From my earliest memories of childhood, I've struggled with my geek-nature: scary things like computers never frightened me. But sometimes this caused social isolation, and that's probably why I became a user interface designer. Because, I figured, if I could make the scary stuff less scary -- easier to use -- maybe that would bridge the gap between the geeks and non-geeks in the world. "Power to the people."

Cross-Cultural User Interface Design

Lately I've become interested in the ways culture affects interface design. Living in a foreign country for the past 2 years has given me a chance to experience the ways people interact with each other in different cultural contexts, which naturally influences the ways people interact with machines, too.

A Japanese vending machine.	Some buttons have red lights -- does it mean the drink is sold out, or available?

Most Americans, looking at the above vending machine for the first time, would say that the red light indicates that the drink is sold out. But actually, the lights only appear after you have inserted your money, and they indicate the available choices.

As another example, taxicabs in Japan show a red sign when they're for hire, and a green sign when they're occupied.

This goes beyond mere colour symbolism. In Japan, something that's lit up, electric, invites the user to interact with it (in this case by pushing the button). Perhaps the country's modern-day fascination with things electric goes back to the industrialization preceding World War II. Even now, kids are constantly bombarded with the message that automation is good. Perhaps it's necessary to cultivate the morale needed to support Japan's industrial economy.

A toilet UI that works really well. (Important point: they've kept latency down -- there's a perceptible connection between waving your hand over the sensor and the solenoid "click". This type of contactless interface wouldn't work if the latency exceeded maybe 50ms or so.)

Hence, something that's illuminated carries a connotation something like the following: "it's on, it's working, it's automatic, it must be good for the world, so I'll try to use it." This is obviously an oversimplification, but it's still an attitude conspicuously absent from the average American user's consciousness.

And that's why we have micro-camcorders whose every surface is covered with buttons. And when they run out of surface area, they create fold-out panels with more room for more buttons. In many ways, this seems to be the Japanese design esthetic. Americans, on the other hand, want fewer buttons because they connote complexity and troublesomeness. Europeans seem to want fewer buttons because they detract from the elegance of the hardware design. Obviously, this is an oversimplification, but it's a pattern that could be carried over to software design for different markets (for example, deep versus wide menu hierarchies).

Cross-cultural interface design issues appear even where you might not expect them. If you're American, look at the picture below and consider whether the labeling connotes "invitation" or "prohibition":

"Do Not Enter?" Toronto Pearson International Airport

I stopped when I first saw these doors, thinking that the real entrance might be somewhere else. Actually, the circle with a slash only applies to pets, and the big red sign simply informs us that the door is automatic. Perhaps in Canada, red doesn't connote prohibition as strongly as it does in the States?

Back to Japan, here are a few more snapshots of unique interface designs:

One of Japan's many self-service automated rice mills.	Automated means you can take the hulls off your rice at 3am in January, if you wanted to.	Challenge: design a user interface for rural rice farmers (consider age, possible vision/motor impairment, and existing domain knowledge). I don't know whether this is a good UI or not, but I'd love to learn how to use it!

Image from a popular print and TV ad campaign. Assuming you don't read Japanese, does the money with wings look like it's flying away from you, or towards you? (the answer, of course, is that it's a 500-yen rebate, but the image of "money with wings" = "money flying away" seems strong in my mind)

Here's a toilet interface that doesn't work so well (yes, I know there are a lot of toilet pictures on this page -- what can I say, Japan has interesting toilets!). Found in one of the biggest bookstores in Japan, nearest to the foreign books floor, the user is given lots of choice here.

Unfortunately it looks like many of the foreign clientele pushed the wrong button by mistake, prompting staff to provide better labeling. I especially like the arrow sticker that says, "move your eye upwards and to the left."

Finally, I would like to end this section with a humble instruction plaque, found on an older western-style toilet (this is the last toilet picture, I promise!). A reminder that we can't always assume the user's existing domain knowledge, as it's often influenced by cultural context in ways designers might not expect.

Don't always assume your user knows how to do it.

-- Thomas Edison, on his 80th birthday interview by Popular Science, Jan. 1926.

Was he right? Which needs to evolve, human intelligence or the ease of use of our inventions?

A public defibrillator at Chicago O'Hare Airport

Do you have time to read the manual?

What is the latency limit for contact-less interfaces, anyway?

The cultural sensitivity of "deep" versus "wide" menu design has been quantified extensively. I first heard about the theory at Aaron Marcus' excellent cross-cultural design seminar at CHI.

We bemoan the disappearance of languages and cultures in the world, but mass-produced software designed from only one cultural viewpoint makes this problem worse. Even if a translated ("localized") version of the software is available, in many countries only Western-educated elites can use the IT equipment we churn out. It behooves us as designers to produce properly localized products that take into account the cultural and linguistic context of use.

Stuff that could be designed better

A favourite hobby of HCI practitioners everywhere is to criticize the designs of others, as if they never made mistakes themselves. This website is no exception. :-)

See my page of questionable designs and suggested fixes.

The not-so-mobile interface

Why hasn't the mobile industry created the waves that fans and investors were predicting? One reason, I think, is because there are still very few devices out there designed to efficiently do what people want. This example is a few years old, but it's still one of my favourites. Aired by none other than Big Blue itself, on prime-time TV, it shows us an exciting vision of the future of computing -- or does it?

Here's a smart-looking guy using a smart-looking device...

See the Video 1.2M MPEG-4 Thanks to Will Wong for capturing the clip!

But wait, let's look at that screen again...

Ah, all the comforts of your home PC. Now, would you really want to sit around yelling "scroll up! click! move right! open folder!"? If you were trading stocks, why shouldn't the device act like a stockbroker instead of a desktop PC?

A lot of HCI people are currently working on better mobile UI's (sometimes at the behest of marketing departments favouring the shotgun approach to feature integration). It's an exciting field in which to work because there still aren't many immovable standards and conventions, so designers are often free to create the best possible UI. But I think that mobile "platform" interfaces will eventually become less important than specialized interfaces narrowly targeted at specific user needs: the Palm UI is great for replacing your DayRunner, but there are better ways to control your stereo than with a stylus and touchscreen.