Intro

The ways in which people interact with each other depend on a variety of cultural aspects that can also influence their day-to-day jobs. These aspects may include socio-cultural norms and conditions; beliefs; attitudes to responsibility and taking the initiative; established practices; demographics; and trends in technology. They may also have an impact on design decisions.

Socio-Cultural and Organizational Hierarchies

Strong hierarchies at a societal or an organizational level can impact the workplace environment. A common example is business workflows (for example authorization and role concepts, or sub-task creation).

Examples

CHINA

In Hong Kong and parts of Mainland China, you can find examples where workflows require more than the common two-step approvals that we know from businesses in the Western-world countries and businesses. This means that you will have to add (up to 6 or 8 additional) approval steps in the application’s interaction when you design business workflows.

Example: In a utility company in Mainland China, releases of meter readings with high deviations are not only approved by the specialist, but also by the respective team lead.

INDIA

In many small and medium enterprises in India, two business roles are introduced to work on tasks that are very often operated by one business role in a lot of other countries: There is a supervisor who oversees business activities and there is a subordinate role that performs operational activities for the supervisor. Most often the subordinates are school dropouts who don’t speak English fluently but who are efficient in calculations and numbers reporting. However, since they cannot (or are not allowed to) take business decisions, you always need to add an additional approval or a review step for the supervisor to the business processes.

Behaviors and Beliefs

Customs and religion influence the way people work. They may therefore also have an impact on the design of applications.

Examples

ISLAMIC REGIONS (and COMMUNITIES WORLDWIDE)

When designing banking apps in Islamic regions you need to bear two things in mind:

• Designing for Right-to-Left (RTL) language
• Broader requirements from the Islamic community to make banking acceptable under Sharia law and consistent with family customs on how to make important financial decisions.

Therefore, it is not only the countries’ or regions’ banking laws and regulations that affect UX but also the culture itself:

• No interest-bearing money lending to customers (Arabic: “Riba”).
• No investment in tobacco, alcohol, or defense industry companies.
• No investment in companies that are high in debt or dealing with processed pork markets.
• No gambling deals (Arabic: “Maysir”)
• No non-transparent or high-risk speculations (Arabic: “Gharar”)

Example

Banks don’t lend money to their customers, but buy the goods for them. The customers in return pay back the equivalent amount of money with a mutually agreed profit surcharge in several installment payments.

People’s Way of Acting and Working

The way people work may influence the design of applications. In order to support the people performing their tasks in the best way possible, make sure that their working method is reflected in the designs of the business processes. For instance, if the employee’s level of responsibility is lower, the specific application design could make it easier for the employees to be guided rather than them having to make decisions on their own.

The following working methods can be influenced by:

• The level of responsibility of employees
• The level of commitment by employees
• The level of employees’ reliability
• Being reactive or proactive as an employee
• The employees’ own career prospects or other expectations
• The employees’ way of forward-thinking
• The employees’ level of education

Examples

MEXICO

In a Mexican subsidiary of a German automotive company, the goods receipt team controls the material flow on the shop floor to make sure that the assembly line never stops. The (material) stock control station should always indicate whether and where material got stuck on its way to the different assembly line stations.

The goods receipt workers in the Mexican subsidiary are all new young employees, only hired for this specific job. They are trained in the German head quarter for one year.

The company wanted to display and check the status of material flow. They needed their 10 existing systems to be integrated into one system that only showed incidents due to delays in the material flow. The research was done in Germany together with German experts and Mexican colleagues, with the outcome to be transferred to Mexico. An SAP Fiori table (also called worklist) was the chosen floorplan, since it can be adapted to the users’ needs.

The Mexican colleagues didn’t want to see the status (yellow or red) of worklist items, as they believed that the yellow status would lead to incidents not being treated until they became critical (red).

The user teams consist of groups of 3-4 people per shift and are asked to work together in order to solve the incident within their shift. These groups assign the incidents to themselves. Once assigned, there is no back button, and they are responsible for that incident until is solved. This measure was introduced to increase efficiency.

The German project lead wanted the goods receipt team managers to assign the incidents, but the Mexican colleagues preferred group self-assignment and they followed this approach in the end.

As an incentive, they introduced a group stand-up meeting with a short report per group about the incidents that they had handled and the way they had solved them, with the goal of enhancing the learning curve. With these meetings, they also wanted to increase peer pressure.

Working Mode

Business processes are different in the various countries around the world. Make sure to get enough information so that you can provide the customers with everything they need.

Examples

Paperwork with Signatures

INDIA

Traditionally in India, people trust a signature or an authorization on paper rather than digital approval. They also continue to archive approved documents in giant-sized room storage. This is due to fluctuating network bandwidth and electricity. Hence, Indian consumers demand a function to download data as a PDF or an Excel sheet, so that they can easily print it and send it for approval or review.

CHINA

At a power plant in Mainland China, signatures are needed in paper and digitally: maintenance workers need the signatures to start the daily routine. Due to safety reasons, every work step needs to be signed on paper as well.

