter – February, 2007

Insights from Human Factors International

In This Issue:

Do you see what I see?
Exploring cross cultural variation in looking behavior

HFI Chief Scientist Kath Straub, PhD, CUA, and Project Director Spencer Gerrol, CUA, discuss cultural differences in how people view Web sites.

The Pragmatic Ergonomist

Dr. Eric Schaffer, Ph.D., CPE, founder and CEO of HFI offers practical advice.

What do you see?

Before you continue reading this newsletter,
please tell us what you see in this picture

Your Web group has created a persuasive and engaging Web site. Your user data stream shows that your customers are doing more on your site. Your usability data stream shows that they are also doing so more successfully.

More impressively, your design team has conducted careful, thoughtful research to beat banner blindness. They have explored the consumers' information needs and decision patterns. They've leveraged the site-use metrics to learn how consumers react to different design patterns. They've used this knowledge to optimize the placement of persuasive up-sell/cross-sell elements. They know that when, where and how you place ad elements counts as much as how the ad elements works.

The Web is an important part of your organization's home-country communication outreach and contributes substantially to your local success. But your organization is global. And based on the success of the site, top management has decided that your transaction-based Web site should be global, as well.

What does this mean for your site? Will the findings of your careful and thoughtful research program on persuasive design and advertisements placement generalize to a cross-cultural design space? Does the decision-making path look the same? We have (roughly) the same brains, don't we? We should notice the same stuff, right?

The Web continues to emerge as a first resource for consumer information. Marketing across cultural boundaries seems to be an efficient approach to going global. Is it optimally effective?

(Maybe we) look different

Take some time to surf the Net across countries. Look at some European Union sites. Then look at some Asian sites (India, China, Japan). When we ask people to do this exercise, they often identify sites that don't fit their expectations and say, "Oh, those places... they are just behind in the adoption of Web technologies, so their Web site designs are still messy and cluttered. In a few years, they will look more like ours." It may be so – presently – that their sites will begin to look more like ours. Or, maybe ours will begin to look more like theirs. But it's not clear that the reason theirs look different now is that they are lagging behind. There are great designers all over. They may be designing to the beat of a different drum.

Consider this study: Masuda and Nisbett (2001) present evidence that when asked to describe the same picture, Japanese participants reported 60% more information about the background than Americans did. Further, Japanese participants observed background changes more accurately than Americans. In contrast, Americans reported more details about the image's central object. Americans were also better at recognizing the same object against a new background.

Nisbett and colleagues chalk this up to different cognitive processing style. Americans (and Westerners) they say are more analytic. They pay more attention to the focal object. They analyze its attributes and strive to assign the central object to a specific category. In contrast, East Asians tend to pay more attention to the broader context. They focus less on the specific objects and more on the relationships between them. East Asians take a more holistic approach.

This is an intriguing difference. But how do we apply it to Web design? Effective designers guide their users' attention using visuals. To create effective, persuasive interactions, designers need to know what draws attention and where viewers' eyes linger.

The two groups in Masuda and Nisbett's research saw the same picture. But they reported different things. What happened? Did the participants look at the same parts of the same picture and just remember different things? Or do they actually see the picture differently – looking at and lingering on different elements?

Seeing is believing

Chua, Boland, and Nisbett (2005) applied eye-tracking analysis to explore this question. In their study, Chua and colleagues tracked the eye-movements of American and Chinese graduate students as they looked at a series of pictures like those below.

Copyright © 1993-2005 by The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, all rights reserved - complete citation below.

Each picture had a single foreground object on a realistic background. Participants were first asked simply to look at the picture for 3 seconds and say how much they liked it on a scale of 1-7. After rating the images, participants were asked to look at another set and to quickly say if they had seen the central object in the image before. (This parallels Masuda's same focal-point / different-background recognition task.)

Chau and colleagues' findings are consistent with the earlier work. Americans focused on the central object in the scene sooner and looked at it for longer. They tended to be better at recognizing the central object later. In contrast, Chinese participants took a more balanced approach, looking at more and different parts of the scene.

This difference, while subtle, is important because it shows that our cultural experiences have an impact not only on what we see, but on where we look.

This research really indicates how profoundly the "high context" dimension can be. It has an effect even on the scan pattern! But of course this is only a tiny fraction of the cultural difference.

There are perhaps a dozen major dimensions, with individualistic vs. communal probably the most central. But there are far more gross issues. Language is obvious. But even English is very different (Indians "Prepone" meetings for example, moving them up in time). There is an enormous context of shared experience (from shared disasters to shared commercials). There are different laws and operating conventions. Different styles of decision making. Even the perception of time is different (In Asia time is seen as cyclic, NOT linear).

I fully expect that the NEXT major frontier in usability (as we get a handle on emotional design) will be the issues of globalization.

References

Masuda, T. & Nisbett, R.E. (2001). "Attending holistically versus analytically: comparing the context sensitivity of Japanese and Americans." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 922-934.

Chua, H.F., Boland, J.E., & Nisbett, R.E. (2005). "Cultural variation in eye movements during scene perception." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), 102(35), 12629-12633.

Figure citation: Volumes 90-102, copyright © 1993-2005 by The National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, all rights reserved. Volumes 1-89, copyright as a collective work only; author(s) retains copyright to individual articles.