Intro

Peoples’ ways of acting are inclined to a variety of cultural aspects that can also influence their day-to-day jobs. The aspects may include e.g. socio-cultural norms and conditions, beliefs, attitudes to responsibility and initiative, established practices, demograpics and technology trends.

Socio-cultural and Organizational Hierarchies

Strong hierarchies in either socio-culture or organizational culture can impact workplace environment; a common example are business workflows (e.g. authorization and role concepts, sub-task creation, etc.)

Examples

CHINA

In Hong Kong and parts of Mainland China examples were found where workflows require more than the common two-steps approvals we know from businesses in western-world countries and businesses. Providing more (up to 6-8) approval steps needs to be considered in the applications’ interaction when business workflows are designed and implemented.

Example from Utilities, Mainland China company: Releases of meter readings with high deviations don’t only get approved by the specialist but also need to get the approval of the respective team lead (today this process is done via email).

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, there is always an additional approval or a review step operated by the supervisor required which is added to business processes.

Behaviors and Beliefs

Examples

ISLAMIC REGIONS (and COMMUNITIES WORLDWIDE)

When designing banking apps in Islamic regions we not only need to focus on designing for Right-to-Left (RTL) language as one UX aspect; we also need to consider 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:

• strict abandonment of interest-bearing money lending to customers (Arabic: „Riba“)
• no investment in companies of tobacco, alcohol, defense industry or those who have high debts or who deal with processed pork markets
• no gambling deals (Arabic: „Maysir“)
• no non-transparent or high risk speculations (Arabic: „Gharar“)

Loan business example: Banks do not loan money but finance goods for their customers – they buy the good for their customers and they pay it back to the bank with a mutually agreed profit surcharge in several instalment payments.

Peoples’ Way of Acting and Working

The way of working may influence the design of applications. It should be reflected in the designs of business processes to support the people performing their tasks in the best way possible. E.g. in case the employee level of responsibility is lower, the specific application design could make it easier for the employees to be guided rather than deciding in full self-responsibility.

Way of working might include

• level of responsibility of employees
• level of commitment by employees
• level of employees’ reliability
• being reactive or proactive as employee
• employees’ own expectation settings regarding e.g. their own career
• employees’ way of forward-thinking

The education level may generally influence the way of working as well.

Examples

MEXICO

In a Mexican subsidiary of a German automotive company, the Goods Receipt team controls the material flow on the shop floor to secure that the assembly line never stops. The (material) stock control station should always indicate whether material got stuck on its way to the different assembly line stations and where it happened. The different materials have specific idle times at different shop floor levels, as defined by Quality Assurance plus times planned in for forklift transports.

The Goods Receipts 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, communicating in German; and even the communication in the Mexican subsidiary is in German.

The requirement by the SAP customer was to display and check the status of material flow. He required one integrated system out of the current 10 existing different systems. This system should only show incidents that have reasons for overdue times in the material flow.

The Research was done in Germany together with German experts and Mexican colleagues with outcome to be transferred to Mexico.

A SAP Fiori table (also called ‘worklist’) was the chosen floorplan, since it provides flexibility to be adapted to the users’ needs.

Outcome of a co-innovation project with SAP:

The Mexican colleagues don’t want to see the status (yellow or red) of worklist items, as they believe that the yellow status leads to incidents not being treated until they become critical (red). The employees tend to think that these incidents are not yet urgent, and postpone them.

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.

The groups assign the incidents to themselves. Once assigned, there is no back button and they are responsible for that incident until is solved. Otherwise, people tend to close an open incident without solving it if it is too critical and choosing another one until they find a less critical incident to work on.

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 a motivational aspect, they introduced a group stand-up meeting with a short report per group about the incidents they handled and the way they solved them, with the goal of enhancing the learning curve. Additionally, they also wanted to increase peer-pressure.

Working Mode

Examples

Paperwork with Signatures

INDIA

Traditionally in India, people trust best a signature or authorization on paper. Manual approvals are perceived to be more trustworthy than digital approvals. They also continue to archive approved documents in giant sized room storage. This is because due to fluctuating network bandwidth and electricity. Hence, Indian consumers demand therefor 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

Due to Safety reasons in utilities sector, signatures might also be needed on paper. Within a power plant in Mainland China Signatures are needed in paper and digital: 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. The company wanted to get rid of the paper but it got even more after the implementation of SAP due to more forms. This causes a significant increase in task time.

In general, the business processes in the energy industry are very complex due to Safety reasons. Whenever an issue occurs a supervisor 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.

One example regarding Safety: because one contractor didn’t follow the Safety rules he died in an accident and the whole chain was affected until the plant director got removed.

Technologies

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 Asset Maintenance within this company.

INDIA

A predominant number of workers in the small and medium sized business in India work with text-only mobile phones. Therefore, approvals and Information messages are sent as text messages (SMS) 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 more and more 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: money in Kiswahili) is a banking app for mobile phones that supports transferring money without a bank account. Originally launched by Safaricom in 2007 in Kenya with the purpose of enabling easy transfers of small amounts of money between people. M-Pesa has nowadays 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 or airtime) who credit the money to their M-Pesa account on the phone.

At first, people 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 for payment at shops, in taxis, to pay bills, and even to receive the salary. The money transfer is initiated through SMS, 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%.

The classic mobile phones in Kenya are more common than bank accounts. There, 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 infrastructural weakly developed regions where there is also a low wage level. Here, a service like M-Pesa includes a clear market gap. A market gap that does not exist in the same form in much of Europe, even though M-Pesa has now reached the continent, namely Romania (2014) and Albania (2015).

INDIA

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

Kiosk owners can also register as 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. After 8 November 2016, Paytm’s transactions and profit increased significantly

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. E.g. Apple Pay recorded 38 million registrations during the first day they went online in Mainland China.

User Demographics

User demographics consist of categories like age, gender, education, work experience, knowledge of and experience with technologies

Education

Examples

INDIA

In some manufacturing plants in India, goods to be shipped are color coded based on the batch they belong to. This way, employees who do not know to read or write, 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 was implemented working with common South African animal symbols on the production line side as well as the move tags. This way illiterate drivers were enabled to deliver stock to the correct places at the production line side.