Mobile Usability: Experiences From Iran and Turkey

International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction ISSN: 1044-7318 (Print) 1532-7590 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hihc2...
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International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction

ISSN: 1044-7318 (Print) 1532-7590 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hihc20

Mobile Usability: Experiences From Iran and Turkey Bijan Aryana & Torkil Clemmensen To cite this article: Bijan Aryana & Torkil Clemmensen (2013) Mobile Usability: Experiences From Iran and Turkey, International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 29:4, 220-242, DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2013.765760 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2013.765760

Published online: 26 Mar 2013.

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Date: 05 May 2016, At: 03:13

Intl. Journal of Human–Computer Interaction, 29: 220–242, 2013 Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 1044-7318 print / 1532-7590 online DOI: 10.1080/10447318.2013.765760

Mobile Usability: Experiences From Iran and Turkey Bijan Aryana1 and Torkil Clemmensen2 1

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Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Trondheim, Norway Copenhagen Business School, Copenhagen, Denmark

In this article, a country specific comparative mobile usability study is presented, using Iran and Turkey as the two chosen emerging/emergent nation exemplars of smartphone usage and adoption. In a focus group study, three mobile applications were selected by first-time users of smartphones. In both countries, the music player application was tested, wherein common patterns of accessing and sorting songs emerged. Whereas the Iranian users appeared to be more interested in social networking via use of an SMS service, the Turkish users tended to prefer to apply hierarchies to their own daily personal contacts. The results and analysis establish the existence of country specific issues and concerns, as well as reveal generic usability issues. The article concludes that the source of these issues is most likely due to a combination of certain contextual features endemic to both Iran and Turkey, not only to ethnic, religious, or cultural issues.

1. INTRODUCTION Cultural usability can be viewed from various perspectives, for example, as ethnic (or country specific) culture of using interactive technology or as a cross-cultural issue of fitting imported interactive technology to local users’ needs (Clemmensen, 2012). In this article, we present countryspecific experiences from Turkey and Iran on mobile usability with a focus on the use of smartphone applications. The novel conceptual contribution in this article is a proposal for The authors would like to appreciate following people because of their great help and support during the study: Fazin Shariati, Babak Amjadi, and Jenia Baghdanian at the LG Electronics office in Tehran; Rami Kim at the LG Electronics office in Istanbul; Dr. Vahid Choopankareh, Dr. Alireza Ajdari and Jamshid Emami at the Department of Industrial Design, University of Tehran; Professor Özlem Er at the Department of Industrial Product Design, Istanbul Technical University; Mahdi Rahnama and Mahideh Arabpour, students at Department of Industrial Design, University of Tehran; and Elham Ghazi, Sara Rakei, Koray Gelmez, and Ezgi Elvan, students at the Department of Industrial Product Design, Istanbul Technical University. Address correspondence to Bijan Aryana, Department of Product Design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, Kolbjørn Hejes vei 2b, NO-7491 Trondheim, Norway. E-mail: bijan.aryana@ ntnu.no

evaluating country-specific usability and user experiences that focus on smartphones and mobile devices in high-income emerging markets. Smartphones can be described as devices that are capable of running various imported and local applications that have their own types of interaction designs. The early definitions of smartphones introduced them as a combination of Personal Digital Assistants and conventional cellular phones. However, at the time of writing this article the so-called smartphones comprise a licensed operating system and are capable of installing different applications for processing and operating documents similar to personal computers. Finally, they are wireless terminal devices that are able to send and receive data through Internet, Bluetooth, Global Positioning System, and similar technologies (Liu, Chen, & Chen, 2011). In this way, smartphones are flexible and complex interactive devices that need a high degree of mobile usability because of their presence in every aspect of users’ daily life. In our definition, country specific usability is a common human–computer interaction (HCI) behavior shared by most, if not all, users in a country or market. Country-specific usability problems may sometimes be mixed with general usability problems that users can face, regardless of their cultural backgrounds. Furthermore, the country-specific problems may be connected to a set of reasons that are ethnic or national culture oriented and are more related to the user group’s experience, socioeconomic situation, and regulations. Current literature on country-specific usability compares Western (mainly the United States and Western Europe) and East Asian countries (Clemmensen & Roese, 2010; Choi, Lee, & Kim, 2006). Regarding the broader area of cultural mobile HCI, a significant number of research studies that target non-Western countries focus mainly on China and India (Donner, 2008). However, although China and India may be the most important markets because of their size and number of potential customers, there are other important emerging markets, such as Iran and Turkey, with comparatively high average income customers (International Monetary Fund, 2011) who can afford smartphones. These markets are emerging markets with non-Western culture; at the same time, they differ from

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emerging markets in China and India in terms of population and market size (having a much smaller and more homogenous population). Iran and Turkey, two neighboring countries, are similar in terms of population size, religion (Islam), and— important to the smartphone market—economic indexes such as gross domestic product and purchasing power parity per capita. At the time of writing this article, both countries face penetration rates of mobile phones close to 100%. There are long-term differences between the two countries that may influence mobile usability. Iran is mainly a Muslim Shia country and is an Islamic republic (Curtis & Hooglund, 2008), whereas in Turkey the majority of the population is Sunni Muslims, and the political system is a parliamentary republic (Metz, 2008); in other words, the overall lifestyle and life conditions are slightly different in the two countries. Furthermore, Turkey has generally been faster than Iran in developing new generations of mobile telecommunications infrastructures (Iran Telecommunications Report, 2012; Turkey Telecommunications Report, 2012). We argue in this article that some of these characteristics, such as governmental regulations, have created country-specific issues in using smartphones, whereas other country characteristics apparently do not influence the usability and user experience of smartphones. This study focuses on first-time users of smartphones in Iran and Turkey using three different mobile phone applications: Music (tested in both countries), Short Message Service (SMS; tested in Iran), and Contacts (tested in Turkey). These applications were installed on the device by the manufacturer and were selected by focus groups in each country to concentrate on applications that were important to user groups. Considering all the aforementioned specifications, our research questions were, How do users in Iran and Turkey interact with commonly used standard smartphone applications? Accordingly, what are possible country specific usability problems? The research questions were shaped to reflect our qualitative approach, as indicated by the use of the question words what or how to convey the study’s open, emerging, and developing design (Creswell, 2009). Answers to these questions should be helpful for understanding the possible reasons for country specific mobile usability problems in Iran and Turkey.

2. RELATED WORK The HCI community has developed clear and established definitions of the concept of usability. The International Organization for Standardization’s (1998) standard of “ergonomic requirements for office work with visual display terminals” explained in detail the issues of usability measures, usability requirements specification, and evaluation of usability during design (IS09241-11). Unlike usability, a consensus or a standard definition of culture has not been developed in the HCI domain. Therefore, to define cultural usability, scholars have applied a variety of existing cultural

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models from different fields, instead of attempting to provide a single, exact definition of culture (Aryana & Øritsland, 2010). Sun (2002) identified two trends of research in culture and usability classified as engineering and humanist trends. In the engineering trend, culture is viewed as a combination of individuals’ general characteristics, such as demographics, personal knowledge, information technology knowledge, and organizational culture. In the humanist trend, culture is viewed as national culture. National cultural factors are related to common human attitudes and ways of thinking and relating to one another in a community/society (such as power distance, collectivism, and individualism) or to an assumption about national group differences in behavior such as nonverbal behaviors. Sun (2002) believed that the engineering trend is the dominant trend in usability research, and building on this line of research, she then explained the concept of cultural usability by connecting S. Hall’s (1997) circuit of culture to engineering usability issues. As she purported, S. Hall’s circuit of culture interprets culture by the main components of representation, identity, regulation, production, and consumption. She connected these specifications of users to components such as representation and identity in S. Hall’s circuit of culture. However, many other researchers in HCI have opted for the humanist view of cultural usability; in particular, Hofstede’s theory of national cultural dimensions has been used by many researchers (Clemmensen & Roese, 2010; Oshlyansky, 2007). Eune and Lee (2009) use Hofstede’s model in their research on mobile phones, suggesting recommendations for connecting marketing strategies to cultural specifications. They reviewed different cultural models such as Hall, Hofstede, and Trompenaars (1994), and using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, they mapped cultural dimensions to mobile phone user interface design components and then applied these in design practice. This was done by implementing an online survey in Japan, China, and Korea. The online survey included questions about mobile phones in five categories that corresponded to the five dimensions of Hofstede’s cultural model. They suggested a “glocal” approach, in which global companies have country specific positioning of their mobile phones and mobile phone features. S. Kim, Kim, Cho, Kim, and Chang (2003) carried out a study of mobile phone cultural usability at Samsung and used the recommendations in a design practice exercise. They tried to understand similar patterns among Korean mobile users using Hofstede’s and Hall’s cultural models. Three different methods of survey, observation, and focus group interviews were used in their research to compare Korean users with American users. The findings were then translated into design recommendations. They concluded that in a culture with high collectivism such as the Korean culture, SMS is a frequently used feature, and thus access to the SMS feature should be easy and direct, for example, by a specified button (or a hot key). At the same time, use of voice mail might not be as high in the Korean cultural context

