Colors, Buttons, Words and
Culture
Designing Software for
the Global
Community
Susan M. Johns
1997 CODI Conference
Pittsburg State University
Axe Library
Pittsburg KS USA
[email protected]
February 6
April 12
April 23
May 5
May 17
July 10
Definition of Culture
 Culture
is the beliefs, value system,
norms, mores, myths,and structural
elements of a given organization, tribe,
or society
 More than mere language translation
– Nakakoji
Cross-Cultural
Communication
 Develop
user interfaces for products
with a global market
 When outsourcing to other countries,
we work and communicate with people
we have never met in person
 Work culture values and views differ
from our own
Technology As Cultural
Amplifier
 “Although
technologies transform
culture and thought to amplify human
productivity...a system’s functionality... is
often unconsciously affected by the
underlying traditions of the system
designer’s culture.”
– Nakakoji
“Sundials perform as clocks in
sunny climates -- they are more
useful in Phoenix than in Boston
and of no use at all during the
Arctic winter.”
Herbert Simon, The Sciences of the
Artificial, MIT Press, 1981
The Tale of Three Interfaces
 54 Americans
 35
English-speaking citizens of other
nations
 43 Males
 46 Females
The Tale of Three Interfaces
Designed For
 (Design
1) English-speaking European
adult male intellectuals
 (Design 2) Caucasian-American women
 (Design 3) generic English-speaking
consumers of an “international-style”
The Tale of Three Interfaces
Moral of the Story
 There
are no generic cultural guidelines
 Issues cannot be solved by using overly
generalized characterizations of user
populations, and ...
The Tale of Three Interfaces
Moral of the Story
 Do
users know what they want?
 Do users recognize what they have
designed (or requested)?
 Is the user the best indicator the vendor
has for developing the best design?
“Don’t boil the ocean.”
Malcolm Frank,
Be Quick or Be Dead,
Software Magazine, March 1997
Cross Cultural Development
 Culture
exists across professions
 End-users and developers share
cultural understanding
 Should users be able to state their
requirements clearly and precisely a
priori when they simply do not have the
knowledge to do so?
Cross Cultural Development
 Software
engineering and application
domain knowledge work together
 Develop knowledge among
stakeholders
 Exploit opportunities to establish
successful cross cultural collaboration
The International Need
 Customers
want systems that use their
own language and meet their own
cultural conventions
 Some countries require products to
reflect their culture and language
 Internationally competitive companies
must consider cultural preferences of
their customers
PeopleSoft Goes Global
 Identify
common processes around the
world
 Deliver languages and localizations
 Add global complexity with manageable
implementation
PeopleSoft Goes Global
 Architecture
for core functionality
 Understand local functions and cultures
 Use Customer SIGs
PeopleSoft Goes Global
 Shorter
implementation
 Customization times diminish
 Ongoing maintenance is reduced
PeopleSoft Goes Global
 Global
customers have more in
common than differences
 Vendor must understand what is
different and what is similar
 Everybody (vendors) is “Embarking”
What is Internationalization
 The
process of providing a computer
system that handles a variety of
language, country, and cultural
conventions
Internationalization (I18N)
 Eliminate
cultural specifics
 Design culture-independent user
information and interfaces
User Information
User Manuals
Error Messages
Menu Labels
Sound Messages
Graphical
Representations
Icons
What is Localization
 A locale
is an operating system
database of language and country
conventions
 Developing software to support multiple
locales is Localization
Localization (L10N)
 Localization
of product for each user
culture
 Language, date and number formats
 Graphical representations/icons
 Color
 Physical flow of objects
System I18N
 Uses
multilingual products instead of
monolingual or bilingual products
 Allows switching between different
locales and languages
 Provides software that meets
international standards
System I18N Challenges
 Treat
English as just another language
 Use one program source for all
languages to reduce costs for
maintenance and documentation
System I18N Challenges
 Plan
for extra disk space needed. To
save space, ship only the languages
purchased by a customer
 What is the delay from when the
package is available in the vendor’s
local country to when it is available in
other languages?
System I18N Challenges
 Monitor
acronyms and mnemonics for
negative meanings in different
languages
 Understand differences among U.S.,
British, and global English
 Be aware of different dialects in the
same language
System I18N Challenges
 Use
care when sorting lists
 Use numeric indexes instead of sorted
alphabetic indexes whenever possible
 Keep illustrations, tables, and figures
simple
 Verify translations back into English
Standards and the World of
Uni- and Zed Unicode
 UNIMARC
Z
39.50
 Z 39.69
 Z 39.70
 Zzzzz...
