By Benjamin Lauren
Today, technical communicators might find themselves developing communication products for persons from other cultures. Yet international audiences and contexts can be incredibly nuanced. As a result, developing technologies for such individuals and conditions can be complex. For example, WhatsApp©, a popular instant messaging mobile application with a global reach, has an audience that crosses several time zones. Many of the app’s users, however, employ different mobile services, platforms, and devices, while also subject to their country’s intellectual property laws.
Further complicating this situation is that cultures can use communication technologies, like mobile apps, in unpredictable ways. Consider how different cultures and people view “selfies.” In some cultures, they are seen as a form of self-expression, while in others, they are considered evidence of narcissism. Given such complexity, how can technical communicators effectively develop materials for international audiences and contexts?
That’s a challenging question with no simple answer. Yet technical communicators must keep searching for methods, strategies, and practices for engaging with international audiences to keep pace with changing technologies and evolving cultural communication practices. The key to success is often connected to the attitude—or the state of being—technical communicators bring to such contexts.
Be Curious: Remember that You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
The obvious way to learn about international contexts is to do research, but what sort? Technical communicators can learn a surprising amount from a Web search (e.g., current trends in pop culture, events, humor, news, politics, and so on across the world). Additionally, online platforms run by newspapers, multimedia services, and sports and news channels can offer culturally useful information to help introduce individuals to cultural norms, beliefs, and attitudes.
For example, while reading the replies to an article on ESPN might reveal some ugly behavior (e.g., trolling), these replies also provide examples of how conversations about sports are valued by a particular audience in a given culture. Knowing these values exist can help one better understand how cultures view participation in a variety of communities and contexts. Such venues also provide a mechanism for examining questions such as, “How else do people in this culture communicate online?” and “What sort of communication channels are being used?” Thus, engaging with cultures online can foster discovery and learning in unexpected ways.
Within these contexts, heuristics can provide a practical starting point for approaching international audiences. Heuristics are guidelines for evaluating or designing an unfamiliar topic, process, or audience, and experts in a given area often create them. They are also useful for beginners who are just learning how to evaluate an interface or understand an unfamiliar culture. For example, national cultural identity heuristics were created from extensive research done by Geert Hofstede. Hofstede’s research describes dimensions of culture such as power distance (i.e., how the culture views hierarchy and power) and individuality (i.e., how the culture views individualism versus collectivism).
A word of caution: use heuristics strategically, but skeptically. While cultural identity heuristics can be useful, they can also overlook individuality. The relationship of individuals with their national culture varies from person to person and can constantly change with time. Not all Americans, for example, are individualistic, and not all Chinese are collectivist (a common assumption under the heuristic of cultural dimensions). The key is to remember that heuristics address national tendencies, not immutable truths.
Be People-Centered: Focus on Problems, not Products
A technical communicator’s research might begin by understanding the problems that affect people in a given culture vs. focusing on developing products for that culture. By emphasizing problem solving, technical communicators can position the user in the center of the development process. As a field, technical communicators already instinctively advocate for users, so it follows that we would do the same when developing technologies in international contexts. To focus on problem solving, Bill Hart-Davidson suggests looking for low-fidelity activities (i.e., out-of-date or low-performing technologies) and designing high-fidelity solutions (i.e., updated or high-performing technologies) that improve a person’s ability to complete a given task or procedure.
Gina Kolata provides an internationally relevant example of this approach in her work on recent advancements in the treatment of heart attack patients. Today, when an emergency medical provider attaches EKG leads to the chest of a cardiac patient, the results of that EKG are transmitted automatically to the nearest hospital. At that hospital, a doctor can immediately access the EKG results and begin preparing an appropriate treatment. Previously, an EKG would not be seen until the emergency vehicle reached the hospital, dramatically slowing medical intervention. In this example, a low-fidelity technology was replaced with a high-fidelity one, creating a more patient-centered approach—one that greatly improves chances of survival for heart attack victims.
When looking to augment people’s activities in international contexts, technical communicators must consider cultural norms and perspectives. The following is a series of questions one might seek to answer in order to understand such norms:
- How will changing this technology improve people’s lives?
- How could this intervention hurt people?
- Does my solution respect cultural practices, beliefs, and attitudes toward a given activity?
- Are my solutions informed by users’ cultural context or my own cultural context?
The answers to these questions can help technical communicators design technologies and products that best meet the needs and expectations (and preferences) of different cultural groups. And an effective way to answer these questions is by doing user research.
A research-based approach can help technical communicators assemble a broader understanding of people’s experiences in international contexts. (The word “experience,” in fact, emphasizes assembling a holistic view of how people interact with a technology or activity rather than a more systems-focused view.) Technical communicators must therefore learn how the current experience of trying to complete a task might fail to align with people’s desired experience.
The central idea to remember is cultural attitudes toward technology vary. So, inventing a new mobile application, for instance, might not actually solve a problem. Rather, it might add a new layer of complexity that confounds a situation further. Moreover, as technologies and cultures evolve, people’s needs and goals change as well. Technologies meant for international audiences that do not consider people’s experiences—and how they change and evolve over time—can quickly become obsolete or unused.
Be Methodical: Use People-Centered Discovery Methods
There are several methods technical communicators can use to understand people’s experiences when completing an activity in international contexts. What follows are three examples I find applicable (although it should be noted many others exist):
- Experience Maps are an umbrella term for holistic methods of understanding experiences with a company. An example of an experience map is a customer journey map. In international contexts, a customer’s journey can vary in unpredictable ways. In some cultures, decisions about medical intervention might first be discussed with family or with a religious leader instead of visiting a medical doctor. Using experience maps affords technical communicators the ability to assemble a bigger picture of how people interact with a technology and understand emotional responses to pain points.