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as it would be in a high-context culture; therefore, a direct physical button for voice mail would not be required. These design recommendations were applied in one of the Samsung products that had variants for the American and Korean markets. A further study by Choi et al. (2006) provided design proposals for mobile usability, comparing the situation in Korea to that of Japan and Finland, using Hofstede’s cultural dimensions as a theory of national culture. Hofstede’s theory has been used directly, without first doing user studies, as a normative model in the design of mobile user interfaces. J. H. Kim and Lee (2005) suggested culture-specific user interface design prototypes, using a concept that links user interface elements to Hofstede’s dimensions. The scope of their study is icon recognition. They developed a model in which user interface elements for each phase of interaction were defined. The phases of interaction in this model included perception, navigation, execution, and confirmation. In the next step, an online user interface prototype was designed and evaluated through the web. Users had to recognize icons during different levels of their interaction with this prototype. For evaluation of the tests they used a correspondence between Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and user interface elements. In this way they were able to assess the relationships between cultural dimensions and each element of user interface. In the evaluation of their prototypes, they found differences between Korean and American users. However, the HCI methods used in the research on cultural usability may be culturally biased. Clemmensen (2011) studied the challenges of usability evaluation in different cultural contexts. The motivation behind his research was that usability evaluation methods developed in the European or American context might not be valid for other cultural contexts, such as those in China and India. He carried out a pilot study in Denmark, China, and India and included usability testing, interviewing, and analysis according to each cultural context. A set of hypotheses about usability evaluation in different cultural contexts was presented at the end of his study that suggested recommendations for cultural usability evaluation such as specifications of evaluators, test procedures, and users’ segmentation. For example, when doing usability testing in India, scenarios could be presented in a Bollywood dramatic format, similar to those suggested by Chavan (2005). In our study, we took the engineering trend view of cultural usability (Sun, 2002), that is, our approach was mainly empirical and design proposal focused. In addition, we took into account that existing HCI methods may be culturally biased (Clemmensen, 2012) by making the choice of applications to test a part of our research design. Our research method was to do usability tests on smartphone applications with a limited number of users and to analyze the results with a qualitative method. As we were able to observe the users’ interaction with the device, there was no need for a prediction of this interaction by a predefined cultural model, such as that in Hofstede’s model.

2.1. Cultural Usability of Mobile Messaging Services The use of SMS around the world indicates a rich variety of social and cultural contexts for this kind of HCI that have been captured only on a general level by the existing definition of usability. Social and cultural contexts have been neglected, to some degree, in the conventional usability theories. Although SMS has been a widely used mobile messaging system, it has been shown not to be so suitable for conducting mobile cooperative tasks (Tang & Begole, 2003). This lack of support in SMS systems for mobile cooperative tasks may be a clue for understanding SMS usage scenarios in societies where people define their activities collectively rather than individually. Sun (2003) believed that if we were to look at SMS with conventional theories of usability, we would find many SMS problems, such as small display or inefficient input methods. Despite all these conventional usability problems, the author argued, SMS is a widely successful feature around the world. She suggested that this paradox has not been well understood in HCI because of the widespread neglect of the social and cultural contexts in the conventional usability theories, and therefore a new model of cultural usability should be proposed. 2.2. Cultural Usability of Contact List and Address Book Applications At the time of writing this article, contact list and address book applications tend to have a similar structure, with names saved and sorted alphabetically in a list. However, little evidence has been found regarding alternative types of structures, such as using graphic symbols or tagging features. Oulasvirta, Raento, and Tiitta (2005) posited that some users would like to know about the current status of their contacts before trying to call them. For example, users might like to refer their friends but would like to know whether it is an appropriate time to contact them. They called this type of information “cues” and developed and evaluated a prototype in which the contact list application shares “cues” of users’ current status. Nguyen and Oh (2010) proposed the ability of tagging contacts on smartphones and evaluated a related prototype. They found that approximately half of Korean users organized their mobile device contacts into groups, and four of 86 Korean respondents wanted to organize their contacts into hierarchies. Although Nguyen and Oh focused on the influence of social paradigms on use of contact list application, regardless of the cultural specifications of societies, Bhamidipaty and Deepak (2007) tested a contact list prototype that was designed for a specific cultural context. Their target users belonged to the base of the pyramid or lower strata of the society of India, that is, those who were semiliterate or illiterate. They developed an address book prototype that was symbol based instead of regular text based. 2.3. Cultural Usability of Multimedia Applications In a study on cross-cultural usability testing of mobile multimedia applications, Belt (2010) suggested that a

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cross-cultural usability perspective should be applied in the product development because some current usability metrics could have been influenced by cultural differences and are therefore insufficient when cultural differences play a role. Belt’s study is unique in the sense that she explored mobile cultural usability for an application that was not communication related. At the time, SMS and contact list applications were mainly communication-related applications; however, mobile phones and especially smartphones were already being used as multifunctional devices. Furthermore, Belt concluded that cultural cognition and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions applied in current HCI literature are not sufficient to predict the results of a study. She suggested that methodology of usability evaluation should be localized according to the varieties in cognitive and interaction styles. Although significant differences in performance metrics were not found in the results of her study, there were differences in the types and frequency of usability problems. There were varieties in verbalization patterns, interaction style, and approach to testing. Similar to Belt, Shi (2008, 2010) discussed national cultural usability, showing that there is a need for localizing usability evaluation methods in some countries, especially when usability problems are country specific. Her case was a comparison of usability evaluation of a multimedia “wedding clipart” application in Denmark and China, in which she found culturally specific usability problems (Shi, 2010).

2.4. Related Studies on Countries in the Middle East Iran and Turkey share demographic characteristics as emerging markets for smartphones, in contrast to larger emerging markets such as in China and India. Moreover, these two countries have been described as being Islamic countries (Rippin, 2008). In general, there are few studies about mobile HCI in the Middle East; however, some scholars (Al-shamaileh, Sutcliffe, & Angeli, 2011) have conducted research studies on the role of Islam on users’ interaction with different interactive systems. Similar to the studies in other parts of the world, scholars have used predefined cultural models such as Hofstede in their research studies of HCI in the Middle East. Marcus and Hamoodi (2009) explored a number of university websites from Arabic countries and discovered some similarities among these websites. They drew connections between the common characteristics and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, and then suggested some changes in these websites for building better communication with global audiences. For example, they suggested that instead of focusing on the buildings and logos, activities of students should be reflected in the home pages of these websites. They believed that focusing on logos and buildings was a result of the presumed high power distance in Arabic culture, according to Hofstede’s cultural dimensions. Unlike Marcus and Hamoodi, who relied on the predefined cultural dimensions, Rambo and Liu (2010) used an

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empirical approach. According to their study on female users of e-commerce systems in Saudi Arabia, adoption of online shopping could have a positive effect on Saudi female consumers’ shopping experience. However, the major factor in designing successful online shopping sites is the consideration of sociocultural factors of society. One of the methods that they recommend for such consideration is modeling the social reality of e-commerce in Saudi Arabia and investigating and modeling the mental models of the Saudi female consumers by using a semantic analysis method. Saneifard (2009) carried out a case study on e-commerce in Iran. The author searched for distinctive driving forces of the emergence of mobile commerce in the country. Her results, some factors, such as attitude toward use, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and innovation, are influential in adoption of e-commerce in Iran, whereas personal characteristics of users do not have an effect, and issues such as risk avoidance that might have cultural roots do have some negative effect on the adoption of such technologies. In another study on Iran, Jahanshahi, Khaksar, Yaghoobi, and Nawaser (2011) reported that acceptance of mobile government systems might be higher than that of electronic (desktop) government systems. They also found some influential contextual factors, such as education, regulations, bureaucracy, and readiness of citizens, for accepting the new technology. Rabiei, Ganji, and Shamsi (2012) evaluated the effective factors of mobile advertising acceptance in Iran, suggesting that most demographic characteristics, especially gender of users, could be considered as effective factors. According to their research, male users are more positive toward receiving mobile advertisements. Looking at the neighboring country, Turkey, Dedeoglua (2004) claimed that in the early emergence of mobile phones in Turkey, symbolic needs overruled functional needs. Çelik (2011) found that mobile phones played an important role in Turkish society, as many citizens have a hybrid identity dealing with both modern and traditional trends. For example, users with a Kurdish background could feel their Kurdish identity in their mobile experience. This feeling was important for them because they faced with some limitations in writing and speaking their mother language in Turkey. Salman, Cheng, and Patterson (2012) showed that using an appropriate iconic user interface would improve the usability and quality of use of a mobile emergency service in Turkey, in comparison with a textual user interface. Another study on mobile social networking applications in Turkey elaborated on the need for localization, especially in terms of language (Öztürk & Rızvano˘glu, 2011). Finally, Al-Khalifa (2010) explored an interesting aspect of localization of mobile device in the Middle East. He discovered that because of specific characteristics of Arabic script in which vowels are not used, deaf users had major difficulties in understanding Arabic scripts. Therefore, he developed an Arabic sign language translator application for smartphones.

