I started my research into cultural aspects of interface acceptance by creating a network of contacts within the Sun community. I spoke with internationalization and localization professionals, as well as HCI colleagues who have an interest in this domain. I learned that managers at Sun have realized that effective internationalization and localization are keys to its business success. To that end, there are specific processes in place to internationalize and localize products. While the modularity is there -- i.e., products are developed so that locale-specific fonts, currencies, time formats, and the like are easily pluggable -- that modularity does not extend into the cultural arena of appropriate and comfortable color schemes, icons, layouts, etc.

I also started building a network of people outside of Sun who work at the intersection of culture and product design. I accomplished that by attending IWIPS '99 -- the International Workshop on the Internationalization of Products and Systems. There, I learned that consumer product companies were in the lead when it came to building culturally authentic products. I found it interesting that when Kodak wants to build a camera for the Chinese market, human factors professionals go to China to research the people and their relationship with photographs. The camera is then designed from scratch to suit the Chinese people. This is fundamentally different from the way software is ported to different locales; localized software is rarely redesigned from scratch. Perhaps software companies can learn from consumer product companies like Kodak.

I have formulated the following research questions:

Are there culturally-related usability problems with localized Sun products? That is, do localized Sun products look and feel "culturally authentic" to users?

To achieve cultural authenticity, is it best to create one generic universal design, to design a different UI for each locale, or to adopt an approach that is somewhere in the middle of this spectrum?

Is cultural appropriateness an important issue solely with consumer products, or is it important for technical software and hardware -- the bulk of Sun's business-- as well?

The first deliverable that came out of my research was a section on Non-Textual Objects that I wrote for a Sun-wide Software Product Internationalization taxonomy. This taxonomy document was coordinated by an internationalization manager at Sun. Its purpose was to describe what it means for a software product at Sun to be internationalized. My section provides guidelines for internationalizing non-textual objects. It discusses cultural considerations for using images, choosing color schemes, laying out graphical interfaces, using sounds, and naming features.

Writing this content was challenging, not only because of the scarcity of information on this topic, but also because my rather abstract cultural guidelines and data clashed with the internationalization community's need and penchant for precise, categorized information. To ship my content into the taxonomy document, I had to mold it into "requirements for compliance" defined for various types of interfaces and protocols. It took several phone conversations, and much revising and editing, for my abstract data to adopt a more square and defined format. From this experience, I guessed that the activities of internationalization and cultural research have different approaches.

I believe the gap between internationalization and cultural research practices can be bridged. A first step is for HCI and internationalization professionals to understand each other. Just as interface designers and software developers have to consciously forge a common language and methodology to work together effectively, HCI and internationalization/localization professionals must join forces deliberately and delicately. I am glad that this workshop will address this need to marry the textual/data handling category of localization with the abstract cultural issues that designers seek to address.

Now that I have cultivated a small interdisciplinary network of people at Sun who support my research, I am turning my attention towards the usability of Sun's localized software. Ideally, I would like to study the usability of Sun's localized software in all of our target locales. Since this is an expensive undertaking, I have devised a discount method to start off: I will conduct a usability study of localized versions of a Sun product in the US. My participants will be Sun employees with diverse cultural backgrounds. While I am not expecting pristine results, I do expect to learn more about what works for Sun in the domain of international usability engineering. I will conduct this study in mid-March, so I would be able to share my results at the CHI workshop.

In the future, I would like to compare the results of this study with similar studies conducted abroad, to see if in fact discount international usability engineering is effective.

Another future deliverable is a matrix of locale-specific cultural data. I envision this as a sort of table, where users can look up a specific country and see information like common color associations, appropriate icons, and reading order, along with screen shots of software developed in that locale. I think there is a real need for a resource like this. Books like Global Interface Design have warnings along the lines of: 'Be careful when using a trash can on an icon, because in country X, trash cans look more like mailboxes.' Information like that is only somewhat helpful. It leaves the reader wondering what trash cans look like in other countries besides country X, and it does not offer a clear guideline for how to design a universally-appropriate trash can icon. If we as HCI designers and localization professionals are going to advocate cultural modality for our software, we need to have locale-specific cultural data to work with.

Creating such a matrix of detailed data will involve leveraging other researchers' work, learning cultural associations in a given locale by administering questionnaires to native users, performing ethnographic observation, and reading tour books and international business guides.

Thank you, Erica Seidel