The Triumph of Users: Achieving Cultural Usability ... - Semantic Scholar

TECHNICAL COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, 15(4), 457–481 Copyright © 2006, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

An Article by the 2005 Award Winner CCCC Outstanding Dissertation Award in Technical Communication

The Triumph of Users: Achieving Cultural Usability Goals With User Localization Huatong Sun Grand Valley State University

Current localization practices suffer from a narrow and static vision of culture resulting in usability problems for IT product and design. To address this problem, this article compares user localization efforts of mobile messaging technology in two different cultural contexts with a new methodology of cultural usability. It calls for expanding the scope of localization practices and linking user localization efforts to the IT product design cycle.

SMS [short messaging service ] was an accidental success that took nearly everyone in the mobile industry by surprise. … [It] was the triumph of the consumer—a grassroots revolution that the mobile industry had next to nothing to do with and repeatedly reacted to. (MobileSMS, 2004)

When mobile text messaging was designed and introduced as a voice-mail alerting service a decade ago (Hill, 2004), nobody imagined the great impact it would have on culture and communication technologies. Mobile text messaging has been a popular communication mode in East Asia, Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world no matter how different the local cultures are. In China, 274 billion messages were sent in the first 11 months of 2005, a 40% increase from the same period in 2004 (“Festive,” 2006). In the United States, a country well-known for lagging in the use of mobile messaging, the increase is also amazing: 7.2 billion

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messages were sent in June 2005, up from the 2.8 billion sent in June 2004, and up from the 1.2 billion for the first quarter of 2003 (Koprowski, 2005; Richtel, 2004). With the phenomenal success of mobile text messaging, we now have a generation named by this technology, “Generation Txt” (Rheingold, 2002, p. 20). The word text is not just used as a noun any more but also as a verb, a practice that I follow in this article. The popularity of mobile text messaging challenges our assumptions about technology use as it pushes us to think of issues of culture, usability, and localization and their dynamic interactions in a broader context. From a design point of view, mobile text messaging is a hard-to-use technology with inherent limitations (e.g., small display, poor inputting methods, and moving environments). From a localization point of view, the technology of text messaging involves only minimal work at the developer’s site—phone manufacturers mainly translate the interface and menu into local languages for operational convenience during the localization process, “the process of creating or adapting an information product for use in a specific target country or specific target market” (Hoft, 1995, p. 11). In the field of technical communication, we tend to think a product with poor usability would not gain popularity, and we tend to glorify ourselves—as communication specialists and participants in the design of IT products—as heroes. That is, we sometimes see technical communicators as potential heroes able to rescue poor users out of their miserable situations (Spinuzzi, 2003) and able to elevate the status of users in the technological order (Johnson, 1998). However, as Spinuzzi pointed out, these stories have another side: “[Users] often do a pretty good job of ‘rescuing’ themselves” (p. 4). In the case of mobile text messaging, users have rescued not only themselves but also the technology. Several things have surprised the mobile industry: A hard-to-use technology with inherent limitations enjoys a huge market success; a technology originally designed and marketed as a business application has been adopted primarily for personal use; a technology whose only value at its inception was its instrumental convenience has now introduced a completely new social world because of that convenience; and a technology has been not only adopted by its enthusiastic users but also integrated and localized to fit their daily lifestyles. Why has this group of users worldwide adopted and stayed with a hard-to-use and poorly localized technology? Why is mobile text messaging so popular even though mobile phones are not a good tool for writing? It is obvious that all these developments would not have taken place without active rescuing efforts from users. Actually, these efforts should not be regarded as merely rescuing efforts, which would discount users’ initiative and agency. Users are designers (Norman, 2004), who are actively redesigning, or—more accurately—localizing, an available technology to fit into their local contexts. In some sense, who knows users’ local culture and contexts better than the users themselves do? Users might not be able to articulate those cultural and contextual factors well, but they know what

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works in their own contexts, and they know how to make use of a technology in their life spheres if they are able to find a good fit. I call these active efforts at the user’s site user localization, which is distinguished from developer localization occurring at the developer’s site. These user localization efforts are an important consideration in usability studies because they represent a way of culturally achieving product usability. That is, the idea of user localization moves the conversation in usability studies to a consideration of localization as designing an IT product for local audiences in terms of their culture, involving a rhetoric of designing and evaluating IT products at the user’s site. In this article, I examine and compare user localization efforts of mobile messaging technology in two distinctly different cultural contexts (the United States and China) to understand how users localize a hard-to-use technology into their everyday life to augment work and life. I am interested ultimately in exploring how these user efforts could expand the scope of cross-cultural IT product design for localization studies, and how we could route these efforts into the design cycle and incorporate them as part of the design process for usability research. To begin, I briefly review the problem of culture that undermines current localization practices, and I introduce the research methodology of cultural usability that would remedy the problem with its investigation of local use in context. Then I compare two local cases across sites to discuss the dynamic interactions between local uses and the surrounding cultural contexts. I end the article with implications for both localization studies and usability research.