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In sum, studies on cultural usability in the Middle East show a variety of influential factors such as language, ethnic background, scripts, differences between genders, economic infrastructure, and politics. No studies suggest that the usability issues in this region should be subsumed under the perspective of religion or the “Islamic World” heading. There may be common cultural grounds in the region but also contrasts between the countries in terms of political system, language, and even religion, which can sometimes make these countries quite different. Unlike in most countries in the Middle East, people in Iran and Turkey do not speak Arabic. Persian, the most common language spoken in Iran, is classified as an Indo-European language, one that is not from the same language family as Arabic and Turkish. Similarly, the Turkish language is classified as an Altaic language, which makes it basically different from both Persian and Arabic. In addition, unlike all Arabic countries and Turkey, the majority of Iranians are Shia Muslims (Nydell, 2012). 2.5. Summary Cultural usability studies have been based on two mainstreams for understanding culture, the first of which is modeling or predicting cultures. Hofstede’s and Hall’s cultural models have been widely used to model cultures. A limitation in this kind of research is that, although the issue of usability has been discussed at the theoretical level, it has not been a core part of the empirical component of the research. This means that user research, observation, and usability testing in different cultural contexts have not been used on a large scale, and cultures have been understood by using normative cultural models. The second mainstream included research studies in which researchers tried to observe users and their cultural specifications during empirical studies, without any prediction or strong assumptions about cultural or country specific characteristics. Although cultural models usually consider culture as a static entity, empirical studies often emphasize the dynamic essence of culture, that is, changes in cultural practice according to the time, space, and context of use. Studies in the Middle East have revealed a wide range of influential contextual factors that could not be predicted by static cultural models. 3. METHOD Although this study started with a focus on culture and cultural differences, the term “country specific” was preferred, as it covered a broad range of usability issues in addition to what was denoted by the discussed concepts of culture. The case study approach used in this research was holistic multiple case design (Yin, 1994) in which a single research objective was followed in multiple contexts, and in each context a specific case was designed (Figure 1). This approach has been discussed as a common strategy for case analysis by Eisenhardt (1989), that is, the overall idea of the analysis is to become intimately familiar with each case—in

FIG. 1. Holistic multiple case designs in Iran and Turkey (color figure available online).

our case, the Turkish case and the Iranian case—as stand-alone entities. This strategy allowed the unique patterns of each case to emerge before we went on to search for cross-case patterns, and then we generalized these further. We selected this approach for the following reasons: • We wanted to consider differences in market conditions such as market segments, and these differences influenced the way that we selected our samples. Therefore, we had two case designs. • Each step of case studies was shaped based on the results of the previous step. For example, we tested two different sets of tasks in Iran and Turkey because participants of focus groups in each country concentrated on different applications. However, because no experimental controls or manipulation should be involved in a case study, using multiple cases can bring concerns about the validity of comparison. A main reason for such concerns is that multiple case designs could not be quite similar in terms of conditions and methods, as the researcher is not able to control the procedure of a case study like an experiment. However, according to Benbasat, Goldstein, and Mead (1987), in most popular frameworks of case study research such as Yin’s (1994) and Bonoma’s (1985) frameworks, applying multiple case designs is suggested as a way for providing a description, building or testing a theory, or generating general research results. Because the research question of this study requires a description of users’ interaction with smartphones’ applications, using multiple case designs can be a good candidate, whereas precise comparison is not possible. This is explained more in section 7. The conditions of field study in each country were influenced by facilities which were provided by an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) that was active in both countries. These facilities were thus not similar in the two countries, especially in terms of access to users, number of participants and time limitations. We aimed to use the data resulting from case studies to understand the quality and existence of country-specific

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usability problems, and thus we applied a systematic discovery of theory from data which was shaped based on the grounded theory concept (Glaser & Strauss, 2006). The version of grounded theory that we used was “constructive” grounded theory (Charmaz, 2002), which allowed us to explore the influence of contextual factors on the research process. In the alternative “objective” grounded theory, the researcher represents the findings without any interpretation or without building connections among them (Marvasti, 2003). We knew that, unlike when doing user research studies in laboratory settings, in this study we were not able to, and did not want to, predict and define the exact conditions before the study; this was another reason for using the constructivist approach, as this approach allows for the possibility of such subjective interpretations by researchers and their respondents as a part of the analysis (Marvasti, 2003). In addition, we applied a scenario-based requirements process for identifying the main themes of country-specific usability problems in which past use of existing systems or future use of potential systems were being used for understanding and interpreting the tasks (Carroll, 2002). In our study, uses of similar or related products were discussed as a basis of themes. Considering the aforementioned characteristics, the main phases of case studies in Iran and Turkey were as follows: 1. Interviews with regional marketing teams 2. Focus group studies 3. Usability tests (the main component of research explained in this study) 4. Problem solving The interviews and focus group studies in the two countries served not only to identify the contextual parameters that might cause usability problems but also to meet the basic requirements for doing the usability tests. These included making a study plan and designing the users’ tasks. Usability tests were the most important part of this study, and the final outcome was finding usability problems under the predefined themes, as described later. In addition, a three-step qualitative analysis (Huberman & Miles, 1994) was used for each phase of the research method. For example, the focus groups study included the following steps: 1. Reducing the data: This step began with having a transcription of the focus group discussions. In some parts of the discussion, participants addressed certain applications that had country-specific usability issues. These notes were helpful for reducing the data to a set of critical applications. 2. Displaying the data: In the second step, some basic themes were developed. Each theme represented the usability issues of an application. 3. Drawing conclusions: According to each theme, it was possible to design a task as the final conclusion of the focus group studies.

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3.1. Developing the Themes by Focus Groups Focus groups are usually designed to explore specific topics, views, and experiences through group interaction (Stewart, Shamdasani, & Rook, 2007). Focus groups can be used early in a study to get insights from the interaction among participants (Stewart et al., 2007); for this reason, they were ideal for this part of case study, in comparison with other methods, such as interviews, which are less interactive and group based. Further, we considered the marketing process because previous reviews showed that in many similar studies, the reality of the marketing and industry infrastructure was missing (Aryana & Øritsland, 2010). In other words, although the marketing networks deliver new interactive technologies and products to users, their role is not important in HCI research. In these case studies, we arranged interviews with marketing team members and asked them to explain their thoughts on a number of topics within certain time limits. These topics included user groups in each market, existing products, current experiences of country-specific customization, and possible ways for accessing users. The procedures for developing themes in each country are described in the following subsections. Themes in Iran The interviews with the marketing team of OEM in Iran revealed that smartphones were perceived as becoming the core area of mobile phone marketing activity in the near future. The interviewees claimed that there were many potential first-time users of smartphones among the existing mobile phone user population in Iran. The marketing team added that “innovative users” in Iran had an important role in the diffusion process of these relatively new products. These innovative users or “innovators” would usually adopt new technologies faster than other segments of users (Mahajan, Muller, & Wind, 2000). Hence, we chose to do focus groups with this category of users in Iran and Turkey. The focus group in Iran consisted of 15 innovative user participants. They were selected and introduced by the OEM and had the following specifications: • • • • •

Aged between 20 and 30 years Potential first-time users of smartphones Students or graduates of design or engineering fields Interest in consumer electronics and digital products High activity in social networks such as Facebook (this activity was identified by characteristics such as number of friends or daily hours spent in social networks)

After the users were introduced to the aim and procedure of the focus group, participants were encouraged to share their ideas and experiences of mobile phone use in Iran. These discussions were then narrowed down by focusing on smartphones and addressing their simultaneous computation, entertainment, and communication-related features. Participants were encouraged to focus on current products and possible ways for

