On November 20, 2009 I made a presentation at ChangeON, a conference focusing on non-profits internet media, hosted by the Daum Foundation, the charitable arm of the Korean internet portal, Daum Communications. They just posted the video online.

My presentation (in Korean) was entitled “UX for Good”, focussing on how internet technologies and social media benefit non-profits, with 4 stories to illustrate how some non-profit organizations in the US are using the internet to their advantage.

The examples include:

• CARMA.org, a site dedicated to monitoring carbon emissions from power plants and providing citizens with tools to take action.
• Ask Your Lawmaker where users can post questions they want to ask lawmakers, visits vote on the question and reporters get the answers and post it back to the site.
• DonorsChoose.org connecting classrooms in need of small funding for activities with donors across the US.
• Ashoka’s Changemakers, global, open-sourced competition site which taps the community of social entrepreneurs to generate ideas for social change.

These are all work I was either directly involved in or made aware of when I was at Forum One Communications in Washington D.C.

Also check out all the other great presentations at the ChangeON conference (in Korean). Especially inspiring where the presentations by Jung Jin Ho of Yahoo! Korea, Park Woong Hyun of TBWA Korea, and Pyo Chul Min of WizardWorks.

Mr Splashy Pants / Greenpeace.org

Mister Splashy Pants, a whale named after Greenpeace held a naming competition in 2007 isn’t really news, but Alexis Ohanian, who is a founder of Reddit tells a great story at TED (in 3 minutes no less!) of how social media created a meme, took Greenpeace by surprise, won the competition, Greenpeace ceded control and in the end saved whales, literally.

The example shows one way for establish organizations to work with social media: Loosen up and go with the flow. Make the most of the situation and the attention. You need to give something up to gain people’s trust and participation. This is something that corporations and non-profits alike are mortally afraid to do.

Organizations are afraid of losing control over their message. But what is brand identity anyway? Isn’t it something that forms in the minds of the customers and participants? And it’s hard to control what people think of you. Individuals are constantly making adjustments to accommodate, influence or reject the way they are perceived by others. But it’s an ongoing relationship, not one-way. The more social we get in the use of internet technologies, the more relationship-oriented things will be.

So it’s not ok to find new ways to do old things, like one-way communication. Embrace participation. Lose some control. It’s ok. If a serious organization like Greenpeace can have some fun, other can too.

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See also: Wikipedia entry

Co-posted on uxforgood.org

In the past, we did little things for love and big things for money. Now we can do big things for love.

His 9 minute presentation is well worth another viewing.

User Experience: my definition

If you do an Amazon search for User Experience (UX) you get mostly web design related books. The web has grown so dramatically in the past decade that it is sometimes hard to imagine a time without it. When something becomes such an indispensable part of life as the web has become, it is bound to generate its fair share of frustration. Studying the users’ experience to alleviate the frustration and make a website or a web service function in a more “natural” way, or a more predictable way for the user is one of the main function of this bourgeoning area.

There are many definitions of what User Experience is, but for my purposes I usually define it as:

The art and science of designing satisfying and pleasurable experiences or interactions with an environment, device or a service for the user.

Recently, living in Korea I have stated to think whether user experience differs significantly between cultures – more specifically between Korean and North American culture as these are ones that I have first hand knowledge about.

I was asked the question, what makes Naver success in Korea and not Google? The underlying question is, why do Korean tolerate, or better, enjoy cluttered, chaotic interfaces over simple ones?

The answer is culture. But what of culture?

The Geography of Thought

In the Geography of Thought, psychologies Richard E. Nisbett suggests that there are fundamental difference between Western thinking and Eastern thinking:

In terms of world view:

[page 100] Thus to the Asian, the world is a complex place, composed of continuous substances understandable in terms of the whole rather than in terms of the parts, and subject more to collective then to personal control. To the Westerner, the world is a relatively simple place, composed of discrete objects that can be understood without undue attention to context, and highly subject to personal control. Very different worlds indeed.

In terms of recognition of object and context:

[page 191-192] Differences between Easterners and Westerners have been found in virtually every study we have undertaken and they are usually large. Most of the time, in fact, Easterners and Westerners were found to behave in ways that are qualitatively distinct. Americans on average found it harder to detect changes in the background of scenes and Japanese found it harder to detect changes in objects in the foreground. Americans in general failed to recognize the role of situational constraints on a speaker’s behavior whereas Koreans were able to. The majority of Koreans judged an object to be more similar to a group with which it shared a close family resemblance, whereas an even greater majority of Americans judged the object to be more similar to a group to which it could be assigned by a deterministic rule. When confronted with two apparently contradictory propositions, Americans tended to polarize their beliefs whereas Chinese moved towards equal acceptance of the two propositions. When shown a thing, Japanese are twice as likely to regard it as a substance than as an object and Americans are twice as likely to regard it as an object than a substance. And so on.