UNDERSTANDING LOCAL USES WITH CULTURAL USABILITY The Dilemma of Culture in Localization Practices Accounting for culture in current localization practices presents a dilemma. On the one hand, culture takes a central role in localization process, which is highlighted in various definitions of localization (Gribbons, 1997; Hoft, 1995, p. 11; LISA, 2003, p. 13). For example, Taylor (1992) claimed localization as “the process of infusing a specific cultural context” into an IT product. Furthermore, the importance of culture has been claimed, proven, and validated in research literature and real-world cases of market failures where companies did not carefully consider local cultural issues (DeVoss, Jasken, & Hayden, 2002; Hoft, 1995; Marcus & Gould, 2000; Zahedi, Pelt, & Song, 2001). On the other hand, culture has been one of the major problems constantly hurting localization practices, where the application of culture remains narrow in scope and on a surface level (Sun, 2002). The popular cultural dimensions used to guide localization practices (e.g., power distance and uncertainty avoidance) only

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represent the dominant cultural values in a national culture while ignoring other subcultural factors. Thus concrete cultural realities including the messiness and complexities of local contexts (e.g., immediate context) and the actual practice of social activities are stripped away during the localization process. Instead, localization specialists focus most of their attention on the delivery aspects of technology, such as what colors or page layout would be preferred by some ethnic cultures and how the dialog box should be resized for a certain language (Esselink, 2000; Kano, 1995; Lingo & LISA, 2000; Musale, 2001). Generally they design for operational affordances—the properties of a technology that afford nonconscious and automatically performed functions—and instrumental affordances—the properties of a technology that support goal-directed actions in the material context. At the same time, they neglect possible design options for social affordances—the properties of a technology that support object-oriented activity and social behaviors in a sociocultural and historical context (Sun, 2004). This shortsightedness results in the lack of an overall vision of localization strategies in product design and a product-oriented localization process separating product design from product use. For many manufacturers, localization occurs only at the developer’s site, and it ends when the product ships. The problem of culture that undermines localization practices cannot be blamed only on localization professionals. It is actually a common issue in current IT product design and development. The popular concept of usability originates from the fields of cognitive science and computer engineering that tend to regard usability as an isolated property and ignore the sociocultural contexts surrounding the product (Adler & Winograd, 1992; Brown & Duguid, 1994; Spinuzzi, 1999b). To improve localization performance, we need an approach to address local cultural issues more effectively. Informed by research in anthropology and ethnomethodology, this article regards culture as the meanings, values, and behaviors that groups of people develop and share over time as well as the tangible manifestations of a way of life (Geertz, 1973). In this sense, local culture includes broad sociocultural factors from national/ethnic culture (e.g., power distance, collectivism vs. individualism) and from subgroup culture (e.g., age group, gender, and organizational affiliation), individual factors (e.g., personal background, values, and interests), ways of life, daily activities, and interpretations of these. This view suggests that the local culture in which a technology is used should be investigated in a context where the collective and the individual meet and where the implementation (instrumental aspect) and interpretation (social aspect) interact. Thus I develop a new framework of cultural usability to study local use in context. Cultural usability is not a new term in usability research; it is one that has begun to appear in usability literature for two reasons. The first is the growing competition in global markets, which has resulted in the growing need for cross-cultural usability studies. The second is the recent trend of paying more attention to social computing. For those focused on global competition, cultural usability involves


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the study of cultural effects on product design and localization (Barber & Badre, 1998; Choi, Lee, Kim, & Jeon, 2005). Those who endorse this approach are more interested in how to conduct cross-cultural usability research in an instrumental way. For those interested in the issues of social computing, cultural usability refers to “a critical design sensibility … [that] situates the practices of technology within its cultural and social contexts” (Tarkka & Tikka, 2001). This approach focuses on design practices from a discursive angle and on the influences of consumer culture in human–computer interaction (HCI) design. Thus, although researchers following these two approaches study the cultural dimension of usability complementarily, the two approaches do not provide a complete picture of cultural usability. For example, studies of cross-cultural interface design elements usually stop at the level of ethnic cultural preferences and fail to explore the dynamic relationship between cultural preference and underlying structuring forces; those studies of cultural usability with a critical perspective fail to realize that ideology frameworks vary in different cultures. The new framework of cultural usability introduced here seeks to provide a more complete picture of the cultural dimension of usability. My new framework integrates key concepts and methods from activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies and brings social–cultural contexts into concrete user activities. It not only studies how a technology is used as a tool in context but also explores its signifying practices. Next, I briefly review and compare three theoretical constructs for studying cultural and contextual factors in technical communication. Activity Theory: Situating Contextual Factors in Activities Activity theory offers usability researchers a productive framework for exploring cultural and contextual issues because it employs an activity as the unit of analysis for studying human activity and tool mediation. In other words, activity theory brings contexts into the object of inquiry. As a cultural-historical approach, it claims that people’s activities are an object-oriented and tool-mediated process in which actions are mediated through the use of artifacts (including tools and languages) to achieve a transformative objective. The activity system includes “a minimal meaningful context” (Kuutti, 1996, p. 28). In such a context, history, development, meanings, community, rules, and even culture are articulated into a unified framework, which makes context an inherent consideration in activity-theory-based HCI research. As Nardi (1996) described, Activity theory … proposes a very specific notion of context: the activity itself is the context. … Context is constituted through the enactment of an activity involving people and artifacts. … [T]he specific transformative relationship between people and artifacts … is at the heart of any definition of context, or activity (p. 76).