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modification or enhancing them to be culturally customized, instead of considering entirely new ideas for mobile devices. In addition, the focus group method was mixed with another qualitative method of diary studies. This method has been used in some studies on mobile devices, such as studies on voice mail (Palen & Salzman, 2002), mobile information needs (Sohn, Griswold, Li, & Hollan, 2008) and mobile e-mail (Franssila, 2009). The participants were asked to write short diaries about smartphones. Because they did not have any prior experience of using other types of smartphones, the following methods for writing a diary were suggested to the participants. In this way, they would be able to experience and observe the use of smartphones in the requested time: • Daily observation of smartphone users at work or in public places • Trial use of smartphones in showrooms of electronic stores • Daily observation and idea sharing with either friends or family members who used a smartphone Participants were asked to use at least two of these techniques and to respond to “Which features of smartphones need customization in Iran? Give examples from your own reports.” The considered time for the diary study was 2 weeks. After completion of the diary studies, a list of features that were mentioned in the diary study because of the time and resources limitations, it was not possible to test all proposed features in usability tests. Two features were selected for usability tests by participants, and two related usability themes were developed, which focused on potential country-specific usability problems of each feature. These are explained next in greater detail. SMS social networking behavior. SMS was frequently mentioned in the diaries. The interviews with the marketing team of OEM indicated that primary features (basic communication such as call, SMS, and MMS) had less importance for users in comparison with secondary features (computation, entertainment, and multimedia-related features). However, the participants explained how people used SMS, that is, not just for exchanging of messages but also for sharing interests and having fun in a group. This observation was the basis of the first theme—Theme 1: Iranian users have usability problems with the current SMS applications when they want to perform tasks that are related to their SMS social networking behavior. Sorting and finding songs through Music application. Listening to music is perhaps among the most common secondary feature that mobile users discovered in their devices, as the marketing team underlined the importance of the Music application. Current media player applications on smartphones usually enable managing and accessing music through media tag information (album name, artist name, genre, etc.). However, according to the interviews, focus groups, and diary studies, there were some users who still preferred to access music tracks by conventional file and folder browsing because they used music files that did not have the correct media tag

information and therefore found the new features not useful. This observation led to the second theme—Theme 2: Iranian users have usability problems in sorting and finding songs by the current Music application. Themes in Turkey Interviews with the marketing team in Turkey revealed some important differences between the two countries, causing some differences in the planning of the tests in Turkey. A major difference was related to the market structure and the role of operators. According to the OEM marketing team, operators in Iran did not provide mobile phones along with their subscription, but in Turkey all operators had options for providing mobile phones. Hence, users in Turkey tended to be able to get new phones without being worried about the price of the device. However, there was also a free market for mobile phones. In this situation, innovative users were able to try new technologies by using the operators’ options. At the same time, the interviews showed that the OEM believed that there was a type of resistance against smartphones in the free market, where products were presented directly by the OEM. In this situation, we decided to use a convenience sample of users for the usability tests. However, we tried to arrange the focus group with an orientation that was similar to the study in Iran. The focus group study in Turkey was conducted by 10 mobile users with following specifications: • • • •

Aged between 20 and 25 years Potential first-time users of smartphones Students of design Interest in consumer electronics and digital products

Some initial insights regarding the use of mobile phones in Turkey were needed for developing the themes, and thus the focus group method was used in Turkey as well. The structure of focus group discussions was similar to the study in Iran. However, the focus group study was mixed with a semistructured free listing study (Goebert & Rosenthal, 2002) instead of a diary study, because we were not able to access participants for the period needed for the diary study. In fact, the OEM was not able to facilitate accessing users in a similar way that was arranged before in Iran. In the free listing study, participants were asked to describe a typical day from morning to night and name and explain all of their activities related to their mobile phones, mp3 players, and personal computers. These descriptions were summarized simultaneously into a list of specific tasks for each user. After conducting the free listing study for all participants, a list of most frequent tasks common among all users was created. This list helped the focus group to select two main tasks for the usability tests. Sorting and finding songs through music player application. Music player and games were the most frequently used secondary features among the focus group members in Turkey. We selected the standard Music application for developing the theme. The standard application enabled users to sort and find

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songs by media tag information such as artist, genre, and album. Iranian users tended to use conventional folder browsing for accessing songs. However, Turkish users apparently had another way for sorting the songs, which was sorting based on the mood, for example, by grouping songs under titles such as happy, energetic, sad, and romantic. From this observation, we developed the idea that, similar to Iranian users, Turkish users would have usability problems in sorting and finding songs. This finding led us to the third theme—Theme 3: Turkish users have usability problems in sorting and finding songs by the current Music application. Contact list hierarchy. A common point in all daily stories was their frequent use of the mobile device for contacting their parents. Further discussions in the focus groups indicated that many users in Turkey liked to have different levels of intimacy and privacy among their contacts. We called these levels of intimacy “contact list hierarchy,” where parents and family members were placed in the first level of intimacy, close friends in the second level, and other contacts in the third level. The results led to the development of the fourth theme—Theme 4: Turkish users have usability problems with the Contacts application, when they want to create and classify contacts according to their preferred hierarchy.

3.2. Conducting Usability Tests An important issue when doing usability tests was the connection between the Operating System (OS) and the device. Devices with similar OS might have similar usability problems that are not directly related to the application that is to be tested. Therefore, before the usability tests we compared the mobile device used for the test with another device that had exactly the same version of OS (Android 2.2) but was manufactured by another OEM. This made it clear that there were many customized features in each mobile device. This means that each OEM had its own specifications on the OS and standard applications. To be able to compare and have valid results, we decided to use a specific device in all of the tests. The recorded videos of the usability tests in both countries were analyzed with a three-step qualitative method, as was explained previously. This qualitative analysis gave us a list of usability problems, which is described in greater detail in section 4. The results were not limited to finding a number of usability problems under each theme and performance metrics. Because constructive grounded theory was a basis for the qualitative analysis, researchers own interpretation played an important role in analyzing the gathered data. For example, the usability problems were classified into theme-related and non-themerelated categories. This classification was done by looking at the activity related to each usability problem. If this activity was directly related to the theme, then the problem was classified as a theme-related problem. To clarify, this process has been explained for each usability test in the Results section.

227

4. RESULTS Our analysis was based on a qualitative approach, and common patterns of usability problems among users were the major component of this analysis. However, we extracted also quantitative data resulting from usability tests, including task completion times and number of errors. 4.1. Results in Iran The considered smartphone, which was recommended by the marketing team of OEM for the tests, was not presented to the Iranian market at the time of the tests. This device was considered for first-time users of smartphones, which had a price close to the reasonably priced ordinary mobile phones, encouraging customers to buy their first smartphone. Fifteen innovative users were recruited by the OEM and invited to participate in the tests. One task was designed for each theme. These tasks were examined in a pretest to ensure that the tasks were understandable and clear to the participants. Two facilitators guided the tests. They both spoke Persian, the language used by most people in Iran. One was responsible for reading the tasks and guiding users when they were not able to continue the task, and the other was in charge of recording the video and taking notes. After the tests, the videos were used for analysis. The SMS task was designed to target functions that were related to the SMS social networking behavior. Therefore, all functions related to sharing contents with the device were considered in the procedure. These functions included searching contents, sharing contents, adding emotions (nontextual elements) to a message, and deleting unwanted contents. The task was designed according to the existing standard asynchronous SMS application installed by the OEM. The steps of this task as shown in Figure 2 are as follows: 1. Find the SMS application. 2. Select a predefined contact and send her a short message containing two words and one smiley emoticon. (The combination of text and smiley was considered due to the tendency of users for using emotions in the social networking.) 3. Return to the main page of the SMS application. 4. Search for a predefined text among the sent messages. (Users usually like to share interesting messages with others, and thus the search function could be important for finding and sharing contents.) 5. Forward the found message to two predefined contacts. (Forward is the main function for sharing contents.) 6. Delete the found message. (In SMS social networking, users usually send and receive many messages; therefore they need to delete some of them.) Another task was designed for the Music application. As can be seen in the procedure, the task was designed for testing the functions that were related to the finding and sorting of songs. Therefore, adding a song to a playlist in different conditions and searching for songs using textual information were part of the

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FIG. 2. Short Message Service task procedure (Iran) (color figure available online).