In terms of social relationships:

[page 51] Easterners fell embedded in heir in-groups and distant from their out-groups… Westerners fell relatively detached from their in-groups and tend not o make as great distinctions between in-groups and out-groups.

You are what you farm

According to Malcolm Gladwell in his most recent book Outliers, the culture of rice farming in Eastern Asia has a profound influence in the way we make decisions, as opposed to corn or wheat farming in the West.

Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field. Some estimates put the annual workload of a wet-rice farmer in Asia at three thousand hours a year.

Rice farming requires close cooperation with one’s family, neighbors and seasonal farmhands. It needs high level of coordination. It also requires a high level of sensitivity to the rice paddies and external conditions such as weather and pests.

What this process reinforced over thousands of year produces is Korean are naturally accustomed to multitasking and well prepared for informational saturation.

The Traditional Korean House

The traditional Korean house has separate rooms, but these rooms have doors made of paper on a wooden frame. The house also opens up to a public courtyard. Each house usually as a home for 3 generations.

In a Korean traditional house family life is highly relational, deeply involved and lacks privacy. Everyone has a closer relationship to everyone else business within that house.

In terms of the room, each room was multifunctional, used for sleeping, eating, studying and recreation. The room for the head of the family was the largest and called the ?? or the “inner room” and is where the whole family would gather to eat each meal. There are no separate functions such as the dining room or bedroom.

Social reinforcement

Back to Naver. I have neither the time nor the expertise to validate my claim but here’s what I think.

So given these facts we can summarize that Korean are:

• More likely to be seeking contextual validity than objective truths
• More social, trusting exclusive in-groups relationships
• More used to complexity, multi-tasking, multi-functioning and information density

Users are not so much “searching” for knowledge as “validating” knowledge. Googling is an individual activity. Naver’ing is a social activity. Social activity is messy. This could explain the chaos and complexity of their homepage, and users’ preference for it.

Blogging in Korea somewhat validates this claim. Blogging in Korea is not about the expression of personal opinion as much as the reinforcement of public opinion. If you do a Naver search on certain terms it is not uncommon to find the same article in multiple blogs, sometime with attribution to the original author, sometime not. This is called ??? or drafting, as in drafting water from a well. The well, being pubic, and you are just taking good information and making it more public.

Korean are supremely concerned about what others think. An example is helping my first grade daughter do her homework. If it is an assignment from class, you can turn to, you guessed it, Naver and you can find the “socially validated” answer through Naver ??? (Ji-sik-in) or Knowledge-In, which is much like Yahoo! Answers and only about a thousand time more used. It is so used that you can ask the question, “Can someone order me some Chinese food? I am in the hospital and can’t leave my mother’s bedside” and someone would have answered the question within minutes and the food is on its way already (a true story).

Naver Ji-sik-in vs. Wikipedia

Some compare Naver Ji-sik-in with Wikipedia and discuss whether one is more useful than the other. This is missing the point. Both serve totally different functions. Wikipedia is the repository for nuggets of public debated and carefully negotiated knowledge, where as Naver Ji-sik-in is the repository of mostly trivial, however, socially validated knowledge. In this case, a piece of knowledge is more true if it has more people saying the same thing, or if it has more ?? or comments saying so.

Like Google, Wikipedia doesn’t do too well in Korea. In Naver’s Knowledge-In, when you ask a question, you get an answer. In Wikipedia, you add a piece of knowledge and others come and change it, edit it, and sometime delete it all together. Koreans don’t like this kind of confrontation and the process of debate and negotiation that follows. They prefer to say, here’s my opinion, take it or leave it.

Cultural Considerations

Many UX practitioners blindly use methodology imported from North America and translated into Korean. Jakob Nielsen and other usability practitioners over emphasize the usability of search, value of wayfinding and how users are so task-oriented. The whole field of UX is set up to optimize the user experience. The highest values are usability and utility. I’m not arguing that these methodologies are not useful, but there is always a missing chapter in these books. There are major cultural differences and these need to be recognized, explored and taken into consideration.

For example, in choosing a cell phone, usability and utility may be over-valued in the West. In the US there is the famous Verizon ad that has a bespectacled geeky-looking Verizon engineer going to various places saying (annoyingly), “Can you hear me now?” Here, the ad is obviously appealing to the value that reception trumps all other expectations. In my conversations with Korean, the question is, “????” which translated is “Do you think it look good?” Here it’s not just whether I think it looks good, but do others think so too. Highest value here is acceptance, not utility or usability. I have seen users accept and struggle with heinous interfaces simply because the phone makes them look good.