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The three-level structure of activity makes it possible to distinguish and describe contextual factors as associated with the instrumental aspect or the social aspect of an activity and brings insights to the notion of affordance by placing it in context (Albrechtsen, Andersen, Bodker, & Pejtersen, 2001; Baerentsen & Trettvik, 2002). Affordance describes the action possibilities posed by the artifact in use. It is a term widely used in the HCI field, but not yet clearly theorized (Gaver, 1991; Norman, 1988, 1999). With an activity-based framework, Baerentsen and Trettvik asserted that “affordances are not properties of objects in isolation, but of objects related to subjects in (possible) activities” (p. 59). They proposed understanding affordance as a generic concept that consists of “operational affordance” on the operation level (e.g., the touch and feel of a phone pad), “instrumental affordance” on the action level (e.g., communicating unobtrusively), and “need related affordance” on the activity level (e.g., staying in contact with college friends) (p. 59). Activity theory presents a robust framework for studying contextual factors, and it shows us the complexities and fluidity of activities in context. However, it does not tell us how activities are structured by contextual factors. The vision of context and culture here is still limited: Activity theory is good at the interpretation of tool-mediated production but weak at sign-mediated communication (Engeström, 1999; Spinuzzi, 1999a). Contextual factors in the activity system are primarily immediate contextual factors based on individual consciousness or group affiliation, without consideration of broader cultural patterns. In the case of mobile text messaging, activity theory can illustrate why a user chooses text messaging based on instrumental convenience, but it lacks a vocabulary to investigate how this use–act helps a particular user maintain his or her multiple identities through his or her daily communication in a broader sociocultural context. To overcome these limitations, I borrow concepts from genre theory and British cultural studies, which allow me to investigate use situations in a broader cultural arena. Genre Theory: Structuring Contextual Factors With Rules Genre theory attends to textual and contextual regularities, repeated actions, and technological influences, both across texts and across practices, by examining the social exigencies of genres (Dias, Freedman, Medway, & Pare, 1999). It provides a foundation for interpreting actions from a social angle: Genres are “enactments of recognized social motives … [and] activities in Leont’ev’s sense” (p. 25). Through solidifying contextual factors in generic conventions and rules, the rule–tool relationship embodied by genres helps illustrate how uses of technologies are structured in social contexts. Influenced by Gidden’s (1984) structuration theory, Miller (1994) suggested genres are capable of reproducing social structures with their recurrent nature in situated communication. Similarly, Yates and Orlikowski (1992)


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argued that genres are produced, reproduced, and modified by individuals through a process of structuring in organizational contexts. Regarding a technology as a genre reveals the reciprocal relationship between a technology and the surrounding social contexts in which it is produced and used. The notion of genre also brings insights into the design of technological artifacts. By providing socially constructed interpretive conventions, genres serve as “border resources” (Brown & Duguid, 1994), which are also affordances here, to support local use in context. Thus, inquiring about rules and habits related to genres can help us investigate how the connection between design and use is dynamically settled in the different interface features of an IT artifact. British Cultural Studies: Articulating Contextual Factors in Discursive Practices Complementary to activity theory and genre theory, the articulation model (Slack, Miller, & Doak, 1993) and the circuit of culture (du Gay, Hall, Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997; Hall, 1997) from British cultural studies bring signifying practices and a developmental perspective into the mapping of contexts. The articulation model explores contextual factors from a discursive angle, highlighting the mediation of meanings in the social aspects of human action. According to Slack (1996), articulation as a methodology maps the context, but “not in the sense of situating a phenomenon in a context, but in mapping a context, mapping the very identity that brings the context into focus” (p. 125). Thus, “identities, practices, effects generally constitute the very context within which they are practices, identities or effects” (p. 125). Articulation is a process of creating connections between various contextual factors on the level of practices and on the level of meanings. As an example of such mapping, the circuit of culture (see Figure 1) examines five key processes in a development cycle of an artifact: how the artifact is represented, what social identities are associated with it, how it is produced, how it is consumed (or used here), and what mechanisms regulate its distribution and use. In the real world, these five elements continually overlap and intertwine in complex and contingent ways. Furthermore, the cultural circuit illustrates how meanings are mediated by an artifact and suggests that a study of the whole circuit of culture is needed to examine a cultural artifact completely. This scope is missing in both activity theory and genre theory. Applying this model to usability studies can show how other elements (representation, identity, production, and regulation) interact with and contribute to the consumption element in the whole life cycle. It tells us that the consumption process is not the only significant and stand-alone process we need to consider when we design new products. Methodologically, in addition to the investigation of subjective experiences with terms such as identity and representation (which is weak in genre theory), the circuit of culture construct also explores broad cultural pat-

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FIGURE 1 The Circuit of Culture examines five key processes in a development cycle of an artifact including production, consumption, regulation, representation, and identity. Adapted from du Gay et al. (1997).

terns in a use context, which serves as a good counterbalance to the individual user-focused perspective of activity theory. One thing worth mentioning is that the strong emphasis of British cultural studies on cultural consumption sheds light on technology use in everyday life and the influence of consumer culture on IT product design and use in the era of fast capitalism. It expands the usability research focus from an organizational context to an individual context and moves our attention to the total user experience. Comparison of Three Approaches To illustrate how the three approaches could work together to explore contextual issues in technology use, in Table 1, I compare and contrast their different focuses and strengths. Cultural Usability: Bringing Meanings Into Activities With a focus on the mediation of activities and meanings in context, the new framework of cultural usability regards usability as a diffusing feature across the activity system, incorporates cultural factors from both the immediate context and sociocultural context into the object of inquiry and situates culture in the dynamic interactions of the instrumental and social affordances of the technological artifact (see Figure 2). Here instrumental affordances refers to the affordances on both the levels of operation and action by combining operational affordance and instrumental affordance from Baerentsen and Trettvik’s (2002) work. Social affordance is

