Designing for Engagement: A Workflow for Participatory, Cross-Cultural Design

By Guiseppe Getto

Within the emerging field of user experience (UX) design, a shift is taking place in how designers think about users as participants in the co-creation of websites, Web applications, and mobile applications. For several years now, user-centered design (UCD) has been the prevailing best practice. As a key UCD resource (Understanding Your Users: A Practical Guide to User Requirements, Methods, Tools, and Techniques) explains, this approach was born out of the need to include users (i.e., the actual persons who would use a given technology) in the actual processes of designing that technology. Such inclusion, moreover, had to be done in a substantive way. This move toward user inclusion was a radical one at the time (over a decade ago), when user experience was often understood in terms of products of the design process vs. in terms of processes that needed to be included within it. And to date, UCD is arguably the most complete and best-understood methodology for including users in the various stages of design—from initial research to prototyping, user testing, and maintenance.

UCD is best understood as a process of requirements gathering (i.e., basic functionality, design choices, level of technical support, aesthetic and linguistic preferences, etc.). Users are interviewed or surveyed during the initial planning stages of a design project. They are also kept in the loop throughout all further iterations of that project, with an eye toward understanding what users require from the design, be that functionality, accessibility, cultural understanding, learning style, language fluency, etc. Once designers understand those requirements, they can create a product or service that meets the needs of real, live users as opposed to designing products for hypothetical individuals who may or may not have expectations that are very different from those that were estimated.

The flaw in UCD is that requirements gathering doesn’t guarantee that users will care enough about a design process to substantively participate in it. This has been pointed out by adherents of what is variously called participatory design, inclusive design, formative usability, or my own term—engaged design. As Tomer Sharon argues in his recent book It’s Our Research: Getting Stakeholder Buy-in for User Experience Research Projects, the true power of user experience methodologies is their ability to cause organizational change. For Sharon this happens at two levels: 1) in the ways users are treated during design processes, and 2) in the ways UX is incorporated into all design work within an organization. Rather than viewing UX as something that simply helps improve products and services for end-users, Sharon advocates a truly collaborative workflow for design projects. This workflow treats both designers within an organization, as well as prospective users of a given product or service, as stakeholders in the co-creation of that product or service.

How To Treat Users and Designers as Stakeholders

Instead of designing a specific usability test or limited- term project with clients, designers like Sharon want to encourage entire organizations to inject UX methods throughout their production cycle. This is known as the UX lifecycle, or processes a design team should go through to ensure a quality user experience. This often involves a UX team working with a design team to help designers understand opportunities to improve UX at each stage of the design process, from initial research to prototyping, user testing, and maintenance.

In my own work, this has meant creating UX deliverables like wireframes, sitemaps, project plans, and business process models (or models for user interaction with a system). I also create these deliverables in formats that are editable so that clients I am working with can continue to perform UX work on their own after the initial project is completed. This not only requires producing deliverables in formats that clients are familiar with, but also inviting them into the knowledge-making practices I am using to create those deliverables. I do this through deep collaboration during each stage of my research, including frequent meetings and invitations to give detailed feedback on key decision points.

Treating users as stakeholders is equally important. Rather than only recruiting representative users for usability tests, it is essential to engage users at a deeper level. Encouraging people who are interested in the product, such as customers using a previous version of a particular application, to get involved in the actual design process is one way to accomplish this. This approach is opposed to showing them prototypes where most decisions have already been made. As a concrete example of this, Eunice Chang and Olivia Williamson, two designers at the firm Autodesk, have piloted adding what they call “customer councils” into their design workflow. Rather than prototyping a design for a product and then testing that prototype, Chang and Williamson ask users of their products to join these councils, which have real power in the direction that prototypes will take. According to Chang and Williamson, members of these councils have gone so far as to use early prototypes of architecture software to design fictionalized “ideal buildings,” and in the process have given Chang and Williamson detailed feedback about the functionality, intuitiveness, flaws, and possibilities of their prototypes.

UX in a Global Context

Along with more participatory design processes, UX experts are looking to global markets for users who have previously been neglected by both designers and researchers. Many U.S.–based UX firms are currently working hard to break into international markets by making connections with designers and customer bases in countries like China and India, where tech sectors are just beginning to take off. This focus has included expanding the scope of user research to include international users and stakeholders, as opposed to only conducting research with users who are the same nationality as the researchers. This approach has also included funding trips for UX experts to travel to these countries in order to encounter user lifeways face-to-face.