In general, the business processes in the power industry are very complex due to safety reasons. Whenever an issue occurs, a supervisor’s approval is needed to get it solved. It is very common in China to have double-checks and that a more experienced person gives the okay. You should bear this in mind when designing apps for this market.

One further example regarding safety: because one contractor didn’t follow the safety rules, he died in an accident, and the whole chain was affected up to the plant director, who was then removed.

Technologies

Be aware of the technical devices tht employees use and how they use them. In some countries, smart phones cannot be afforded by the majority. In others, a certain device may be used, or it may be used differently, for example for money transfers.

Examples

CHINA

Around 80% of asset maintenance workers at a Chinese plant use an iPad mini, which led to the implementation of specific native apps for this company department.

INDIA

A predominant number of workers in small and medium-sized businesses in India work with text-only mobile phones. Therefore, approvals and information messages are sent as text messages to office assistants, supervisors and other shop-floor business users in the factories, both on the road and in remote sites.

Payment via mobile phones

Mobile phones are increasingly used for money transfers and payment especially in regions where banks are rare, and the population doesn’t have access to bank accounts or lack cash. This has an impact on banking processes.

AFRICA

M-Pesa (Pesa means money in Kiswahili) is a banking app for mobile phones that supports transferring money without a bank account. Originally launched by Safaricom in Kenya in 2007 with the purpose of enabling easy transfers of small amounts of money between people. M-Pesa nowadays has 30 million users in 16 countries, but it is still mostly used in Kenya. A simple mobile phone and a banking-SIM-card is all that users need. A smartphone is not required.

Users must go to one of the Safaricom agents (there are approximately 40,000 in Kenya, mostly corner shop sellers) who credit the money to their M-Pesa account on the phone.

At first, people who are located in smaller and bigger cities used the M-Pesa app to transfer a part of their earnings to their family, instead of having to travel far to the rural areas where their families live. In addition, the app is used in shops, in taxis, to pay bills, and even to receive salary. The money transfer is initiated through text message, which is a safe way to transmit data way in countries that fall short of bandwidth and mobile internet connection. Before the usage of M-Pesa, only a small part of the population had access to a bank, in 2014 it was already 75%.

Classic mobile phones in Kenya are more common than bank accounts. The use of computers and laptops has almost been skipped in their technological evolution, but mobile phones are massively spread within the population.

Meanwhile, the M-Pesa success story has also expanded to other countries, for example to India, Egypt, Afghanistan and Ghana, and has found countless imitators. The system is particularly suitable for infrastructurally weakly developed regions where there is also a low wage level. Here, a service like M-Pesa includes a clear market gap.

INDIA

Kiosk owners in India cooperate with the Indian government. They offer online forms to the rural population to fill out official documents required by the state(s).

Kiosk owners can also register at a franchise station for the Indian Post. Besides the classical services (post stamps/shipping) they execute the financial service offering of the Indian post. Users can transfer money with their mobile phone via post offices or kiosks as banks are often too far away for the rural communities. This procedure covers nearly 89% of the rural area.

Paytm (‘Pay through mobile’) is an Indian electronic payment and e-commerce brand which makes money transactions via mobile easy-to-use. It was massively influenced and funded by the Chinese e-commerce platform Alibaba. They offer their services with apps for Android, Windows and iOS.

In 2013, the company launched Paytm Wallet, which became India’s largest mobile payment service platform with over 150 million wallets and 75 million Android-based app downloads as of November 2016. This rise in usage of the service was largely due to the demonetization of the 500 and 1,000-rupee currency bills.

With Paytm it is possible to pay at kiosks or auto-rikshaws in lieu of cash. Every vendor owns a unique QR code, the customer scans it, enters the amount and thus transfers the money.

CHINA

In Mainland China WeChat Pay is used by approximately 600 million people and covers 40% of the mobile-payment-sector. Through a mobile QR code that is updated every 60 seconds on the users’ phone, the vendor can scan the code and enter the payment amount. This system works much faster than credit card payment (so called quick pay).

In addition, users of WeChat Pay can lend money to family and friends, pay electricity and heating bills, or trade with financial products. Alibaba is the major competitor.

These two competitors make it difficult for other companies to start mobile-banking in China but the many potential users attract companies like Apple, LG, Huawei and Samsung to enter the market with their pay apps. For example, Apple Pay recorded 38 million registrations during the first day they went online in Mainland China.

User Demographics

User demographics consist of categories such as age, gender, education, work experience, knowledge of and experience with technologies. When designing for customers in different countries, you may for example be confronted with finding solutions for illiterate employees.

Examples

INDIA

In some manufacturing plants in India, goods to be shipped are color-coded based on the batch they belong to. This way, illiterate employees can still identify the goods by color and load them as a batch into the truck. The color codes are entered via an SAP system with an extended field.

SOUTH AFRICA

In an automotive plant in South Africa a system used to be implemented working with common South African animal symbols on the production line as well as the move tags. That way, illiterate drivers were enabled to deliver stock to the correct places in the production line. This was the temporary solution to deal with illiteracy until a school was built on-site for the workers.