A lot has been written about exporting of or copying of successful models of online businesses from the west to the east (or from the US to Europe), but the opposite also happens. Om Malik: “The six year old company has made a successful business out of bringing hit South Korean
games to the West”.

An excellent overview of languages and countries by John Greenwood.

Inspiring: “His first loan consisted of $27 in total, which Dr. Yunus used to
help 42 basket weavers regain their dignity and independence from creditors (who charged exorbitant interest rates and yielded mere
pennies in profits). What followed was a lifelong pledge and journey of
an educator turned banker, who arms the poorest of the poor with the
tools and means to become financially independent. He firmly believes
that poverty is not created by the poor, but rather is a system we have
created. To prove this point, he has given loans to nearly 100,000
beggars and has seen 10,000 of them completely stop begging and 90,000
of them transformed into entrepreneurs in their own right. The Grameen
Bank has the highest recovery rate of any banking system in the world with 98 percent of the loans being paid back.

How does technology play a part? Grameen’s “phone ladies”
are widespread across rural communities in Bangladesh, offering the use
of mobile phones for a fee. By loaning out cell phones on a per call
basis and putting them in the hands of the rural poor (many of whom
have never seen a telephone before), these women become the central
access point to information technology and the rest of the world.”

A great podcast interview with Apala Lahiri Chavan about UX in India. Some salient points:

• Mobile phones are a business tool, which explains (partly) their popularity.
• Mobile phones empower women by letting them build social networks that they couldn’t build so easily before.
• On the differences between India and China: India continues to be very hierarchical and male-focused, whereas China has changed a lot in these two cultural aspects recently. “Very major differences in these two dimensions.”
• Indian Rasa’s are an Indian categorization of emotions, and when they try to solicit emotions from Indian users in tests, it’s easier for the users to express their emotions in terms of these Rasas.
• Major pitfall for designing for India: the idea that “Indians speak English, so we can just transport our product easily”. It’s true that a lot of Indians speak English, but most Indians still think in their mothertongue (usually non-English). And the culture is very strong and specific - you often have to adjust your product or service. For example, insurance in the US is all about individual risk management, in India, a group culture, insurance is all about your family and such - they’ll take care of you.

Apala is also the inventor of the “Bollywood technique“, which basically frames usability test scenario as a Bollywood movie in order to make it easier for participants to provide real feedback:

“What is the main challenge when you are usability testing in Asia?

In Asia it is impolite to tell someone they have a bad design. It is embarrassing to admit that you cannot find something. So it is very hard to get feedback.

Apala tested a site that offered railroad tickets for sale. She used the conventional simulation method and got little feedback. She could see that users were not succeeding. But they would not willingly discus the problems.

Apala then tried the Bollywood method. Now Bollywood is the Hollywood of India. They make more movies than Hollywood. They are famous for movies that have long and emotionally involved plots. The movies have great pathos and excitement. In the Bollywood method Apala described a dire fantasy situation. The participant’s beautiful, young, and innocent niece is about to be married. But suddenly he gets news that the prospective groom is a member of the underground. He is a hit man! His whole life story is a sham, AND HE IS ALREADY MARRIED! The participant has the evidence and must book an airline ticket for himself and the groom’s current wife to Bangalore. Time is of the essence!!!

The participants willingly entered this fantasy and with great excitement began the ticket booking process. Even minor difficulties they encountered resulted in immediate and incisive commentary. The participants complained about the button naming and placement. They pointed out the number of extra steps in booking. The fantasy situation gave them license to communicate in a way that they never would under normal evaluation methods.”

I’m looking for global usability and ux consultants: people and companies who specialize in providing usability, design, ia and such services for global websites. Contact me if you know any or leave links in the comments. Thanks!

When I talk about global information architecture, I always talk a lot about how categories are cultural (even when they’re not).

