Chapter 4: Indian Needs-Cultural End-User Research in Mombai

Katja Konkka

Visiting a typical Indian family in a suburb of Mombai (formerly known as Bombay), or spending the morning with an Indian journalist at his or her office? Perhaps following a businessperson to a client meeting in New Delhi? This is a part of your work if you throw yourself into cultural end-user research. Well, of course you also read books about different countries, cultures, and religions. But in order to feel, hear, smell and see the actual context for which you're designing, and to understand the daily life of your customers, you must experience the environment and meet the people.

Culturally Varying Needs

We talk about functional and emotional end-user needs. By functional end-user needs we mean that new designs have to serve the practical objectives of the users. They have to support existing practices, workflows, and organizational roles. Emotional user needs determine the user's pleasure when using technology.^[1] Technology can be pleasurable if it gives the user a sense of control, or if its use attests to a high degree of skill. Pleasure can also be evoked by aesthetic appearance or positive associations that attach to a technical object.

The word need, as it is used in this chapter, probably reflects everyday language at Nokia more than any formal definitions. Our concept of needs can include environmental settings, cultural values, economic possibilities, legislative regulations, religious beliefs, or language-related interpretations-whatever issues are observed to have a potential influence on mobile communication and the design of communication products. These needs are related to user interface solutions either directly or by providing a context for interpretation.

Functional needs vary culturally, and emotional needs even more so. What is pleasing for the eye or ear, what is socially acceptable, or what evokes positive associations are indeed cultural matters. Colors, for instance, have culture-dependent meanings. Some South African tribes see red as a friendly color and green as a hostile one. These people may have problems interpreting traffic lights when visiting urban areas. Some Indians see orange as associated with Hinduism and green with Islam. The interpretation of icons and graphics can be very culture-dependent; for example, a Hindu sign meaning 'all the good' is often perceived by Westerners as a Nazi swastika.

The vast potential of mobile market opportunities can be wasted if we are not prepared for each different culture entering the mobile information society. Preparation essentially consists of working toward an understanding of the everyday needs of those populations. If we don't understand our markets well enough from the perspective of end-user needs, the new features we create will not be accepted and-even worse-we won't necessarily know why.

Responding to culturally varying end-user needs doesn't always have to mean completely different products for each market area. Quite small user interface (UI) issues can sometimes make the difference. For example, the user's ability to add Hindi greetings or religious symbols to a message adds a great deal of emotional value to short message service (SMS) in India among its Hindu people. Hindi music in ringing tones and other alerts would do the same. The scalability and variability of the whole product to suit different cultures is a basic requirement for cultural adjustment.^[2]

We put a great deal of effort into knowing our customers. Understanding is acquired by conducting different types of research projects in various cultural areas-projects ranging from traditional market and usability research to contextual ethnographic studies. During the year 2000 we conducted an end-user needs study in India.

^[1]R. Westrum, Technologies & Society: The Shaping of People and Things, Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1991.

^[2]K. Konkka and A. Koppinen, Nokia Mobile Phones, Finland, 'Mobile Devices-Exploring Cultural Differences in Separating Professional and Personal Time,' in IWIPS Proceedings, Baltimore, Md., 2000.