Facilitating Dynamics of Focus Group Interviews in East Asia: Evidence and Tools by Cross-Cultural Study

As people’s values, behaviours and even cognitive processes differ in different cultures, facilitating cultural sensitivity in design has become a critical issue. Cultural differences have been taken into account in design in various ways, such as focusing on preferences in colour or form of products, using cultural dimensions as criteria for website design (Marcus & Gould, 2000), considering human cognition styles in interface design (Kim, Lee, & You, 2007; Dong & Lee, 2008), and creating new mobile communication experiences for target locales (Konkka, 2003). There have been, however, few studies focusing on how cultural differences influence user research methods in design. Since the design process increasingly involves users in terms of participatory design and co-design, the relationship between culture and user research methods has become a more crucial one. In addition, since most user research methods popularly employed these days were developed in Europe and North America, it is natural to question their fitness in very different cultures. Recently, a few studies have addressed the notion of cultural influence on user research methods. In their work on usability evaluation methods, Hall, de Jong, and Steehouder (2004) argued that European participants had more critical attitudes towards tested products and found more problems than Asian and African participants did. They showed that users’ cultural backgrounds do influence the results and the process of user research, concluding that retrospective think-aloud protocols are less affected by cultural differences than the plus-minus test. Similarly, Chavan (2005) argued that conventional ways of conducting usability tests do not work with Indian users because Indians are reluctant to give negative comments on test products and would rather try to work around them. In her work, she modified usability test methods by incorporating characteristics of Indian local culture, such as the collective nature of being on a train or critiques of “Bollywood” films. These related studies show that cultural backgrounds influence users’ attitudes and comments during the user research and highlight the need to take culture into account when applying user research methods. In addition to different attitudes to criticism, how group dynamics is organized in different cultures is also a crucial aspect,