Global UX: Design and Research in a Connected World discusses how user experience (UX) practice is changing and how practitioners and teams around the world are creating great user experiences for a global context. The book is based on interviews with practitioners from many countries, working on different types of projects. It looks behind the scenes at what it takes to create a user experience that can work across borders, cultures, and languages. The book begins with a quick look at the world outside of UX. This includes the external forces of change and globalization as well as an overview of how culture affects designers and the UX of products. It considers what global UX means for an individual practitioner, a company, and teams. It then turns to the details of global UX with the process and practice of research in the field; how information is brought home and shared with colleagues; and how it is applied in design. The final chapter presents some thoughts about how to deliver value both to projects and the users of finished products.
Covers practical user experience best practices for the global environment
Features numerous, global, real-world examples, based on interviews with over 60 UX managers and practitioners from around the world
Contains case studies and vignettes from user research and design projects for multinational companies and small start-ups
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Itās 7 AM in California. Jim is on his second call of the morning planning a usability test in Israel. In the United Kingdom, Ian is in the middle of his day, which will include checking in with project teams in Saudi Arabia, Germany, and Argentina. In India, Deepa is getting ready to go out for some food before an evening call with colleagues in the United States.
Those are just a few snippets based on stories we gathered in interviews about working in global UX (user experience) with more than 65 UX practitioners, who have lived or worked in almost as many countries.
The important thing is that these events can and do happen anywhere. Travel used to be exotic. International travel for business was unusual. Even with the rise of multinational companies, most products and certainly most services were local.
Then the Internet happened, and it now itās hard to find anyone whose work isnāt global in some way. Global teams collaborate around the world, among many countries, and in many configurations. And companies making digital products from e-commerce to games and social media do business across the world as easily as across the street. Even start-ups have global strategies.
Do we really think this is a new, more connected world? Actually, we do. For one thing, global work and travel are becoming routine. Hereās what we heard from one person after another. āWhen I started working, the idea of working with a team in another country was sort of exotic and now itās just part of everyday practice.ā Think about how fast this has happened.
Weāre pretty lucky to be working at a time when you can routinely work with people all around the world, with projects and customers that are spread across many locations in a virtual network.
All this global-ness doesnāt happen by accident, however. We talked to the people who make it happen. Our goal in this book is to show how good UX work is changing products around the world for the better. We have tried to look forward to what we can learn about tomorrowās UX practice from the leading trends today. You may find these glimpses into global practice are a mirror, reflecting your own work. You may find they are a beacon, showing a path ahead. Either way, we hope this book will inspire you and your own practice.
Before we get too far, letās define what we mean by āglobal work.ā Some people asked who or what had to be āglobalā to qualify and suggested choices that include:
ā¢ A group of (for example) Americans who work on a project for or in another country
ā¢ A group of people from many countries who work on a project for users in a single country, such as India
ā¢ Partners from several different countries who work together
ā¢ A global company that has people from all over the world
ā¢ Work on products or services used in more than one country
Our answer was, āYes, all of those.ā We are interested in how people think about their work and all the global aspects of it.
This Book Is about People
As we started this book, our focus was on stories of successful projects. As we talked to many people in the field (and used up packs of sticky notes sorting out what we heard), the most compelling insights were not the case studies, the details of their methodology, or a specific business success. The interesting stories were about how they experienced the practice itself.
We listened to the data. As a result this book is about how user experience practice is changing and how practitioners and teams around the world are creating great user experiences for a global context. Itās about the how more than the what.
This book is based on interviews with practitioners from many different countries, who work on many different types of projects. We looked behind the scenes at what it takes to create a user experience that works across borders, cultures, and languages.
We got input from a diverse group. We selected people for the interviews through a mix of planning, convenience, and snowball referrals. We looked for people who worked in different places, different industries, in a range of roles and UX disciplines, and with a variety of personal backgrounds.
We were especially interested in people who have worked in more than one country and people who have reached across cultures in their personal and professional lives. Some have lived in several countries for extended periods of time or have moved permanently to a new place. Some have jobs and projects that take them around the globe on a regular basis, while others travel more virtually.
The list of people who contributed to this book is just after the preface, and short biographies for each person are at the end of the book. In addition to many informal conversations, we recorded over 70 hours of interviews. Their thoughts on the challenges of the day-to-day work, as well as the larger issues of global UX, give this book a richer texture and more viewpoints than just those of two authors.
Like any ethnography or work of journalism, people are pictured in this book through their stories, their quotes, and what we learned by talking to them. But these portraits represent more than just the individuals. They are, we hope, enough of a collective voice that each of you reading this will see some part of yourself in them.
Charting the Territory
A few big themes emerged from these interviews. You will hear them reflected throughout the book, but they are important enough to mention right up front.
A Passion for User Experience
Even more than wanting diversity in the interviews, we wanted to talk to people with a passion for their work. And that passion came through over and over. We heard the same level of engaged innovation applied to work on a 25-year-old software product as to cutting edge start-ups.
In The Power of Pull, John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison examined the shift to a networked knowledge economy and the ādispositionāāthe attitudes, world views, and behaviorsāthat make people successful in this shifting environment. In their view, workers who are passionate are inspired by unexpected challenges and energized by new problems to solve. These are the people who use their connections to explore ideas that lead to large and small innovations.
In our interviews, that passion came through clearly. For Jenna Date, the Director of the Masters in Human-Computer Interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, it sounded like this:
I love doing work in different cultures just because it feels like it tests my edges and broadens my horizons as a human being as well as a researcher, and it gives me all of those experiences that Iām looking for in such a way that it tests me.
Jenna Date
Or like this from Steve Baty, a principal at Meld Studios in Australia:
When you start designing outside of your own cultural foundation, you have to really pay attention. If you are not open to those insights, you will just miss the opportunity to connect with the person you are designing for. Our design work is about creating a deep-seated emotional connection with people.
Steve (Doc) Baty
There were dozens of different ways in which UX is focused on building bridges to connect cultures in large and small ways. We were also struck by how passionate people are about what their work means for our products, companies, and the world.
Figure 1.1 Days like this are not unusual for UX-ers working on several global projects at once. Joe Leech, User Experience Director, cxpartners @mrjoe, Twitter.
A Global UX Toolkit
We also learned that the toolkit of UX techniques is very consistent in practice around the world. This broad UX practice informs and is informed by the challenges of global UX.
Whether the story was about early user or design research to create a better understanding of the context, the challenges of bringing that cultural knowledge home, or insights into innovative design processes the basic techniques we heard about were similar. From ethnographic research to design...