TABLE 1 Comparison of Three Approaches to Understanding Contextual Factors

Theories

Activity Theory

Methodology of studying contexts

Activity as a unit of analysis

Methodological strength on different mediations

Mediation of activities (tool-mediated production) at the individual level

Ways of situating artifacts in context Types of contexts mostly studied

An artifact–practice dyada Organizational

Genre Theory Genre as social action in the sense of both a cultural artifact and a structuring force Mediation of activities (tool-mediated production) via mediation of meanings (sign-mediated communication) at the social level An artifact–rule dyada Organizational

British Cultural Studies Articulation model

Mediation of meanings (sign-mediated communication) at the social and individual levels

Artifact on a cultural circuit Individual

aFrom Designing for Lifeworlds: Genre and Activity in Information Systems Design and Evaluation (chap. 1), by C. Spinuzzi, 1999. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Iowa State University, Ames, IA. Adapted with permission.

FIGURE 2 The framework of cultural usability regards technological artifacts as genres that are situated at the intersection of the immediate context and the broader sociocultural context. Here usability is interpreted as a diffusing feature across the activity system in the immediate context and on the circuit of culture in the broader sociocultural context.

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based on need-related affordance at the activity level while incorporating broader interactions between social practices and technology properties informed by genre theory and British cultural studies. Usability here is regarded as a diffusing feature (Spinuzzi, 1999b) that embodies interactions in the network. It is founded on and originates from the process of mediation. In simpler terms, usability is a mediation process that consists of tool-mediated production and sign-mediated communication. It is both (a) a material interaction with the artifact and its contexts and (b) an interpretation process of this activity. The framework of cultural usability is used as a research methodology in the study described in this article. My stance as a researcher here is based on praxis. That is, I agree with Sullivan and Porter (1993) that technical communication research is “a design activity involving the construction of a method worked out from the intersection of theory and situation, which leads not to knowledge (in the sense of total truth), but toward understanding, the basis for future rhetorical judgment” (p. 237). As Salvo (2001) suggested, usability studies can be both “a design mechanism” and “a critical research practice” (p. 280).

RESEARCH DESIGN The comparative case studies1 were conducted in two distinctly different cultural contexts: the Albany, New York, region and the Hangzhou region of Zhejiang province, China; these cities are state and provincial capitals, respectively. Nineteen Americans and 22 Chinese participated in the study from Spring 2003 to Spring 2004. They were selected based on the following criteria: age, frequency of use, patterns of use, and wireless carrier. Participants were college students or young professionals (18 to 30 years old), who sent and received at least five text messages per day, employed various use patterns, and had different wireless carriers. Data were collected through two stages, each with different focuses on use patterns and mediation practices. In the first stage, questionnaire surveys and text message diaries were employed to study patterns of mobile messaging use at the two sites. Participants were asked to log text messages for 4 days in a row including both workdays and nonworkdays, and both weekdays and weekend days. For private messages, they did not need to log the message content, but they were asked to log the place, time, and situation for that message. Forty percent of the participants were selected for the second stage (7 of 19 American participants and 10 of 22 Chinese participants). Special attention was 1The project was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for human subject research.


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given to keep a balanced variety of subjects, based on their messaging patterns from the first stage. I used qualitative interviewing to conduct an in-depth study of the mediation practices of selected cases. An interview usually lasted 45 to 75 minutes, all of which was audio-recorded. A few American participants in the second stage agreed to be shadowed. They were followed for 1 or 2 half days as they went about their tasks in their cars, offices, and stores—popular places for messaging from their diary studies. The framework of cultural usability guided the fieldwork in shaping the method of data gathering and analysis:

• To explore a concrete use activity situated at the intersection of the immediate and the sociocultural context, I used a simple 5W (where, when, who, how, and what) structure to examine patterns of use activities emerging from message diaries such as where and when the text messaging practice occurred, who people texted to, how messages were exchanged, and what they texted about. The instrumental affordances and social affordances were brought in to understand the dynamic interactions between the user and the technological artifact and between practice and context. • To investigate recurrent use situations of mobile text messaging in context and search for structuring forces of this technology in a broad sociocultural context, I drew from genre theory, linked textual patterns of mobile messages to routinized use behaviors, and analyzed collected text messages with a verbal data analysis method (Geisler, 2004). I analyzed a total of 2,474 text messages (including 813 American messages and 1,661 Chinese messages) for rhetorical purposes to understand local user goals and emerging writing activities. Here a rhetorical purpose is conceived as both a user goal in terms of activity theory and a social motive in terms of genre theory, which could be translated into design functionality in the future. Text messages were coded into seven categories, including informing, coexperiencing, expressing, instructing, coordinating, switching, and other.2 In addition, the technology of mobile text messaging itself was interpreted as a genre that mediates between social motives and local goals with instrumental and social affordances in the individual context. • By looking at the circuit of culture through which text messaging technology travels, I analyzed interview transcripts and observational notes to see how the mediation of meanings and the social motives originating from broad cultural contexts affect the adoption and use of this technology in daily life practices and in various life spheres.

2The

simple agreement was .90 or .87 corrected by Cohen’s kappa.

