It’s difficult enough to design an easy-to-use and compelling site for your own culture. It’s even harder to make it work for other cultural markets too.

Minimize the risk-- Contact me

User Testing for Global Markets

Issue addressed “Will our site have requirements or design issues specific to different global markets?”

Your challenge: Make sure your product will work in foreign markets

Software products, and particularly web sites, are often developed to serve multiple ethnic or global markets. Product design must be sensitive to local cultures in order to avoid serious user-experience issues that could not be anticipated by the design team, who is usually immersed in North American culture.

A good software localization firm will be aware of how much space should be reserved to accommodate translation, physical layout to accommodate iconic languages, issues to do with character sorting, regulatory and privacy issues, transaction fulfillment issues, and culturally offensive content issues.

However, there are other cultural issues to do with interactive design that can compromise the effectiveness of your site. At the moment, there are few credible rules or heuristics on this topic. Potential issues include:

• stylistic preferences and expectations in presentation
• expectations set by similar, existing product sets
  
• differences in appropriate and effective online persuasion and trust-building techniques
  
• issues to with with trust, respect, and privacy in different cultures
• the effect of local internet infrastructure (hardware and bandwidth)
• and most of all, unknown and unanticipated cultural issues

My solution for your project

Certainly, the best way to ensure that your design will work in its various markets is to conduct good usability/user-experience testing with the appropriate set of end-users.

Here's how I do that for your project:

• At all times I remain the point of contact for your business stakeholders and development team.
• I work to understand your project requirements with your key stakeholders and then determine the appropriate work to address your requirements.
• I develop a common evaluation methodology that targets the right issues for your globalization project. This ensures that inputs from different locales can be compared and amalgamated to identify both common and unique design issues and recommendations.
• I identify qualified usability professionals who are indigenous to each of the required locales. I train them to ensure a tight focus on the end-user issues identified by the common methodology. They use their own resources to locate end-user recruiting services and laboratory facilities, and conduct the evaluation in the native language.
• Depending on the project, I conduct testing for North American locales. My testing focuses on more common usability issues, allowing the global testing to focus on cultural/locale issues rather than re-hashing the same usability issues.
• I ensure that effective, consistent, quality data are obtained from the local markets. I amalgamate the information across locales, then present the set of actionable findings back to you.

You don't need to deal with multiple locales to enable quality testing and understand disparate sets of findings -- I do all that for you.

If you operate by the typical global development model, your North American corporate headquarters "owns" the Internet site template in order to maintain control of your valuable brand identity. Certain local content is the responsibility of the local business units. Your challenge is to develop a single template with style guidelines that can be adapted to suit local requirements. An untested foundation can, and will, create global-sized headaches for you and your global offices.

Last update: May 07, 2002
(c) 2002 Don Hameluck Usability Consulting Inc.

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