A lot of my thoughts around cultural categories come from this one book: Sorting things out - classification and its consequences, by Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey Bowker. (at Amazon.com)

In it, the authors look at some famous classification systems, and how the act of classifying affects people, is political and cultural and so on. It’s the kind of book you have to read a few times to really get all the rich ideas in it - at least I had to. (Partly, actually, because its, let’s be nice, academic writing style, that can be hard to work your way through, and if you think this sentence was dense, well, try some of the sentences in this book.)

The main points that it makes are (or at least some of them):

• Researching classifications can be boring like hell (unless you are a category geek perhaps).
• Classifications embed values.
• Classifications are infrastructure: they tend to disappear into the background, yet they profoundly shape (through their embedded values) our lives. 
• Classifications affect lives: jobs are lost, regions benefit at the expense of others, money is moved around and judgements are made.

A blog post can’t do justice do the ideas in this book, at least this blog post can’t. In fact, it’s so good I think I’m gonna read it again right now.

An excellent and free report on the global search market. (via) As John says: “while Google is by far the leading search engine globally, it still does not lead in a number of key markets, namely China, Russia, Estonia, Czech Republic, and South Korea.”

Working out the structure of your locales can be surprisingly difficult. The world is fairly well organized around the concept of countries (after all, we wage wars to define them), but locales often aren’t countries, but languages, regions, markets or combinations of the above, and those are much fuzzier.

I’ve been looking into the structure of locales, and one concept kind of presented itself, that of "hyperlocal locales". I’m not sure if that’s a good name for it, but it’s the best I could think of so far.

Hyperlocal locales are very specialized locales. You see them all over the place when you look at what companies really do when they start localizing, and they’re often surprising.

An example is "Catalonia - Catalan", or "Barcelona - Catalan". Catalan is a language spoken in Catalonia, a part of Spain. Barcelona is the capital of Catalonia. It’s the second official language in Spain apart from Spanish. When you’re in Barcelona, you’ll notice that signs, advertising and such are often in both Spanish and Catalan, or only in Catalan. Speaking Catalan is a matter of local pride and identity, therefore, if you want to target this market you’ll need to create a hyperlocal locale "Catalan".

Another example is "French Canadian", or "Quebec - French", as Yahoo calls it for example. French is spoken in Quebec as a matter of great national pride, and if you run, say, an intranet in Canada with offices in Quebec you’re even legally obliged to provide information in French as well as in English.

You’ll notice in the screenshot of Yahoo’s locales that they have "U.S. in Chinese" and "Y! Telemundo" (= "Hispanic US") as well, more hyperlocal locales.

The world’s large cities also present opportunities for hyperlocal locales. Craigslist is famous for this approach: they started out in San Fransisco (hyperlocal from the start), and have branched out by country (Colombia, for example) but also by city. A city like Bangalore (a tech hub in India) is a big market for Craigslist and has its own Craigslist Bangalore. Instead of expanding to India (aka "the Indian subcontinent" - India is huge), Craigslist goes hyperlocal and expands to specific Indian cities, one by one. It’s a smart strategy for a marketplace.

Especially for sites that that rely on reaching critical mass (marketplaces, social networks with part of their service in the physical world), hyperlocalizing can be effective: it lets you limit your coverage (Bangalore, not India) so you can reach critical mass faster.

So what do you think of this concept of hyperlocal locales? Is it useful? Boring? Can you think of a better name for it? I’d love to hear comments and thoughts.

Download this report in PDF format

This free report provides a brief introduction to Latin America for information architects and user experience designers.

Introduction.

“Latin America” is generally considered to consist of the countries south of the US. The Caribbean islands are sometimes included. However, as Wikipedia says: “There are several definitions of Latin America, none of them perfect or necessarily logically consistent.”

Selecting a locale.

The “Latin America” locale is popular with companies who want to provide some level of service to users in these countries, but don’t want to customize their service for individual countries. The locale is almost always in Spanish, and it is, in that case, better referred to as “Spanish speaking Latin America”. Brazil (a big market) is often an additional locale, with Portuguese as its language.