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STORIES OF LOCAL USES Sophie’s Story: New Chocolate at Work At the time of the study, Sophie3 was a 30-year-old retail manager and an owner of a home-based interior design company at the American site. She started using cell phones in 1997 and adopted text messaging technology in February 2002. She chose mobile text messaging to work out a communication constraint with her best friend, Dana, during working hours. Dana’s boss did not allow employees to make phone calls to friends during work. As a store manager, Sophie’s work schedule was very busy, and she was typically unable to check e-mail during work. Mobile text messaging solved this problem: Dana was able to use the computer in her office to send short e-mails to Sophie’s cell phone, and Sophie’s reply would be instantaneously sent via text messages. Using this method, they maintained constant contact with each other without being noticed by the boss or other people. Later Sophie found text messaging to be “a whole other dimension.” She texts her husband and coworkers to “have fun.” In the 4-day period of the diary study and the follow-up half day of shadowing observation, Sophie sent 40 messages and received 27, for a total of 67. More than half of her messages were sent for an expressing purpose. A closer look at those messages with an expressing purpose shows that Sophie employed different communication styles and vocabularies when she interacted with people of different ages. The messages sent to her best friend, Dana, who is her age, have a colloquial style, as illustrated in the following: City kitty: :-D [Greeting Dana who was taking a trip to New York City that day] Smart kitty … awesome opportunity for you … take it … I believe in you [Encouraging Dana who decides to go back to school] … Arrrgh [a complaint to Dana] When communicating to Ida, a close friend and coworker in her early 20s, Sophie used a lot of slang and gang phrases from TV comedies and talk shows such as Saturday Night Live. In the following text snippets, we find slang in almost every message. As described by themselves, these text messages present a jive talking style. Ida (2:30 p.m.): jive from the dialectizer :-[ Sophie (2:35 p.m.): Woo doggie [good friend] … u [you] all up n [and] everything

3Pseudonyms are used for all participants, and some personal details are altered to protect anonymity.


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Ida (2:36 p.m.): Im [I’m] all up in that s**t yo! how do you feel about “m-kitty” im [I’m] changing my name. Sophie (2:40 p.m.): Jenna will have fun w [with] your new name Sophie (3:00 p.m.): Do m-kitties roll on dubs [drive]? Ida (3:10 p.m.): Hells [hell yes] no g-funk [a nonsense word used as a compliment to a friend who is particularly savvy] Sophie (3:15 p.m.): NOther [another]? … who is the coolest m-cat in the world? :-[ Ida (4:00 p.m.): Tonight on the M-Kitty Show: How to Fashizzle One’s Nizzle with musical guest L-Doggie and The DawgPound4 Sophie (4:10 p.m.): Sounds like a fascinating dizzle … i’ll watch fojizzle [for you] Ida (5:00 p.m.): Big pimpin’ [very cool] and spendin’ cheese [very luxurious] Sophie (5:15 p.m.): That cheez [greatest thing in the world] is na-chos [what does NOT belong to you] … lay off the toastah [gun] yo Sophie (6:45 p.m.): Youre [You’re] my favorite schizzle [sure] m-kitty Ida (7:00 p.m.): talk to you later As unobtrusive communication, mobile text messaging fulfills Sophie’s emotional needs of staying in contact with friends and loved ones at work. It has important affordances in a business setting. On the instrumental level, text messaging affords silent communication, convenient use, and discrete action. The phone is not noticeable when tucked into a pants pocket. By setting it to vibrate, only Sophie would know when a message arrives. In addition, she can take the phone with her everywhere as she moves around the store helping clients. On a social level, text messaging helps Sophie stay in contact with her friends in an unobtrusive way. Sophie describes the importance of mobile text messaging to her in this way: Mobile text messaging is important to me because it gives me more opportunity to communicate with people in creative ways. … It’s nice to just have that little break [messaging break]. It’s like you get a little greeting card in 4-izzle: Coined from Snoop Dogg. Nizzle is the product of Snoop getting all crunched up and saying “izzle” on the end of everything during interviews/shows. It has no meaning.

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the mail every day. It’s nice to know you thought of someone that made you laugh. Indeed, text messaging is the “new chocolate” (Lowe, 2003) for Sophie: “Instead of dashing to the fridge in times of emotional fragility, girls are now grabbing their mobile phones and texting a support team of female friends.” Sophie likes chocolate: She usually has a big bucket of chocolates in her office that she eats during her breaks or for socializing with her coworkers. She also likes chocolate in the form of text messages from friends, which lets her know that she is being thought of. The new chocolate not only provides emotional support for Sophie in the workplace but also helps her construct her identity and perform in her immediate social network. In terms of her personal identity, Sophie is consciously establishing and maintaining an image as a close and approachable friend to her girlfriends. From the perspective of her business identity, texting enhances her leadership credibility. Text messaging is a popular practice in her workplace, and many people like texting during off hours. By keeping up with popular trends and speaking her coworkers’ language, Sophie develops a management style that encourages her younger coworkers to ignore the generation gap between them and enjoy working for her. Though she is fond of text messaging, Sophie still complains about the poor design of the messaging application. She finds it extremely inconvenient to input the exclamation mark (“!”) on her phone. There is no exclamation point on the first key for punctuation, which is important for composing a cute, funny, and emotional message. To use such punctuation, she typically has to press a few keys to go several screens deep. Lily’s Story: Pure Water in Social Network Lily is 26, a teacher and student advisor at a local technical college at the Chinese site. She got her first cell phone in September 2001. The first thing she did with her phone was send text messages to her friends who had cell phones already, notifying them of her new communication method and her phone number. It was a natural move for her to adopt texting and join her texting circle. As she got familiar with the phone features, she texted more and more. Now texting, she said, is “an indispensable means of communication” in her life, and she thinks that most of her friendships and cousinships are maintained and enhanced by text messaging. After graduation, Lily moved to her current city. Away from her hometown and school, she uses text messaging to stay in contact with childhood friends, college friends, colleagues, and relatives. She finds text messaging agrees with her personality compared to other technologies. For example, she does not like to make phone calls with friends all the time as it is abrupt to call people and ask about their recent situations after years without contact, nor does she like to go online to chat