???? (Shin-to-bul-yi) was the slogan adopted by Korean farmers (and political interests) against the opening of Korean agricultural markets to foreign imports. Literally translated it means, “Body and land are not separate”. The meaning explicit meaning for Korean farmers is that Koreans should eat stuff produced locally because our bodies have been acclimated to these foods.

I would tend to agree. I would love to eat high quality homegrown produce except for the fact that in this age of mass production, it tend to be more expensive than imported, and since a good part of what we eat is processed and packaged anyway, people don’t know the difference or don’t care.

I digress. The point being, even with something as seemingly ubiquitous and universal as the internet, regional and cultural considerations matter. In a big way.

User Experience Design in Korea
So does this have implications on how interfaces should be designed in Korea? As much as the Google is different from Naver I would say. As I have tried to propose, the motivations of users may differ due to culture.

Once again, this needs to be validated, but I would think that in Intranet designs in Korea, especially for knowledge repositories, the author, the social context, and comments by others are as important as the piece of knowledge itself. On the task oriented matters, learning how something should be done is as important as how it is actually done. I think you would find few intranets in the U.S. with commenting and strong social features. These tend to be a must in Korean intranets. There is a constant buzz of social activity you’ll be hard to see anywhere else.

KISS in Korea may not necessarily stand for “Keep It Simple Stupid”. It may more appropriately be “Keep It Social, Stupid”.

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Footnotes

1. I have talked about Naver and Google based and cultural differences before in my post from Jan 2008, Strategies for Globalizing Korean Websites

From the World Bank Flickr account

Given the size, complexity and issues surrounding the World Bank (not to mention its impossible mandate of “Working for a World Free of Poverty”), it does surprise me how well it does things sometimes.

Case in point: the World Bank has a Flickr account! It has over 1,400 photos, nicely categorized into 3 collections (Africa, South Asia, East Asia) and 33 sets (that cover selected topics and countries).

Did I tell you that they also have an API to access their 114 indicators from key data sources and 12,000 development photos? This is too much. The Bank (as it is affectionately called to insiders) is more Web2.0 that a whole lot of organizations.

[Thx AC]

I agonized over what to present, but in the end settled to cover the various intervals at which information is presented to us and that with the internet that interval is getting shorter, and its quality harder to determine.

At one end of the spectrum you have encyclopedias which take years to update and hold the most authority, on the other end you have services like Twitter that get updated several times a day and have no filter for quality. I present the various web services that lie in between these two extreme.

When there is so much information out there, how do we find the good content? To this point, I put together some short case studies of how information is being organized by various "agents" that act as content quality filters for the users.

The conclusion being, a trusted publisher, such as Design House, can leverage its brand and history of content quality to rise and become a "trusted source" on the internet. However, the challenge is to do it in a web-centric way that appeals to web users, and not in a print-centric way.

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Twitter: What are you doing?

Ever since I moved to Seoul last year, I’ve begun to post to Twitter more regularly. It started as a means to stay in touch and update friends I left behind in the US. I expected people I know to follow my feed, however I really didn’t expect people I didn’t know to become followers. Who would be interested in my mindless ramblings?

When I received notifications that total strangers were following me, at first I was a little distressed… then intrigued… then somewhat comforted in a strange way. They started to respond to my updates. Here were people who discovered me through search, or through other followers, with whom I share a passing interest which may be that we are English-speakers living in Korea, or interested in technology, music, or even Firefox3 etc., who track my comments and with whom I could hold casual conversations.

Jason Kottke made a really interesting observation that there is a trend towards making private conversation channels public and permanent. Blogging is thus a the public form of emailing, Flickr is public photo sharing, YouTube is public home videos and Twitter is public form of instant messaging (IM).

I always thought that with Twitter, I was just broadcasting my thoughts into the wind but when I started to get comments and followers, it did indeed feel more like public instant messaging.

The barrier for someone to respond to a Twitter post is really low. You don’t have to know the person, and they don’t have to approve you for you to follow their feed. This makes for looser more casual relationships, but no less interesting ones. The potential of services such as Twitter seems to be in its "discoverability" – the ability to find others who share you thoughts and start casual conversation, just by the fact that you broadcasting your thoughts publicly. One of my favorite Twitter spin off services is Twistori which simply track Twitters that begin with "I love…", "I hate…", "I think…", "I believe…", "I feel…" or "I wish…". It’s addictive to watch people random yet actual thoughts scroll by.

