Current Status of Usability in the Chinese IT industry (Part Two)

(...continuation of part one)

3. Lack of multidisciplinary background.
The majority Chinese practitioners come from graphic design or computer science backgrounds rather than psychology or other disciplines. Therefore, some practitioners still think that UI design is only small GUI, such as icon design. At the same time, most of the HCI research is only concentrate on some limited HCI technologies, such as multimodal interfaces using speech and pen, and software architecture, while paying little attention on usability aspect.

4. Lack of recognitions of the importance and the ROI of UCD from the managing board.
Although communication with users has been assigned high priority, Chinese enterprises rely mainly on accumulation of experience rather than well-disciplined methods for this purpose. Usability practitioners find it is hard to make managing directors to realize that the problem can only be solved by improving the process to make it more user-centred. Designers are not only learning from the west but also teaching them to the business leaders. Therefore, they also require research result in the ROI and instructions on how to popularise usability.

One of the users on uiGarden's English forum asked why there’s so much colourful and animated area, such as moving texts, etc. on lots of Chinese web sites. Are the usability rules different in China? Our Chinese users responded that their boss thought more ads and moving elements meant their companies were more profitable. As the designers usually don’t have rights to make the decision of their design, the only thing they can do is to follow their bosses’ decision. And the Chinese audience seems more tolerant to ads and other annoying stuffs on the website. However, this also raises another question. That is, if users don’t mind, should we still change the design according to usability rules? The discussion continues on the forum.

5. Different preference on communicating methods and interface layout
There are much more users on the Chinese forum than on the English one. Our Chinese users prefer to communicating in public spaces rather than more individually liked spaces, such as mailing list, etc.

Another Difference I want to mention is that left is considered to be more important than right in Chinese people’s mind. Our forum uses a western forum system which has preview button on the left and the post button on the right. However, our Chinese user criticised it as being a usability problem because they are used to click the left button to post.