History of Unicode
 ASCII,
a “U.S.” Standard (ISO 646)
 DBCS - double byte character system
(some chars 1 byte, some 2 bytes)
 Unicode - all chars 2 bytes (16 bits)
History of Unicode
 Unicode
is a subset of ISO 10646, as
are ASCII and Latin-1 (8-bit ASCII)
 Unicode eliminates duplicate Han
characters in Chinese, Japanese and
Korean (CJK)
 ISO 10646 stores chars in 4 bytes;
Unicode stores chars in 2 bytes
Definition of Unicode
 The
Unicode standard is a fixed-width,
16-bit character encoding system that
contains codes for every character
needed by the major writing systems
currently in use in the modern world,
along with codes for a full range of
punctuation, symbols, and control
characters (Davis et al.)
Definition of Unicode
 Punctuation
marks
 Diacritical marks
 Uppercase, lowercase, and uncased
letters
 Characters used to represent digits
 Control characters
Unicode Problems
 Universal
standards for dates,
measurements, and money
 Simplified encoding of Chinese
characters does not depict “classical”
Chinese
 Storage (twice as much?)
 Transmissions (twice as long?)
UNIMARC Definition
 implementation
of ISO 2709 for the
structure of records containing
bibliographic data
 intended to be a carrier format for
exchange purposes
 does not stipulate form, content, or
record structure of data *within*
individual systems
UNIMARC Problems
 Software
developers must rewrite their
existing software
 the existing MARC formats use a
unique definition of extended ASCII
 How do you convert 40 million MARC
records without anyone noticing?
UNIMARC Benefits
 Allows
addition of foreign titles without
transliterating the data
 Users able to search library catalogs in
all languages rather than just by call
number or ISBN
 Assumes software/virtual keyboards
and other input devices needed to
generate the CJK characters
Sorting and Conditional
Formatting
 English:
A-Z, a-z
 German: Characters with an umlaut
sort directly after characters without an
umlaut
 Swedish: Ö sorts last in the alphabet
after Z
 Spanish: double characters (ll and ch)
that sort as single characters
Other Issues
 Upper
and lower case, subtract 32 no
more!
 Wild card symbols in search/find boxes
 Hyphenation of long words and word
breaks
 Gender in language
 Tense and case
Message Catalogs
 Files
used to store program input and
output strings
 All program strings used interactively by
the user should be contained in one or
more message catalogs
 Messages stored in database locales
 Makes messages more customizable
Menu Space
 30-200%
extra space depending on the
number of English characters
 Ex: “Preferences” translates
“Bilschirmeinstellungen”
 Boxes should be self-sizing and
movable
Conventions and Format
Differences
 Dates:
–
May 12, 1959 is
12/5/59
5/12/59
1959-05-12
 Calendars:
Gregorian, Hebrew,
Islamic, Japanese Imperial Era
 Times: 8:32 p.m. is
– 20:32
20,32,00
20.32
KI 20.32
Conventions and Format
Differences
 Numbers:
– 3,912.45
3.912,45
3 912,45
 Currency:
– $2,456.78 2,456,78 DM 2.456$78
– Don’t forget yen and pound symbols
 Paper
sizes: A3, A4, A5, JIS-B4 JIS-B5
 Punctuation : << >> ; ¡ ¿
Formats for Patrons
Z39.69 and Z39.70
 NISO
standards for patron personal
data and patron transaction data
 I14N and L10N aspects of patron data
need to be considered
 Not limited to address, postal code,
phone, ID#, and confidentiality issues
around the world
Color, Music and Sound
 Color
combinations
 Color balance (theme and secondary)
 Color association (appropriateness
based on abstract concepts)
 Music and sound more easily linked to a
photograph than an icon
 Music associations highly dependent on
culture
Icons
 Trashcan
icon can look like a postal box
in Britain
 If you use books, make sure they open
in the proper direction for the target
market
 Email icon of a rural post box with a red
flag has no meaning outside rural
America
Icons
 Colors
within icons may be culturally
insensitive
 Try not to use text: think in terms of
international driving symbols
 Think: what is the symbol for ISBN other
than ISBN?