The dominant social networking site in Korea is Cyworld, and from stats, most of the traffic on Cyworld is between "Il-chon" or "approved friends/family". This reinforced the notion that Koreans are very closed in their relationships, and prefer closed social networking sites like Cyworld to more open ones such as MySpace. The Korean version of Twitter, Me2Day challenges that notion to a certain degree. Here is a site, much like my experience with Twitter, where users form loose relationships with other users they "discovered" leading me to think that the internet is a greater enabler of social relationships than I thought.

Now that Cyworld’s popularity is on the decline, they are fishing for new ideas. They had a terrible launch of Cy2.0 which was supposed to Cyworld’s next generation but after a lukewarm reception, they hastily demoted to being a lowly "blog" application tab. They are also in beta version of a 3D service not unlike Second Life. I’ve contended for a while that it would have been in Cyworld’s best interest to move more agressively towards mobile, because that’s where all the action is occurring, by acquire a service like Me2Day and moving towards shorter, more casual sharing of thought and comments to complement its more established social networking system. Instead they created a service called Tossi which is similar but doomed to fail, lacking strong integration with Cyworld and more so because it’s a paid service (you have pay for data usage). This is due in no small part due to a rift between SK Communications who operates Cyworld and SK Telecom which is its parent mobile operator. Sad.

I never thought that a service like Second Life would ever have much of a chance in Korea, but I am seriously having second thoughts (no pun intended). Cyworld is showing strong signs it’s losing steam and If my original assumption about Korean being adverse to open, casual social relationships can be overturned by services like Me2Day, maybe it’s an market just waiting to be tapped. We’ll have to see.

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Just for laughs, I stumbled upon a hilarious role-playing conversation in Twitter between Starwars Characters (see screenshot below).

Luke Skywalker's twitter feed

The Point: Making Something Happen

The Point is a simple website with a clear purpose: making things happen. The way they do it is helping users formulate a campaign statement for action with a clear goal. Users can then choose to participate in the campaign. When the goal is met (or “the point” is tipped), an email is sent to the participants to act. For example:

Stop Zippy Oil from polluting Lake Apache
Zippy Oil must stop dumping waske into Lake Apache or else we will boycott ZippyPump when 100,000 people join

The campaigns can be serious or silly, which is a nice twist:

Bow-tie Tuesday
Andrew Mason will wear a bow tie every Tuesday if 8 people do the same.

The site has a collaboration section for brainstorming ways to approach a problem and also a social networking component to connect people with similar interest.

In Korea, where I work, there is a lot of businesses coming online based on Web2.0 models, and a lot of talk around using Web2.0 to enhance service offerings and user experience, but little talk about the social impact that Web2.0, which to me is missing the whole point of Web2.0.

Tim O’Reilly said back in 2005, Web is a platform. A platform to do what? We should at least consider the potential of it becoming an agent for change and the betterment of society as a whole.

What is encouraging is that there are already many services by the big players in the Korean online space that make online donation easy and fun. Korea’s leading social networking site, Cyworld has its online volunteer matching and giving site called Cytogether where you can donate your time or “acorns” to a cause. Naver, the Korean search engine / online portal behemoth has a service called Happy Bean where you collect “beans” worth about 10 cents for every email you sent through their email service. You can donate these you causes and donations are matched by corporate sponsors. CJ Foundation (CJ is part of the Samsung conglomerate) has its own version of the US site DonorsChoose.org called DonorsCamp.

A culture of donation doesn’t spring up overnight, but if you look at the numbers, citizens who are online (or “netizens” as they are called here) are beginning to donate generously.

But these services are only limited in their scope and potential and only scratch at the surface of serious change. In one of the most wired places on earth, shouldn’t we expect more innovative services that enable and empower people to think differently.

When I was recently asked to give a 1 hour presentation at OpenTide China, in Beijing, on a subject of my choice, I chose to put together a presentation highlighting some of the work that I was involved in while I was working at Forum One Communications (my previous place of employment), that involved innovative use of Web2.0 for social action. I ended up giving the same presentation again to staff at VINYL, Seoul, where I currently work. The presentation outline Web2.0 principles and then introduces 4 “stories” or projects I was directly or indirectly involved in. The projects are CARMA, Changemakers, Ask Your Lawmaker and DonorsChoose (I didn’t have direct involvement but know the project well because I good friend worked on the Korean counterpart DonorsCamp).

Here’s the presentation I gave:

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Convergence is sometimes viewed as the consolidation of multiple technologies towards a singular uber-device. I prefer to define convergence as the tendency of technologies, as they grow in complexity and scope, to overlap (and consolidate) functions. Convergence therefore refers to a trend wherein devices and functions take on commonly shared traits, but this doesn’t mean that this trend ultimately ends with a single multifunctional mega-device, no matter how cool and ‘mad scientist’ that might sound.

The article goes on to describe “7 considerations for convergence”. An excellent read.