task design in order to highlight users’ possible problems with incomplete media tag information. The test steps as shown in Figure 3 are as follows: 1. Find the Music application. 2. Type and search for a predefined song name. 3. Add this song to a predefined play list without playing the song. 4. Play the song. 5. Try again to add the song to the play list. 6. Return to the main page of the music player. 7. Search for the songs of a predefined artist. 8. Play all songs of that artist. 9. Return to the main page (home). The same application was tested in Turkey as well. From the focus groups in Turkey, we knew that Turkish users might not have these problems with the sorting features of the tested application, as they did not put much emphasis on textual (media tag) information; for this reason, the task design for the Turkish users was different. The next subsections show the test results according to each theme. Theme 1: Iranian Users Have Usability Problems With the Current SMS Applications When They Want to Perform Tasks That Are Related to Their SMS Social Networking Behavior After preparing a list of errors made in tests with the Iranian participants using SMS application, it was clear that some errors were repeated by all or most participants. Table 1 shows the distribution of usability issues related to using an SMS application across the 15 Iranian participants, where each participant is identified by a number. Each type of usability-related error is

identified by a letter that is described in the list entitled as “description of error types” at the end of the table. Error types are arranged according to their sequence in the task procedure (Error A occurred in the initial steps of the task, whereas Error L belongs to the last steps of the task). As an example, Table 1 shows, among other things, that Participant 2 experienced errors of type D, G, H, and K. This means that • She was not able to understand the thread view and its differences with the conventional folder view for SMS (Error G). • She did not find the “forward” function for forwarding a message (Error H). • She was not able to insert a smiley in the message (Error K). It should be noted that different types of errors could occur during each step of this task. For example, both Errors A (finding backspace button on the LG keyboard in the vertical mode) and B (finding direction arrows on the LG keyboard in the vertical mode) could happen during Step 2 of this task (typing and sending a SMS). Therefore, there was no relationship between the number of errors and the number of steps in each task. This was also true for the rest of the tasks and errors. Theme-related errors. We observed that three errors were more related to Theme 1, which focused on social networking behavior (as shown in Table 1). Our reasons for separating these errors were as follows: • Forward was the main function in the SMS application for sharing contents in social networking behavior. All 15 users were not able to find out how to forward a message (Error H).

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FIG. 3.

229

Music task procedure (Iran) (color figure available online).

• In social networking behavior, users needed to express their emotions, and inserting a smiley was the only function that could answer this need. Nine users were not able to insert a smiley (Error K). • When users sent and received messages on a group basis, they usually needed to deal with a higher number of messages in comparison with the time that they were communicating on a pair basis. Therefore, searching among messages was essential. Eight users had problems in identifying the search results among the messages archive (Error L). Other highlights. Other errors were not directly related to the SMS social networking. For example, problems with using the virtual keyboard (Errors A and B in Table 1) could be valid for all occasions that users want to use the virtual keyboard. We used a similar way of interpreting and presenting data in Tables 2, 3, and 4; in each table we separated errors that occurred during activities mentioned in each theme, plus, in some cases we found other highlights that could be of interest— according to the objective of the research. The performance metrics (task completion times and number of errors) showed that both users had relatively high

performance (shorter task completion times and smaller number of errors), and users with low performance shared similar usability problems. There was no relationship between users’ performances and the types of usability problems that they had. In summary, three usability errors (which were common among more than 50% of participants) were in sharing contents through SMS—addressed by Theme 1. The related steps of the SMS task (forwarding the message, inserting a smiley, and searching the previous contents) were intentionally designed to resemble possible scenarios of SMS social networking. The results supported our initial assumptions about usability problems related to sharing contents through SMS among Iranian users.

Theme 2: Iranian Users Have Usability Problems in Sorting and Finding Songs by the Current Music Application The analysis of the usability tests supported the identification of usability problems addressed by Theme 2. Table 2 shows the distribution of usability errors related to using the Music application across the 15 Iranian participants. Theme-related errors. As can be seen in Table 2, all users had the similar theme-related errors of A, B and C. These errors

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TABLE 1 Common Usability-Related Errors Identified From the SMS Application Test in Iran Type of Errors

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Theme Related Participant ID

H

K

L

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

x x

x

x

x x x

No. of participants who had this type of error

15

Non-Theme-Related A

G

F

x x

x x x x x

x

E

I x

x x

x

x

x x x

x

x

x x x

x x x x

x x

x

8

7

6

8

B

x

x

x 9

x x

D

x

x

x

J

x x x

x

x

x x

x x

x x x

x 6

4

3

3

2

Note. Description of error types: A = finding backspace button on the LG keyboard in the vertical mode; B = finding direction arrows on the LG keyboard in the vertical mode; C = finding the search text box in the contact application; D = using the physical search button; E = browsing contacts; F = while in the thread view newer conversations are in the top, in the search results older SMSs are on the top, causing problems for participants in understanding the time order of threads; G = understanding the thread view and its differences with the conventional folder view for SMS; H = finding the “forward” function; I = finding “new message” function; J = being confused between the recipient text box, message text box and the empty space between them during writing messages; K = inserting a smiley through the options menu; L = if a participant wants to find a word among messages and this word exists in a thread, it will be shown bold after the search. (Some participants experienced difficulty with finding the found words, even if they were bold.)

were directly related to the two activities of finding and sorting mentioned in Theme 2 because • All participants were not able to play the search results (Error A in Table 2), which means that they were not able to fulfill the final step of the finding activity. • All participants had problems in finding and adding songs to the playlists (Error B in Table 2). Therefore, this error showed problems in both finding and sorting activities. • All participants were not able to sort and play all songs by a specific artist (Error C in Table 2). This error showed a problem in the sorting activity. Other highlights. Errors D, E, F, G, H, and I can occur in all type of interactions with the Music application. For example, problem F can happen when a user only wants to play an album,

without any aim of finding or sorting songs. We did not classify Error E as a “related to theme” error. Although it was a part of finding and sorting activities, it did not prevent the participants from doing the task correctly. Similar to what we did for the pervious task, we reviewed the performance metrics (task completion times and number of errors) of users. Again, we did not find a relationship between users’ performances and the type of usability problems that they had. Both high-performance and low-performance users had the same common usability problems. In summary, the Iranian users experienced three common errors that were central to their ability to use the Music application. 4.2. Results in Turkey Because the OEM assigned this product for first-time users of smartphones in both countries, the same device was used in the usability tests in Turkey. A task was designed for each

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TABLE 2 Common Usability-Related Errors Identified From the “Music” Application Test in Iran Type of Errors

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Theme Related

Non-Theme-Related

Participant ID

A

B

C

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

No. of participants who had this type of error

15

15

15

G

D

x x

x

x x

x

F

E

I

H

x

x

x x x x

x

x x x

x

x

x x

7

5

x

x x

4

3

x

3

2

Note. Description of error types: A = having problems with playing all search results; B = having problems with adding a song to a playlist without playing it; C = having problems with finding all works of an artist when the media tags are not complete; D = scrolling the main menu in the wrong direction for finding the applications. Participants tend to scroll down the menu in order to find the music application because of their prior experiences with other mobile phones, especially Nokia and Sony Erickson. In this case they need to use the up direction; E = There are four different tabs in the music application for artists, albums, songs and playlists. When a participant wants to search for a track, artist or album it is not important that he or she be in the related tab. The search function works regardless of the selected tab. However, some participants changed the tab before using the search function (e.g., they selected the artists tab before searching the name of an artist, but they did not need to do so); F = After clicking on an album, some participants do not know how to play all tracks; G = using the physical options button for adding a song to a playlist; H = After searching for an item, a list of the search results will appear along with a “now playing” bar at the bottom of the page. Some participants click on this bar instead of clicking on the search results on the top; I = The device has a car mode. In this mode, some basic and most needed features are displayed by large icons on the screen. This mode helps participants to use the device without much concentration when they are driving. Some participants activated this mode mistakenly when they were searching for the shortcut of the music application.

theme, and pretests were conducted to assess the clarity and feasibility of the designed tasks. The tests were done with a convenience sample of users, taken from customers in an electronic store in the center of Istanbul. Twenty-five users attended the tests, with three facilitators conducting these tests. Because the tests were conducted in a public space (the electronic store), one person was needed to ensure that the test participants could do the test and would not be disturbed by other people; the second facilitator was responsible for recording the video; the third person was responsible for guiding the participants

during the tests. The second and third facilitators were native Turkish speakers. Unlike the task design for the Music application in Iran which on textual content, the Music application in Turkey focused more on browsing and navigation in the task design, as can be seen in the following steps of Figure 4: 1. Find the music application. 2. Decide about the “mood” of music that is going to be listened to.

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FIG. 4.

Music task procedure (Turkey) (color figure available online).