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via instant messaging, as she does not feel it genuine to chat with different friends at the same time. She values simple friendships and the one-to-one communication that text messaging affords. She concluded, “It is a very beautiful thing to convey feelings this way.” During her 4-day diary period, Lily sent 28 messages and received 24, totaling 52 messages. More than 70% of the sent messages were to her college and childhood friends who were not located in the same city where she lived. And almost half of her sent messages were to inform others of recent changes in her life. She initiated conversations most of the time, and she and her friends usually engaged in a conversation consisting of several message exchanges as in the example below. In this case, Lily was accompanying a company recruiter to a career event at school that evening. Feeling bored and because she had heard the news of the engagement of her college friend and roommate Mei, who was currently in Cixi, she texted her: Lily (7:45 p.m.): Mei, zai wang shang kan dao ni ding hun de xiao xi, gong xi a! (Mei, I saw your news of engagement online, congratulations!) Mei (7:50 p.m.): zai wang shang ma wo ye zai (Are you online me too5) Mei (7:51 p.m.): xie xie 2xxxx8 (Thanks 2xxxx86) Lily (7:56 p.m.): wo mei zai wang shang, shi xia wu kan dao de. wo hen shao shang wang, jin tian wan shang you yong ren dan wei zai xue xiao zhao pin, wo zai zuo pei, hen wu liao a! (I’m not online, and I saw it this afternoon. I seldom go online, some company is on campus for recruiting, and I’m accompanying the recruiter, so boring!) Mei (7:59 p.m.): o you kong lai Cixi Sandun de fang zi zen me yang wo ye xiang mai (Oh welcome to Cixi when you are free how is the real estate situation in Sandun) Lily (8:02 p.m.): wo mei mai san dun de fang zi, suo yi qing kuang bu tai shu xi. wo mai le xue xiao fu jin de fang zi, huan zai shi qu mai le tao xiao fang zi, mu qian ya li hen da a! (I didn’t buy the condo in Sandun, so I’m not familiar with the real estate situation there. I bought one near campus, and also bought a small one in downtown. A big burden for me now!) Mei (8:06 p.m.): hao li hai wo ji cuo le you hao fang yuan tong zhi yi sheng da jia yi kuai zhu hang zhou (Wow you are so great my 5Mei’s 6This

text messages do not have punctuation marks. number is Mei’s QQ ID, a popular instant messaging application in China.

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memory made a mistake please notify me of good real estates there let’s live in Hangzhou together) Lily (8:11 p.m.): ni da suan lai hang zhou fa zhan ma? huan ying a! yi ding yao dai ni de zhun lao gong guo lai a! (Do you want to move to Hangzhou for career development? Welcome! Please come to visit with your fiancé!) Mei (8:18 p.m.): mei you zhi shi zhao ge luo jiao de di fang shun bian ji dian gu ding zi chan (No I only want to find a place to settle down and gain some fixed assets on the way) Lily (8:35 p.m.): he he! ni de jing ji tou nao huan shi zhe me fa da! (Ha ha! You are still so money-wise!) Unlike the informal status of text messaging in American social life, text messaging is acknowledged as a formal genre in Chinese day-to-day social activities. When I interviewed Lily, she was busy preparing for her upcoming wedding ceremony, and she had just sent out the first round of invitations for their wedding banquet to her friends via text messaging. She appreciated the affordance of getting quick feedback from text messaging. Friends typically texted her with congratulations, told her whether they would be able to come, and how many of them would make it. Especially for friends at a distance, it was more convenient to send text messages than to mail invitation cards. Lily also prepared a few paper-based invitations. These were primarily reserved out of respect for her older work colleagues with whom she had a good, yet more distant relationship. By using text messaging for maintaining and enhancing her social network, Lily actually identified herself strongly with the sociocultural norms surrounding her. In a collectivist culture, relationships are relatively long lasting, and individuals feel a deep personal involvement with each other. This long-term relationship orientation is mediated nicely with mobile messaging that allows people to stay in touch in an unobtrusive way. She confessed in the interview, Sending text messages helps me understand [the saying] “The friendship between gentlemen appears indifferent but is pure like water (Jun zi zhi jiao dan ru shui)” in a deeper way. It makes me feel good by texting and greeting friends occasionally. “The friendship between gentlemen appears indifferent but is pure like water” is a Confucian motto about how to socialize with friends. It has been told for thousands of years in China and is deeply rooted in Chinese people’s daily social practices. People are taught that they should treat their friends genuinely with reserved warmth and reasonable distance. The best friendship is like pure water, maybe


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mild, but enduring without being tainted with personal interests or excessive contact. Although Lily enjoys the social affordance of this text messaging technology, she is also bothered by its instrumental limitations. As Lily tends to use text messaging to chat with friends by employing messages that inform, she finds her care and consideration is confined to the size limit of a text message. She usually likes to compose long and complex messages to describe life scenarios. She estimated that about 70% of the time when she composes text messages, she receives a prompt telling her that she has reached the size limit. Then, she has to go back and delete some words without ruining the clarity of her messages. It is annoying to go through this process daily, but she has no other way. Texting in a Broader Sociocultural Context The case histories of Sophie and Lily are not brought up here randomly; each of them represents a major use trend emerging from their local sites, according to the findings of Sun’s (2004) verbal data analysis and the questionnaire survey. At the American site, as participants used this technology mostly to have fun conversations with friends, they were interested in sending fun messages to express their feelings and share moment-by-moment experiences. Their chats were usually short. The majority of messages can be regarded as small talk in which participants had quick exchanges updating each other about their status (e.g., “watching TV”) and other minute life details. In contrast, Chinese participants liked to stay in contact with friends via text messaging. They sent more messages to inform. Long chats exchanged between friends were very common in Chinese message logs, and participants usually had more in-depth conversations over various topics.

