Whitney Quesenbery

Design for a Global Audience

Publisher Summary User experience (UX) work is shaped by corporate structures and how a company sees its strategy in an increasingly global world. Headquarters (HQ) and regions, global strategy and local implementation, central control or distributed teams—each creates different relationships that affect how UX is done. This chapter discusses operating models such as outsourcing, offshoring, and local partners, and how UX teams manage global collaboration. It also describes some companies that have chosen to be local and what that means for their perspectives. Global products almost always require local variations, even if this is just translating the text, converting currency, and having appropriate formats for time and other measurements. This requires the underlying technical structures for internationalization. Without them, one can only adapt to each new market with custom coding and each variation is an entirely different program.

Building Your Cultural Awareness

“Thinking globally” all starts with the individual. You. How you learn to think about a larger world, are open to new experiences, and use opportunities to immerse yourself in new cultures. This chapter looks at different ways practitioners have taken on a global perspective (or chosen to focus locally), how they face the challenge of meeting new cultures, and how they hold on to their own identity.

It’s a New World

UX is shaped by the same social, economic, business, and cultural forces that affect us as individuals. The old world is vanishing as the world economy changes. This chapter looks at how these changes are affecting UX. These changes include the rise of the network. The Internet has forever changed the way we communicate, collaborate, and do business. Individuals are more mobile, more connected, and more aware of people outside their immediate environment. There are more global companies and global products. But perhaps one of the more subtle trends is the way innovation can come from anywhere. New ideas, and the power to spread them, is not confined to one part of the world. New forms of innovation have emerged, and the network makes open, distributed collaboration possible.

Research in the Field

This chapter looks at global UX research and the thought process behind it: how to plan it, think about the goals and what you can learn, how to put a team together. Like any project, conducting global research starts with goals and planning. This includes deciding when field work is the right answer, and which UX techniques are most useful. But there are additional practical considerations for this work: managing the pace of the project, including non-UX people on the research team, and how to get the most out of your time in any location. Diving into the research itself, planning must cover ways to manage language barriers, working with interpreters, local partners, and the participants themselves.

1 – The Start of the Journey

This chapter introduces the practice of user experience in a global world. Our goal is to share what people think about how they work in user experience practices in global, cross-cultural, distributed team environments. We know that your mileage may vary. You may be in a cutting-edge environment, or trying to convince your company to take UX seriously. But this book tries to address challenges of time zones, languages, communication styles, access to users, and work distributed across teams with different cultures or economic conditions through the perspectives of current practitioners around the world, in many different kinds of companies.

Global Companies and Global Strategy

Publisher Summary User experience (UX) work is shaped by many factors today. Corporate structures and how the company sees its strategy fit an increasingly global world and are key among them. Headquarters (HQ) and regions, global strategy and local implementation, central control or distributed teams, each creates different relationships that affect how UX is done. This chapter discusses operating models such as outsourcing, offshoring, and local partners, and how UX teams manage global collaboration. It also discusses some companies that have chosen to be local and what that means for their perspectives. The work of creating fully global products is a process that starts with the product concept. It starts with basic business questions like where one plans to sell the product and understanding the differences between that market and all the others. The relationship between headquarters and regional offices is fraught with the conflicts of perspectives of those in each part of the organization. This is especially true in companies that still maintain a strong control from a central office. Individual perspectives on this issue depend on where the person is located in the organization, and also on how well the company is doing in moving to the multipoint collaboration of the flat world.

10 – Delivering Value

Publisher Summary This chapter describes how one can add value to projects, products, companies, teams, and the world. The challenge for user experience is that this work rests on knowing, and working both with and for the people who will use what one creates. But when products, especially online products, can be used by anyone, anywhere, it is hard to stretch oneself to stay true to that core principle. One must think beyond design, beyond user experience. Instead of trying to speak in the jargon of business, one should put the skills to use and build credibility through success on pragmatic projects the business cares about. It is imperative to learn the heart of the work to create more of it. The chapter highlights three core truths—that one builds bridges, that one needs to see collaboration as leadership, and that everything one does should create value. Finally, it is important to give all team members visibility, so that they can share their insights and successes in an equal way (despite the challenges of communication over distance).

Bringing it Home

Once the research is done, whats the best way to share what you learned with the full team and make it part of the background for everyone in the company? This chapter examines some of the unique requirements for sharing cultural knowledge. This research goes beyond user success percentages and task analysis: global research reports have to communicate the nuance of cultural similarities and differences. That has led many in the field to try new ways to recreate the immersive environment they experienced in the field, with photos, personas, sketches, and stories that put a face on the research data. For some, it has also changed the daily routine. Instead of waiting until all research is done, daily debriefs get details out before they are lost to information overload. And the entire team of researchers and observers are invited to participate in coming up with the insights and implications of the work.

Effective Global Teams

Global companies and global products mean global teams. This chapter looks at the organization of these teams and what makes them tick along well. Two challenges are of particular interest to global teams. The most obvious is the need to deal with time zones. As people and companies have matured, teams are more likely to share the pain of time zones rather than assume that one part of the team should be on the phone at 1:30 in the morning, so meetings can be scheduled during one groups work day. More difficultly, global teams must deal with all the issues of collaboration over distance—maintaining good contact, working through imperfect communications tools, and making sure that all voices are heard. And, they must do all of this through cross-cultural collaboration. Finally, global teams are challenges to not only keep their UX skills up to date, but to find ways to share knowledge of users around the world.