3. Find a song in that mood (members of the focus group collected songs from 30 most popular Turkish singers in pop, traditional, rock, and rap genres to cover a wide range of tastes). 4. Add the found song to a predefined play list without playing the song. 5. Play the song. 6. Try again for adding the song to the play list. 7. Return to the main page (home). As the task steps show, possible functions for sorting songs were tested in the task. We included one step for understanding the sensitivity of users to the “mood” of songs as a tool for selecting or sorting songs. This was asked in the short interviews before each test, which included questions about users’ current habits of sorting songs in personal computers, portable music players, and mobile phones. The task related to Contacts application was designed to observe creating, searching, and sorting contacts. From the focus group study, we knew about the tendency among the Turkish participants for building a hierarchy in their communications. The only possible feature for making differences among the contacts was adding a contact to the favorites, which was included in the task design. The task included the following steps, as shown in Figure 5: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Find the Contacts application. Create a new contact with a predefined name. Add the above contact to the contact list. Return to the main page of application. Find the same contact again. Add the contact to the favorites.

Theme 3: Turkish Users Have Usability Problems in Sorting and Finding Songs by Current Music Application As shown in Table 3, most Turkish participants had problems in recognizing the process of sorting songs in playlists. It should be added that we had different task designs for the Music applications in Iran and Turkey; therefore, errors in Table 2 and 3 are not exactly the same. Theme-related errors. Errors occurred during finding and sorting activities are shown as theme-related errors in Table 3. All of these errors occurred when participants aimed to add a song to a playlist, including the following: • Twenty-four participants (out of 25) were not able to add a song to a playlist without playing it (Error B). • Except for one participant (no. 7), all participants had at least two errors in adding songs during their tests. Other highlights. Other highlights of Table 3 are as follows: • Errors H and I show that 10 participants were not able to identify the meanings behind the graphic symbols assigned to “Shuffle” and “Repeat” play modes (Participants 9, 10, 13, 14, 15, 19, 20, 24, and 25 had one or both of the Errors H and I). • Error A (problem in scrolling the application menu and finding the Music application, 18 of 25 participants had this type of error), and Error F (exiting the application before task completion) were errors that could happen in different conditions, not only during sorting of the songs, as addressed by Theme 3. The short interviews made before the tests showed that only six participants on a daily basis used to sort and find songs by

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233

FIG. 5. Contact list task procedure (Turkey) (color figure available online).

applying the “mood” on their digital devices (portable music players, personal computers, and conventional mobile phones). As observed in the videos, when participants were asked to select a mood and then select a song, most participants selected a random song quickly. Therefore, the “mood” way of selecting songs that was suggested by the focus group was not a behavior shared by all participants participating in the tests. Similar to the results in Iran, we reviewed the performance metrics (task completion times and number of errors) and found that both users had relatively high performance, and users with low performance shared common usability problems. Theme 4: Turkish Users Have Usability Problems With Contacts Application When They Want to Create and Classify Contacts According to Their Preferred Hierarchy Table 4 shows the usability-related errors for the contact list application in Turkey. Theme-related errors. Errors that occurred during creating and classifying contacts are shown as theme-related errors in Table 4. We can see four categories of theme-related errors: • Errors in creating a contact—Errors B to H in Table 4: Two of 25 participants had at least one error in this category (all participants except Participants 3, 7, 11, and 21). • Errors in searching for a contact—Errors J to L in Table 4: 12 of 25 participants had at least one error in this category (Participants 2, 9, 11, 13, 15, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, and 25). • Errors in marking a contact as a favorite—Errors M to Q in Table 4: 13 of 25 participants had at least one error in this category (Participants 2, 3, 6, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, and 21).

Other highlights. • Similar to the Music application test, some Turkish participants were not able to identify the meaning behind graphic symbols. Inspection of Error M indicates that 11 participants (of 25) were not able to identify the star icon as a symbol of favorite contacts. • Errors A (scrolling the application menu and finding the Contacts application) and I (exiting the application before task completion) can happen anytime when users interact with this application, and this might be because of general usability problems, something that could be true for all users, regardless of their country. Similar to the previous test in Turkey, participants with different performances faced similar usability problems. Identifying graphic symbols was one of the problems that were common between users with quite different performance metrics. 4.3. Results Across Iran and Turkey Because of our case study approach, the conditions of usability tests were not similar in both countries, and therefore a precise comparison would not be valid. However, there were interesting similarities and differences between the two countries. Although some characteristics of countries affected the case studies, we found no effects of other characteristics, such as religion or language, in the case studies. The Music application was selected by both focus groups in Iran and in Turkey. In both countries, the usability themes covered issues regarding sorting and finding songs in the library. In Iran we found clear evidences of participants’ problems with media tag information, as suggested by focus group

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TABLE 3 Common Usability-Related Errors Identified From the “Music” Application Test in Turkey Type of Errors Non-ThemeRelated

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Theme Related Participant ID

B

C

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25

x x x x x x

x x x

x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x

x

No. of participants who did this type of error

24

13

G

I

H

L

J

D

E

K

x x

x x

x x x x x

F

x x x

x

x x x

x x x x x

x x x

x x x x x

x x x x

x x x

x x

x x

x x x x

x

x x

x x x

x x x

x x

A

x

x x x

x x

x

x

x

x

x x x

x x

x x

13

9

7

x x x 4

3

2

2

2

18

6

Note. Description of error types. A = scrolling the application menu and finding the Music application; B = adding a song to the playlist without playing it; C = participants did not know how to add a song to the playlist when a song is playing (participants did not recognize using hardware option button for doing this task); D = going to the “Playlist” tab for adding the music to the playlist; E = going to the Album tab for adding the music to the playlist; F = exiting the application before task completion; G = pressing the “Now playing” button in the music application for adding a song to the playlist when music is playing; H = pressing the Shuffle button in the music application for adding a song to the playlist when music is playing; I = pressing the Repeat button in the music application for a song to the playlist when music is playing; J = pressing the “album’s name” in the music application for adding a song to the playlist when music is playing; K = pressing the “song’s name” in the music application for adding a song to the playlist when music is playing; L = being unable to find the “add to the playlist” item after pressing the options button.

studies. In Turkey, however, we were not able to find strong evidence of mood-based sorting behavior among participants. Moreover, Turkish participants had problems in understanding graphic symbols (Shuffle and Repeat buttons) in comparison with Iranian participants. Task designs for testing the usability of the Music application were different in the two countries, according to the

country-specific scopes that emerged from interviews and focus groups. Despite this, we found similar types of errors occurring in both countries. For example, both Iranian and Turkish participants were not able to add a song to a playlist before playing the song. These similarities and differences in error types when using a Music application in Iran and Turkey could be itemized and described in the following way:

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TABLE 4 Common Usability-Related Errors Identified From the “Contacts” Application Tests in Turkey Type of Errors Non-ThemeRelated

Theme-Related

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Participants ID 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 No. of participants who had this type of error

C

B x x

x x x

x x x

x x

x

x x

x

M

J

x x

K x

H

x

x x

L

F

N

O

P

D

Q

I

x

A x

x x x x

x x x x x x

x

x

x

x

x x

x x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x

x x x x x

x

x x x

x x

x x x

x x x

x x x

x x x

x x

x

x x x x x x x x

x

x

x 11

x

x

x x

14

G

x

x x x

x x x

E

11

6

x 5

4

x 4

4

x 4

3

3

3

3

2

2

16

x

4

Note. Description of error types: A = scrolling the application menu and finding the Contacts application; B = participant did not know how to save a number as a new contact (participants did not recognize the use of the hardware option button for doing this task); C = pressing the Send SMS button for adding a number as a new contact; D = pressing the Backspace button for adding a number as a new contact; E = pressing the Contacts tab for saving a number as a new contact; F = dialing a number instead of saving it as a new contact; G = being unable to fill in the fields when creating a new contact; H = participants did not know how to save a new contact after filling the fields; I = exiting the application before task completion; J = going to the Favorites tab instead of Contacts tab for seeing the contact list; K = going to the Phone tab instead of Contacts tab for seeing the contact list; L = creating a new contact instead of searching for the saved contact; M = being unable to recognize that pressing star icon will add a contact as a favorite; N = press the options button instead of pressing the star icon to add a contact as a favorite; O = pressing the Contacts tab to add a contact as a favorite; P = pressing the Favorites tab to add a contact as a favorite (instead of pressing the star sign); Q = dialing a number instead of adding it as a favorite.