SITUATING CULTURE IN USER LOCALIZATION This study provides insights into how a specific local use is developed in a concrete activity situated at the intersection of an immediate context and a sociocultural context and how this local use echoes both the subjectivity of the user and the ethos of the surrounding culture. Within the framework of cultural usability, the use stories of Sophie and Lily illustrate how various cultural factors are articulated through use to localize a hard-to-use technology into participants’ personal lives. Local use of mobile messaging technology is situated at the intersection of an immediate context and a sociocultural context. Each use has a local purpose and a social motive. On the one hand, Sophie chose text messaging to accomplish tasks in her immediate context (i.e., to work out a communication constraint with her best friend in the workplace). On the other hand, Sophie texted to achieve social motives in the sociocultural context by exchanging emotional support with friends.

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Here, both activities and meanings are mediated by the technological artifact in the use process. Local uses of mobile text messaging were the outcome of the interactions of various cultural factors on different levels. For instance, the gendered practices of mobile text messaging technology serve as an interesting example of the local–global dynamic of practice. In Lily’s case, her personal use of the technology was influenced both by her gendered identity on the local level and by ethnic cultural factors on the global level. It is worth mentioning that she used a phone model called Dancing Queen, which was made by a local Chinese phone manufacturer, Amoi, and was popular with female users. It has an elegant red color with a diamond-like flashing light on top and also included applications such as a menstrual cycle calendar and a biological clock. The feminine phone manifested how the technologies of wireless phone and mobile text messaging were localized for female social practices. These social practices were Lily’s way to negotiate a form of “pure water” relationships between friends in her sociocultural contexts. To integrate the technology into their daily lives and enhance their lifestyles, frequent users of mobile messaging have developed localization strategies derived from their local culture. Both Sophie’s and Lily’s cases show that the adoption of text messaging helps them not only accomplish instrumental tasks (e.g., bypassing e-mail problems or avoiding abrupt phone calls) but also construct their identities (e.g., in a workplace or sociocultural context). Meanwhile, as we explore how various cultural factors are articulated into user localization, it becomes clear how culture is situated in the localization process: Culture is situated in concrete use activities within concrete contexts, which should be approached in a dynamic fashion and in a broad way. The analysis of Lily’s use of messaging technology shows that her local uses were influenced by dimensional cultural factors such as a high-context communication style and collectivist culture, but these dimensions are not abstract and isolated ones; they also interacted with the local conditions in the immediate context and with Lily’s own personality. This suggests that we should move toward designing local technology with rich understandings of use activities in context instead of simply applying cultural conventions to localization work.

EXPANDING THE SCOPE OF LOCALIZATION The local-use success of mobile text messaging technology asks us to consider one question: Is the mobile text messaging technology well localized or not? Mobile text messaging technology was originally designed in the United Kingdom as a voice-mail alerting service rather than a writing technology for personal communication. It has inherent limitations. When the technology took off in other parts of the world, only minimal localization work had been done at the devel-


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oper’s site—primarily the translation of the interface for operational affordances of the technology. Since then, the interface and the functions of the technology have remained the same except for the improved inputting methods such as predictive typing. The localization work at the developer’s site is not satisfactory. At the user’s site, the fieldwork shows that even though mobile text messaging technology is hard to use and not well localized, participants successfully localized the technology into their daily lives in various ways (Sun, 2004). Thus user localization seems to be very successful. Here we see two contrasting localization phenomena from the developer’s site and from the user’s site. What do the two contrasting localization phenomena suggest for future localization practices? Does this mean that localization professionals might not need to work so hard to address cultural issues in localization design because users will do that in their own contexts as shown in the case of mobile text messaging? It is not the time for us to celebrate the triumph of users yet. A cultural circuit view of mobile text messaging can help us better understand the localization process of this technology (see Figure 3). As discussed earlier, the cultural circuit provides a timeline and a developmental perspective for examining technology use in context. On this cultural circuit, the developer localization occurs during the process of production, designing the instrumental affordances of mobile text messaging for local users. Then the user localization pervades the processes of consumption, regulation, representation, and identity. Through articulating various cultural factors into the user localization process, users realize the social affordances of the technology through practices. Clearly, there is a stronger element of user localization rescuing the weaker developer localization in mobile text messaging, making the circulation of the technology on the circuit possible. How-

FIGURE 3 The problematic localization process of mobile messaging technology on a cultural circuit. Two-way arrows with question marks suggest problematic links here.