“South America” and “Central America” are not commonly used as locales - neither is “The Americas”.

US companies regularly provide separate “US Spanish” (or “Hispanic US”) and “Spanish speaking Latin America” locales (both in Spanish) because the content, products and services offered within the US can be quite different from those offered to Latin American countries. The Spanish speaking market within the US is very large, often warranting its own locale.

Internet usage.

Internet penetration is still low in Latin America. However, people find creative ways to get access: shared computers and internet cafes are popular. Broadband access penetration is also low, although growing fast. Broadband speeds are often relatively low.

“Tier 1 countries” - countries with higher internet adoption - are considered to be Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Chile and perhaps Colombia. According to Comscore (source): “[in 2007] Brazil had the largest online population with 15.8 million users–or 11% of the country’s total population. On average, Brazilians viewed 40% more pages in June than other Latin Americans.”

Even though overall penetration is low, there is a large and hungry market for many consumer applications in Latin America. Brazil specifically is considered to be an early-adopter of internet services.

User experience.

Language. Support Spanish for most of Latin America, Portuguese for Brazil. There are small differences in the Spanish used in the different countries of Latin America, in a similar way that American English and British English are different. Other languages spoken in Latin America include French, Haitian Creole (based on French), Quechua (a native American language), and many more.

Connection speed. Support slower connection speeds. The positive side of slower connection speeds is that user expectations of response speed aren’t as high as in the US. However, users do expect “polished” websites, not bare-bones low-speed alternatives.

Slower connection speeds affect usage patterns. For example, users on slow lines paid by the hour often log out to read their email offline, write their responses and then log back in to send the email.

Culture. We can’t describe Latin American culture in a paragraph, but in short: family and group identity are considered more important than in Europe or the US. Telenovelas (soap operas) are very popular, and football (European style) is the most popular sport.

Even though cultural identity is mostly defined by country, there are also many strong local cultural identities: regions or indigenous groups can have a strong sense of identity, separate of the country that they live in. There is also a vague sense of cultural identity that is “Latin American”: an identity shared between the countries of South America.

Emigrants. Many Latin American countries (Mexico, Colombia) have seen a large percentage of their population emigrate to the US and other countries, and remittances (money sent back home) from these immigrants are reported to add up to 54 billion US$ a year. Services that support communication between emigrants and locals (VoIP, send flowers, …) are in demand.

Resources.

A good podcast interview with Luis Larnal about doing user research in Latin America.

Interesting paper (PDF download) on mobile user experience in Latin America.

Alexa provides useful lists of the most popular websites by country.

Local experts.

The following people and companies are recommended if you need user experience help in Latin America.

In/Situm is (http://www.insitum.com/ - see Luis Larnal from the podcast mentioned above) is a research consultancy specialized in Hispanic and Portuguese speaking markets.

Jorge Arango (http://www.jarango.com/en/) is a recommended information architect based in Central America and is the director of Bootstudio (http://www.bootstudio.com/en/).

The IA Institute lets you find information architects by location.

Finally, if you need information architecture or user experience help for Latin America, don’t hesitate to contact 290s.com.

Our first post ever. Let me explain the name first.

290 is a category in the Dewey Decimal system. It stands for “Other religions”. It’s a famous example of a culturally biased category.

Melvil Dewey grew up in New York state in the late 1800s, and after considering becoming a priest (his parents were fairly strict Christians),  he decided to become a librarian and invented the Dewey Decimal System, a classification system that would be able to classify all the books in the world. It is still used today in public libraries around the world.

Dewey Decimal (DCC) has serious problems though. If you look at the 200s (”Religion”), you’ll see that all the categories are about Christian religion, with all the worlds’ other religions delegated to a subsection of the 290s. Biased? For sure! But it’s still being used today, and the reasons for that are some of the same reasons that make global information architecture so hard.

So that’s why - 290s.com. And of course, the domain was still available