1. For first-time users of smartphones in the two countries, the music player can be the most important noncommunication feature. That is why both focus groups selected this application for usability tests. 2. In both countries, participants had problems in sorting songs in the form of playlists. This could be because of cultural

mental models; however, there were contextual influential factors as well as users’ experience with other digital products. Participants tended to sort songs with methods that they used to apply in similar products. 3. In Iran, the specific political regulations and restrictions prevented participants from purchasing songs with standard and

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correct media tag information from the official publishers, and this had an influence on the way that they sorted songs on their portable devices. As an example, some Iranian participants had problems finding all works of an artist when the media tags were not complete (Error C, Table 2).We did not see a similar issue regarding the regulations in Turkey. 4. In Turkey, participants had more problems in understanding the visual symbols of user interfaces (Errors G, H, and I in Table 3). Along with possible cultural reasons, the users’ sampling could have affected this usability issue. Innovative users in Iran might have had more experience in interacting with similar user interfaces in comparison with Turkish participants, who were selected randomly. 5. Although different task designs were used, we observed similar errors in both countries, such as adding a song to the playlist without playing it, selecting the right direction for scrolling, and appropriate use of search and options hardware buttons. Of course, these problems may have been common if we had conducted usability tests in other countries as well, and thus we are not sure that these are country-specific usability problems. The same issue can also be valid for the SMS and Contacts tests.

TABLE 5 Overview of Themes Iran Theme 1 SMS and networking

Turkey Theme 2

Theme 3

Song/Music

Songs/Music

Theme 4 Contact and hierarchy

Note. SMS = Short Message Service.

were presented by text, that is, they were not visual symbols. Consequently, if this function had been shown by text instead of as a graphic symbol, participants might have recognized it easier.

There was some overlapping in usability issues between the Music application and the SMS application in Iran, as well as between the Music application and the Contact list application in Turkey. Similar to the Music application behavior, Turkish participants had problems in understanding the meaning of a visual symbol in the contact list test. Some participants were not able to recognize the star sign as the symbol of a favorite contact, as shown in Figure 6. They needed to touch this star in order to mark a contact as a favorite, but they tried to search in the available options instead. All of these available options

5. DISCUSSION In the research presented in this article, we found countryspecific usability problems, but we also found generic crosscountry usability problems. As can be seen in Table 5, we studied usability in the two countries under four themes. The two themes were related to the Music application and two others concerned SMS and Contacts applications. Users of smartphones in both countries had problems in sorting and finding songs by the current music application. Iranian users faced usability problems in using the SMS application, which they tended to use as a kind of social networking application. Turkish users had usability problems in using the Contacts application, especially in classifying contacts in hierarchies. In the following subsections, we continue the discussion according to each theme.

FIG. 6. Participants need to touch the star sign in order to assign a contact as a favorite (color figure available online).

5.1. Theme 1: Usability Problems of SMS in Iran To understand SMS usage scenarios in Iran, the possibility that people define their activities collectively rather than individually had to be acknowledged. Thus, even before beginning to do a usability problem study, it was important to pick the right kind of interactive activity to test. From the focus groups, we learned that in Iran the SMS application is used as a kind of social software (one SMS goes to many receivers at the same time) by Iranian users. Although the cultural usability literature within HCI could prepare us for this observation on a general level (Frandsen-Thorlacius, Hornbaek, Hertzum, & Clemmensen, 2009), most HCI literature assumes that usability problems are universal, that is, usability problems are similar in all countries, and people around the world use the same technology in a similar way. Thus, usability problems of using SMS should be essentially the same in Iran as elsewhere. However, our study suggests that this is not so, or at least the usability problems related to the use of SMS applications in Iran should be interpreted differently from the SMS-related problems found in many other countries. In addition, the tendency of Iranians

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to use SMS as a social networking tool could be because of regulations that banned social networking applications such as Facebook. The Iranian users wanted to, but had difficulty, using the “thread view” on their mobile device to review their conversations with other people. Such a view has been studied as a design issue, that is, a way to tile SMS for quicker browsing (Zinman & Donath, 2006). Jacucci (2011) proposed a mobile social software design and discussed the integration of messaging, media sharing, and awareness cues beyond simple aggregation. In our study, there are indications from the focus group discussions that users in Iran prefer to have both options of folder view and thread view. Hence, we would that add the use of SMS (particularly the use of the “thread view” as a cheap and easy form of a social software function) to the list of functions that should be integrated in such designs. When looking at our study in Iran, it appears that the classification system for mobile messaging systems proposed by Tang and Begole (2003), which puts SMS as a system that is not as suitable as other systems for conducting mobile cooperative tasks, is not sufficient when seen in a cultural context. Thus, Sun (2003) may be correct in her view that if we look at SMS with conventional theories of usability, there are many problems about SMS, such as small display, inappropriate input methods, and disturbing environment; however, if we look at SMS from a cultural usability view, we can see that SMS is surprisingly successful in Iran. Furthermore, the success of SMS in Iran can partly be ascribed to the (collectivistic) social and cultural context in Iran that a study based on the conventional (individualistic) usability theories would tend to ignore.

to the playlist without playing it, selecting the right direction for scrolling, and appropriate use of search and options hardware buttons. From our study, we were not able to say whether the errors associated with SMS and Contacts applications would be found in other countries, as this would be possible only if we had carried out a similar study there. However, we used the whole process of interviews, focus groups, and usability tests to show how the weight put on some kinds of usability problems may be region, country, or culture specific. As is known, it is a general finding in cross-cultural usability research that when testing the same application in different countries, one often obtains a similar number of usability problems in various countries—the difference between countries lies in the severity ratings that are given to a usability problem in the tests used in the different countries (Clemmensen, 2011; Shi, 2010). Belt (2010) suggested that the cross-cultural usability perspective should be applied in the product development because current usability metrics of effectiveness, efficiency, and error can be influenced by cultural differences and that the methodology of usability evaluation should be localized according to the varieties in cognitive and interaction styles. This has been done to some degree (Chavan, 2005). Furthermore, usability evaluation methods are probably carried out in systematically different ways in different countries (Clemmensen, 2011). In a sense, the evaluation methods are already localized, often without the usability professionals being aware that their practice of testing is different from the practice of their colleagues in other countries. How usability evaluation is carried out in Iran and Turkey should be taken into consideration if a comparison of results is attempted.

5.2. Theme 2 and Theme 3: Comparing Music Application Across Turkey and Iran In both countries, participants had problems in sorting songs in the form of playlists. This could be because of cultural mental models; however, there were contextual influential factors as well. A similar factor in both countries was experience with related products. Participants tended to sort songs with methods that they used to apply in similar products. Although different task designs were used, we observed similar errors in both countries, such as adding a song to the playlist without playing it, selecting the right direction for scrolling, and appropriate use of search and options hardware buttons. Of course these problems might have been common if we had conducted usability tests in other countries as well, and thus we are not sure that these are country specific usability problems. The same issue can be valid for the SMS and Contact list tests. For first-time users of smartphones in Iran and Turkey, the Music application can be the most important noncommunication feature, which is indicated by the fact that both countryspecific focus groups in our study selected this application for usability tests. In our study, we observed some similar errors in both countries with the Music application, such as adding a song

5.3. Theme 4: Usability Problems With Mobile Contact List Application in Turkey Further discussions in the focus groups indicated that users in Turkey liked to have different levels of intimacy and privacy in their different contacts. How users organize their mobile phone contact list may reflect the society in which they are living. Nguyen and Oh (2010) found that approximately half of the Korean users in their study organized their mobile device contacts into groups, and four of 86 Korean respondents wanted to organize their contacts into hierarchies. In our study we had indications from the Turkish focus group that users wanted to organize their contacts into hierarchies, but it turned out in the usability test that they could not use the contact list applications to do so, not even the simple feature of marking “favorites” as level one in a two-level hierarchy of contacts. This was particularly problematic, as the Turkish users emphasized their need to be able to identify “who was who” in their family in the contact list; thus, the content and frequency of their communication would depend much upon with whom in the family they were communicating. Finding a contact in a contact list was thus problematic and of high importance to the Turkish users in our study. Oulasvirta

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et al. (2005) studied how the contact list could present information or “hints” of the presence of friends, which they suggested could be done by designing a feature that made the contact turn yellow when that particular friend was nearby. A similar feature for different types of family members (parents, cousins, sisters, etc.) could perhaps be useful for the Turkish mobile users for finding family member contacts. Using the graphic icon of “star” to denote the group of people that one loves and respects (e.g., family) and then using the same icon to identify colleagues might not be culturally appropriate—this is an interpretation of our findings indicating that Turkish users were not interested in using the star sign for identifying the contact list hierarchy. Bhamidipaty and Deepak (2007) designed a contact list prototype for a specific cultural context, a semiliterate user, in India. They proposed using icons to denote different circles of contact members. The proposed icons included those of a home, family, money, man, mobile, woman, elder-man and elder-woman, and, when testing these icons, they found that the use of such icons was more appropriate: “Their near and dear ones like elderly parents, relatives staying away from them who are semi-literate and not working” (Bhamidipaty & Deepak, 2007, p. 392). The concept of the contacts hierarchy can be important for contacts that are important but are not frequently used, such as a family doctor. Bergman, Komninos, Liarokapis, and Clarke (2011) studied so-called unused contacts—that is, contacts that have not been used for a long time—and suggested denoting unused contacts by presenting them in a smaller font at the bottom of the contact list. Thus, the idea that the social status of contacts should be shown by graphical design of the user interface was suggested. We would propose using a graphical design approach to avoid country-specific usability problems in the contact list of mobile devices. Turkish users in our study could benefit from a specific set of contact hierarchy level icons that match their social reality. Figure 7 shows two samples of such solutions that were proposed by Turkish participants.