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ever, this might not happen for other IT products. In worse situations, an IT product with poor localization work will not be able to move through this circuit if users refuse to use it and attach social and cultural meanings to it. Actually the localization success of text messaging technology is an unqualified localization success because it only occurs at the user’s site. This technology succeeds with its inherent use limitations because it offers social affordances that other technologies are unable to provide currently. When newer technologies are introduced with similar social affordances and better instrumental affordances, users will not bother to localize a hard-to-use technology any more. My fieldwork already showed this trend: Some participants reduced the use of text messaging during the second stage. A few American participants found that text messaging technology was too expensive after their service provider’s promotion ended. And several Chinese participants found other technologies were available to them (e.g., e-mail). Moreover, so many technologies with minimal localization efforts at the developer’s site failed on the market, whereas only mobile text messaging succeeded. The use success of one technology cannot be applied to all technologies. The circuit view also raises questions for the current developer localization of text messaging. This view suggests that the mobile messaging technology traverses various processes on the circuit continually to accomplish user goals; however, there are problematic links between the production process and the processes of consumption, regulation, representation, and identity, which impede a smooth circulation. The links between these processes should be two-way transactions, but in my fieldwork (Sun, 2004) I rarely found production processes responding to the use patterns emerging from the processes of consumption, regulation, representation, and identity except that one phone manufacturer, Amoi, responded to the enthusiasm of female users on wireless phones and modified the product for this group of users by adding female-oriented applications in Lily’s case (e.g., her phone model, Dancing Queen). Yet in my fieldwork I was unable to find how the localized messaging applications provide instrumental affordances for different emerging communication functions at two local sites. If this situation continues, current successful user localization of text messaging technology might not be able to be sustained as the momentum of circulation decreases. This circuit view expands the scope of localization. Here a successful localization case does not end at the shipment stage; instead, as an open-ended process, it reaches beyond the design stage to the use and consumption stage, including developer localization at the manufacturer’s site and user localization at the user’s site. Moreover, there is an ongoing “dialogic interaction” (Salvo, 2001, p. 288) between the developer localization and the user localization in which developers respond to users’ needs in a timely fashion and improve instrumental affordances to support users’ activity in context and improve localization performance in the next round. If this dialogue is problematic or does not exist, the current use success might eventually dissolve or disappear.


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LINKING USE TO DESIGN The findings from this study combined with the framework of cultural usability provide us with a fresh perspective on situated uses by associating localization work with them. They suggest that the localization of IT products and services is both a move from a generic system to local configurations of technology and an active process of “articulation work” (Hales, 1994) in a local context. And localization work does not belong only to designers but also to users. In this enabling and empowering system, users work with designers and producers as actors/constructors to coconstruct the whole practice. If we do not confine localization work to the arena of international technical communication, we will find that all situated uses are local uses that need localization strategies. Currently, when usability research moves into use experience research (Wilson, 2005), user localization can be regarded as a radical view of user-centered design that examines postadoption use experience at users’ sites. This is important in usability studies because an IT product will not fit into the user’s lifestyle without it. As Norman (2004) maintained, designers can make easy-to-use products that fulfill our needs, but they cannot make something that we would bond to. Again, who better understands the local use situation than users themselves? So why not expand the design process to the users’ sites and let users participate in the design process there? Why not let users continue and/or complete the design—determining the way of using the particular IT artifact? In previous discussion and research on incorporating users into the design process (e.g., Beyer & Holzblatt, 1998; Hackos & Redish, 1998), we technical communication researchers have tended to limit our attention only to various design phases from gathering requirements to final testing. With an expanded vision of localization, we should start to consider involving users at the use phase or expanding the design process to users’ sites. My investigation of user localization in the case of mobile text messaging shows the possibility of linking use back to design. Generally, designers face two challenges. First, many design resources are not in the designer’s hands but “developed in use” (Brown & Duguid, 1994). Second, breakdowns are inevitable in human–machine communication (Suchman, 1987). Therefore, besides providing fully functional IT artifacts, designers need to develop means to initiate practices and fix breakdowns. As Spinuzzi (2003) suggested, designers should “[provide] a base for works to build on,” using an open systems approach (p. 204). In addition, Mirel (2002) promoted designing software for complex tasks with “flexibility, control, and adaptability” (p. 182). Here, the job of designers is to incorporate better instrumental affordances into a technological artifact to help develop and realize social affordances that resonate with social motives in local contexts emerging from interactions. The core of this vision is founded on a deep understanding of concrete use activities in local contexts while considering cultural and structuring factors. It argues that the process of information design is an open system with

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built-in instrumental affordances to invite users to localize the technological artifact and realize its social affordances according to their culture. It is an open system where many possible local uses have been developed surrounding the intended use from the beginning. With this understanding, information designers will not seek to design fully localized interfaces or products (because that is never possible) or regard the product shipment (or developer localization) as the end of design. Instead, they will look for ways to initiate a communication channel and to build a support network to enhance user localization and help repair the possible breakdowns in contexts of use. Designers will also watch the use trends emerging from users’sites and design better instrumental affordances to respond to those trends. For example, designers for a mobile messaging application might want to examine two types of communication practices in two cultural contexts, fun communication and relationship communication, and ask themselves: What kinds of design features could be incorporated in mobile messaging applications to support these two types of communication work? In this way, use and design would be connected on the cultural circuit. Maybe that would then be the big moment for us to celebrate the triumph of users.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Special thanks to my advisor William Hart-Davidson and the committee members Cheryl Geisler, Robert Krull, and Linnda Caporael for their valuable advice at various stages of this project and to the reviewers and editors for their help in this article’s production.

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Huatong (Hannah) Sun is an assistant professor in the Writing Department at Grand Valley State University. She is interested in studying how cultural factors influence and shape the adoption and use of information technologies in an age of globalization.