The importance of this approach, moreover, is appearing in the current research in global/international technical communication. Huatong Sun’s recent (2012) book, Cross-Cultural Technology Design: Creating Culture-Sensitive Technology for Local Users, is an example of a participatory framework applied in a cross-cultural situation, a case study of six Chinese users of text messaging interfaces. Sun argues that designers and researchers should “localize” research methodologies to specific groups of users and their cultural contexts. For Sun, localization is a “design philosophy that integrates action and meaning in technology design in order to make a technology usable and meaningful to culturally diverse users” (267). Basically, Sun is arguing that we need to go out and actually work with users in culturally diverse contexts if we really want to develop models for doing so. The danger of simply incorporating international users into existing methods is that designers will end up creating products and services that are out-of-sync with the everyday lives of users living in other nations and cultures. Localization starts with understanding the lifeways of users, including value systems and perceptions of technology that are specific to a given culture.

Participatory Design Is Contextual Design

My own experiences with participatory design frameworks have led me to develop my own philosophy: engaged design. I use this term because I want to emphasize the engagement process essential to any participatory design project. I believe, for a truly participatory design process to be enacted, designers and researchers need to get involved in the complex lifeways of actual users to the extent that they begin to understand exactly what users’ diverse needs and purposes are. Rather than trying to persuade prospective users to perform usability tests they aren’t invested in (e.g., through monetary compensation), I advocate locating users whose wants and needs align with the product or service I’m designing. Forged through my experiences designing mostly with nonprofits and community organizations, but also for a hybrid learning environment composed largely of Chinese international students, the key method I have used to engage users in this manner is what UX specialists call contextual inquiry.

Contextual inquiry is a process of observing and working with individuals in the actual settings in which they will use the product or service being designed. Rather than interviewing users over the phone or having them come into a usability lab, advocates of contextual inquiry go to where users are, observing them working in their own office or other community setting. (A good, recent sourcebook on this topic is Steve Portigal’s Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights.) Stemming from ethnographic field methods (i.e., participant observation, taking field notes, video-recording daily activities, photographing participant workspaces, etc.), contextual inquiry assumes that in the fine-grain details of a given user’s everyday life lie the best indicators of what kind of design will be successful for them. Because cultural value systems are typically transparent to those who live them, and opaque to those outside of them, learning why users prefer certain technologies, workflows, languages, or venues for performing their work is crucially important to designing effective products for individuals from other cultures. This I know from personal experience.

An Example of Participatory, Cross-Cultural Design

When designing a hybrid learning environment for Chinese international students, my initial prototype of a course website and learning workflow was a total disaster. Students struggled to understand my learning goals, to meet those goals, and to effectively manage all the work involved in the class. After some investigation, I learned that this was in part because my student-users had concerns about writing publicly in Standard Edited American English. They feared their classmates would judge them on their grammar and syntax. Adding to this problem were the culturally embedded knowledge-making practices student-users brought with them to the environment. These practices just didn’t mesh well with my initial learning goals. I wanted students to understand that professional writing and communication were increasingly occurring in digital environments, including via social media networks and other websites, but students associated those environments with their home dialects and feared attempting to use Standard Edited American English in them.

Because the course was hybrid (i.e., part online and part face-to-face), it was also necessarily technology-driven. The vast majority of students, however, were unaccustomed to thinking of technology as a tool for school-based communication. Several of the students were avid users of popular Chinese social media sites and celebrity websites, including QQ (a multilingual chat application that allows users to switch between a variety of languages, all within the same platform). Once I discovered this use scenario, I began to encourage students to incorporate technological platforms into their workflow that were similar enough to QQ to help students feel fluent, such as microblogging platforms like Tumblr and Twitter. I also encouraged them to incorporate scenarios they were familiar with (e.g., explaining a passage of text via images from their home country, describing terms that didn’t translate well into English, etc.) into the learning environment. These activities included leading brief, in-class workshops on the contexts and usage of these platforms in their home countries.

As I began to hybridize the learning environment in this manner, students appeared more apt to engage with the course material in substantive ways. For example, they began to critique American technology usage vs. Chinese technology usage and visa-versa, articulating the strengths and weaknesses in each culture’s use of technology. The entire learning experience itself became one of cross-cultural inquiry into the communication practices and technologies used by learners from both China and the United States. And the main takeaway from the class became the overarching idea that technologies, and their users, are always already culturally embedded.

UX Design Is Contextual Design

At a broader level, every participatory design process should be an exercise in cross-cultural inquiry, because designers should never assume they have a window into the lifeways of users, especially if those users are from a dramatically different cultural context. Unless the designer is already a close colleague with participants in other cultures, it is essential that the designer get involved with the lifeways of prospective users (i.e., learn what matters to them, what kinds of technology they are already using, how they work on a regular/daily basis, etc.).