FIG. 7.

5.4. The Concept of Country-Specific Usability Problems The findings from this study can be explained both from the engineering and the humanist trends identified by Sun (2002). From the engineering perspective, the individual Iranian or Turkish user is a carrier of certain country specific demographics, personal knowledge, information technology knowledge, and organizational culture. Because any group of users will tend to be different from another group of users on one or more of these parameters, an empirical study that compares findings from two different user groups, such as the Iranian and the Turkish users in this study, will find differences as well as similarities. Hence, the findings from this study (there are both cross-country and country-specific usability problems, and the level of these vary across individual participants) are not surprising but are according to theoretical expectations. From the humanistic perspective, the Iranian and the Turkish usability tests should be interpreted in relation to common paradigms in those societies. Applying a constructive, grounded theory approach in the present study, we were able to explore and exploit the influence of contextual factors on the research process. The findings from this study should be understood as a grounded theory model of what are important local theories of usability in these two countries. Thus, a first attempt to make a grounded theory model of “country-specific usability problems” based on the results from case studies in Iran and Turkey could describe the applications, users, and error categories (rather than the number of errors and task completion time), as can be seen in Figure 8. Among the theme-related problems, there was only one common problem for the two user groups, namely, the problem of adding a song to the playlist without playing it (Figure 8). The constructive grounded theory approach allows conclusions by finding other links between results. In Figure 8 we see that with the current approach, the usability problem themes are related to specific countries. Two of the usability problem themes (SMS and Contacts applications) are country specific, but even the cross-country theme (Music application) consists

Two sample concepts for new Contacts application by Turkish participants.

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FIG. 8. Country specific usability problems in this study. Note. SMS = Short Message Service.

of country-specific error categories. However, it is obvious that it would make sense to investigate closer whether there are overlaps or relations between some of the country-specific error types across countries. Further data and analysis are necessary to determine on what level or in which nuances the differences between country-specific usability problems should be searched. In general, similar to the previous studies, results of this study reveal the role of contextual factors in country-specific usability problems. Awareness of such contextual factors before usability evaluation in a specific country or region can be helpful in many ways, such as in better task designs for usability evaluations or easier identification of usability problems and their sources. We were able to find three important categories of these contextual factors that can be used as a checklist for identification of possible country-specific usability issues. Diversity of items, which can be classified under these categories, shows that the concept of country-specific usability covers a broader area than does cultural usability. The mentioned categories can be seen in Table 6; however, contextual factors are not limited to the factors mentioned here.

6. CONCLUSION Concentrating on two emerging markets of Iran and Turkey that were less explored in the current literature, we identified two main themes of usability problems for each country by focus group studies on smartphones. Usability problems were found under these main themes. The answer to the core research question of whether there country-specific usability problems in any of these applications is that, yes, we were able to find country specific usability problems: • First-time users of smartphones in both countries had problems in sorting and finding songs by current music application.

• Iranian users faced usability problems in using SMS application because they tended to have a type of SMS social networking behavior. • Turkish users had usability problems in using the contact list application, especially in classifying contacts. However, there were other usability problems that were not anticipated by the focus group studies and may be classified as general usability problems. Although we started our theoretical research by cultural usability studies, the results of usability tests and their connections with focus group studies showed that there were other regional or country specific issues that could be connected to the usability problems. As an example, the regulations in Iran prevented users from purchasing music online and using social network applications. These issues had connections to two main themes of usability problems in Iran. In addition, in both countries users’ experiences with similar digital devices had effects on their current interaction with smartphones. This can be valid, especially for music application in both countries, suggesting that more successful products in a market could create some habits that affect users’ interaction with future products. Therefore, when different products are successful in different markets, these habits may create some country-specific usability issues not directly connected to the national culture. The next steps in this field of research could be conceptualization of a model that would illustrate countryspecific factors and their interaction with usability. This model could help researchers conduct more focused empirical studies on country-specific usability. 7. RESEARCH LIMITATIONS The case study approach of this article prevented us from conducting the same usability tests in both countries, which might have enabled us to achieve a more precise comparison between the countries. Further, the settings in the usability tests

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TABLE 6 Some of the Main Contextual Factors in Country-Specific Usability Main Categories Social factors

Contextual Factors Gender differences Visual literacy

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Languages and scripts

Communication norms

Authority factors

National Image

Limitations or promotions in use of technology Market factors

Diffusion of new technologies

Market segmentation

References Mentioned in this Paper Rambo and Liu (2010): Female users of e-commerce services in Saudi Arabia Kim and Lee (2005): Icon recognition in Korea Bhamidipaty and Deepak (2007): Visual phone book for illiterate Indian users Salman, Cheng, and Patterson (2012): Using iconic user interface mobile emergency service in Turkey This study: Turkish users’ problem with understanding graphic icons Al-Khalifa (2010): Arabic sign language translator for Arabic-speaking deaf users Öztürk and Rızvano˘glu (2011): Language localization for social networking applications in Turkey Clemmensen, hertzum, Hornbaek, Shi, and Yammiyavar (2009) and Chavan (2005): Indian users’ avoidance of direct criticism Oulasvirta et al. (2005): Some users like to be aware of their contacts status before calling them Nguyen and Oh (2010): Adding the tagging ability to phone book application for Korean users who would like to have hierarchies in their contact list This study: Turkish users like to classify their contacts Çelik (2011): Turkish citizens who belong to the Kurdish ethnic group use mobile phones to express their ethnic identity since there are some limitations for the Kurdish language in Turkey This study: Limitations in use of social networking applications in Iran may cause Iranian users to use SMS as a social networking tool Jahanshahi et al. (2011): Study on acceptance of mobile government systems Saneifard (2009): Study on influential factors of success of mobile e-commerce in Iran Rabiei, Ganji, and Shamsi (2012): Demographic characteristics of users have a direct influence on acceptance of mobile advertisements

Note. SMS = Short Message Service.

of the two countries varied, as we applied a holistic multiple case study approach for a combination of studies with different methods. In the multiple case holistic case study approach, each case may have a different setting, depending on the conditions (Yin, 1994). The limitations in resources and unexpected events influenced the study plan. While in Iran we were able to access the innovative users for a long time; this same opportunity was not facilitated by the OEM in Turkey. For this reason, we used diary studies as a complementary method in Iran and a free listening study in Turkey. The OEM’s access to users could also have affected the number of subjects in each test. This may have influenced the random selection of users in Turkey, as the innovator users who participated in the test in Iran might

have been more experienced with similar user interfaces and graphic icons. In addition, we considered the mobile device as a static device, concentrating only on standard applications that were installed on the device by the OEM. However, smartphones are basically dynamic products, and users are able to customize them. Current first-time users become experienced users in a few months, in which case the study did not have similar conditions for the tests. Furthermore, we tested different tasks in Iran and Turkey because we developed task designs according to the focus group studies. Therefore, a comparison between the performances of users in the two countries might not be valid. This means that the conventional performance approach toward usability would not be able to be applied for a comparison of

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the two countries. Finally, across many studies, it is possible to evaluate empirically (e.g., by doing a meta-review) if such differences are significant. Hence, from an engineering perspective, the present study is a case study that can be added to the pool of case studies. One way to improve this study, again from an engineering perspective, would be working more systematically with quantitative approaches such as the cultural consensus model (Garro, 2000; Romney, Weller, & Batchelder, 1986). Such consensus models could be used to understand the level of agreement and disagreement between the Turkish and Iranian informants on a mobile device application; that is, further studies could explore the existence of general consensus among each country-group of participants and investigate similarities and differences (group-specific idiosyncratic concepts) between these participant groups.

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS Bijan Aryana is a PhD candidate at Department of Product Design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology. The title of his thesis is “Exploring Design for Country-specific Customisation”. The subject of his PhD project is influenced by his previous experiences as an industrial designer. In this project, he is trying to understand the relationship between country-specific differences and design. Torkil Clemmensen is a professor at Department of IT Management, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. He has more than 20 years of academic and industrial experience with human-centred methods and techniques for analysis, design and evaluation of information and communication technology and digital media, and how these are designed and used in organisational, human, social and cultural contexts.