- Proto-personas and Personas represent a profile of customers, which help technical communicators learn about their audience’s needs, habits, and backgrounds. Understanding audience is especially important in international contexts, where a user’s needs, habits, and background can be different from your own. Proto-personas are not based on research; rather, they represent an educated guess made by an informed person or team. Personas, on the other hand, are usually developed through research involving a mix of data collected quantitatively (e.g., surveys) and qualitatively (e.g., ethnographic observations).
- User Research is conducted before a system has been developed, whereas usability testing focuses more on the development of an existing system. Usability testing of an already developed product is still important, but you should try to learn as much as possible about how individuals use a technology before designing a system—and then developing the technology to meet such patterns of use. User research can take many forms including surveys, interviews, observations, activity analysis, and behavior modeling. Cultures respond to user research differently, so you must carefully think through how these methods will be received by international audiences. Some cultures, for example, might respond to think-aloud protocol negatively or just not engage as expected.
A methodical approach based on user research can save time, money, and a great deal of frustration for technical communicators or their companies or clients. For this reason, technical communicators should try to learn as much as possible about their users and the users’ cultural context before designing for them.
Be Attentive: Pursue Continuous Development
Solutions to today’s problems are often temporary. Products, services, and experiences must continuously develop. One of the best ways to prepare for these changes is for technical communicators to engage with users—or the persons who will use their products. To do so, technical communicators must continuously work to understand how people use technologies, especially in international contexts.
To engage in continuous development, technical communicators should adopt iterative approaches to information design. Such approaches focus on continuing change based on feedback. They also create room for users to test products, provide feedback, and help guide future development of a product. Using iterative development, technical communicators work with users to test prototypes or existing products, analyze the results of the tests, and redesign the technology where appropriate. Iterative approaches can also make technologies more culturally appropriate and useful for users.
Because people’s experience is a work in progress, the data provided by user research must be continuously updated. Technical communicators can do this work by collecting, analyzing, and interpreting new data through processes such as interviewing, surveying, and contextual inquiry. In this way, continuous technology development is a process of discovery aimed at understanding how international contexts and audiences continue to shift.
Be Empathetic: Create Spaces for Dialogue
Technical communicators have to constantly learn new ways to engage with people in international contexts. Sometimes this means creating spaces for dialogue where the main goal is to listen and learn from others. Being a good listener can be surprisingly challenging because cultures communicate in different ways. Individuals from the United States, for example, might be more direct in stating a problem during user testing, while users from India might take a more indirect approach toward criticizing a problematic feature. In fact, research by Vatrapu and Pérez-Quiñones suggests the cultural identity of a usability moderator can influence how people respond during a test. An empathic mindset helps technical communicators to better understand these nuances without passing judgment on individuals or their culture, or worse, relying on stereotypes to guide one’s thinking about international audiences.
To practice empathy, technical communicators can begin by understanding their own cultural norms and attitudes, and how others might view them. For example, a professor from China once visited my technical communication class. I asked for his business card and as he handed it to me, I immediately put it in my wallet. He frowned but remained polite. When I handed him my business card, he took it with both hands and looked it over carefully. He held the card in his hands until our interaction ended. Later, the professor’s chaperone explained he was trying to show respect by carefully reading over my business card. By putting his business card in my wallet so quickly, I inadvertently showed him disrespect.
An empathic mindset requires a person to look inward. Technical communicators can practice empathy by being reflective about attitudes toward different cultures and ways of working, especially as their own reactions to unfamiliar cultures influence their approach to technology design. Sometimes the spaces needed to support dialogue must exist internally at a company, or even in an individual’s mind.
Be Excited: Seek Opportunities and Learn
This entry reviewed general approaches for gaining an initial understanding about developing materials for international audiences and contexts. One of the thrilling things about being a technical communicator today is that individuals must constantly learn and relearn ways of communicating. Technology changes, products and platforms evolve, audiences shift, or problems that seem impossible to solve one day seem less overwhelming the next. Technical communicators can look at these challenges as either opportunities to learn, or impediments that frustrate.
Designing technologies for international audiences and contexts is no different. It comes with a set of challenges that can teach an individual a great deal about the field and about people. There is certainly much more one can learn about creating technology for international contexts and users. In the end, it’s a matter of the state of being one wishes to adopt. By being curious, people centered, methodical, attentive, empathetic, and excited, technical communicators will find new and incredibly rewarding technology opportunities await.
References
Hart-Davidson, B. 2002. Turning Reflections into Technology: Leveraging Theory and Research in the Design of Communication Software. IEEE Professional Communication Conference Proceedings, 455–467.
Kolata, G. 2015. A Sea Change in Treating Heart Attacks. The New York Times. Retrieved from www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/health/saving-heart-attack-victims-stat.html?_r=1.
Vatrapu, R., & M. A. Pérez-Quiñones. 2006. Culture and Usability Evaluation: The Effects of Culture in Structured Interviews. Journal of Usability Studies 1.4: 156–170.
BENJAMIN LAUREN (blauren@msu.edu) is an Assistant Professor of Experience Architecture (XA) in the Department of Writing, Rhetoric, and American Cultures at Michigan State University, where he teaches professional writing, XA, and rhetoric and writing. He is also a Writing, Information, and Digital Experience (WIDE) researcher. His research focuses on how people manage creative and collaborative activities in a variety of professional contexts. Ben’s work has recently appeared in Technical Communication, International Journal of Sociotechnology and Knowledge Development, and User Experience Magazine.