There are a variety of ways to achieve this objective:

Preliminary research: longterm participant observation, contextual inquiry, surveys, open card sorts
Prototyping: contextual inquiry, closed card sorts, focus groups, usability testing with a lo-fidelity prototype such as a paper sketch or quick mockup
User testing: contextual inquiry, usability testing with a high-fidelity (i.e., as close to the eventual user interface as possible) prototype
Maintenance: contextual inquiry, focus groups, surveys

You can see from this list that I value contextual inquiry at every stage of design. The value for such inquiry is that it allows a design process to integrate into the everyday lives of users. This means that there is also a greater chance that the product or service delivered will by optimally usable.

Users are complicated people with lots of (often conflicting) needs and values. The more you can learn about them and invite them into the design process, the more you’ll learn about the specific, culturally embedded lifeways they inhabit, and the more your design will mesh with those lifeways. Unlike UCD, then, engaged design requires more than just knowledge of user requirements. It also requires engagement with users on a deep, interpersonal level. This degree of personal interaction is essential to getting the information needed to create products that effectively reflect the behaviors and usage patterns of individuals. And when collecting such data, users should be treated as stakeholders in the design process whenever possible, because they are; they will be the ones whose lives will be most affected by design choices. They have the most at stake in the design process, whether they realize it or not.

Within this context, even the word “design” can be misleading. The problem is that it bears the connotation of highly trained professionals with in-depth knowledge of programming or interface development. It connotes individuals who are creating the deep-level infrastructures and mind-blowing new interfaces that digital experiences operate within. Those people are certainly designers, and they are essential to all cultural lifeways that make use of digital spaces and applications, just as an architect is essential to the construction of a new building. As any good architect knows, however, without knowledge of the ways in which a building will be used, and without buy-in from key stakeholders, an initial design runs the risk of working against actual use. Given time, renovation of any design also becomes necessary as user needs change, new materials and technologies become available, and aesthetic choices begin to appear dated.

Engaging Users through Making Knowledge with Them

The overarching difference between UCD and engaged design is the level of dynamism, flexibility, and interaction between users and designers. Within the paradigm of UCD, knowledge-making is retained by designers. While user knowledge is deeply valued within the design process, users aren’t necessarily invited into the central knowledge- making practices that run the process. At the same time, there are limits to any methodology, and it is certainly not my intention to claim that designers should already be using a participatory framework. It isn’t always practical to invite users into every knowledge-making practice that is central to a given design process. Sometimes there are large knowledge gaps between designers and end users that require a high degree of translation work to help users understand how a design can be useful.

Depending on the level of engagement users will have with specific aspects of a given design, or how different a new iteration of an existing design will be from previous versions, requirements gathering may be enough. It has also been my experience that users don’t always have the time or interest to engage in a design process in a deep way. When working in global contexts or with users from international cultures, it is also essential to consider such factors as language fluency, technology preference, and aesthetic choices important to the culture. As already mentioned, designers should never assume that users are coming from the same cultural background as them, so these additional factors should at least be considered whether working with international users or not.

Rather than replacing UCD with something like engaged design, I believe that these methodologies exist on a continuum. Every design process should be centered around users, but the means of engaging users in that process will differ strongly depending on the factors I’ve described here. I am certainly not claiming that usability testing is no longer essential, for example, or that certain usability tests, such as those that focus on basic functionality, shouldn’t be administered with users who are completely unfamiliar with the design. Sometimes it is important to recruit some fresh eyes at a particular stage of a project.

Take-Aways: Culture Matters as Much as Design

If there is one take-away from this discussion, it should be that culture matters in every design process. Design processes should always be messy and localized, because culture is messy and localized. It’s not that design best practices don’t exist, it’s that users often interfere with those best practices. Rather than being seen as a burden on designers, however, that interference should be considered essential to any design process. If a designer approaches a given situation with set protocols in mind for how the design should respond to that situation, they are already closing off possibilities for interacting with their users.

My design work has largely taken place with user groups that are frequently neglected by large-scale digital product deployments: first-generation college students, non-profit workers who have little experience with technology, ESL users from a variety of cultural backgrounds, etc. In working with these populations, I have learned that best practices often interfere with what people need from a design process. However, the most important skill I have learned, which I suppose could be called a best practice, is to listen more and talk less. I always have lots of ideas for how to meet user needs, but my first job is to listen to how they articulate those needs and to help them help me meet those needs. This kind of reciprocal and reflexive interaction is at the heart of any participatory design process.