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Tell me more about that? Gathering User Requirements and Context of Use for Global Enterprise Applications Ultan Ó Broin (December 2012)

Tell me more about that? A standard phrase used by usability professionals to elicit information from users when gathering requirements before designing a solution. The question’s probing, open-ended nature is the very essence of the iterative, user-centered exploration that makes for building a great user experience.

For enterprise applications (used for Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management [CRM] functions), understanding how workers accomplish tasks distinguishes user experience (UX) from usability’s traditional emphasis on user interface (UI) layout and look and feel. In Oracle, we say that applications UX is about how you work, not about how you click. Using a range of disciplines, a UX team delivers thoughtfully designed solutions that account for anything of importance workers rely on to complete a task. This broad consideration we can usefully refer to as context of use; the core of successful user requirements gathering.

Context of use varies by enterprise location, country, region, culture, and so on, nuanced by worldwide trends. Intuit’s founder Scott Cook, explaining Intuit’s failure to expand globally, highlights the negative business impact of omitting local UX requirements:

“We didn’t build our products based on a deep study of the countries. We built them based on what we had in the US. I kicked myself. We should have known better.”1

The challenge for makers of global enterprise applications is to uncover how local users work and then bring a compelling and modern UX to life in a single software application. That means building apps from code that meets internationalization (i18n) requirements, translating the application, adding localizations features (reporting, statutory, compliance functionality and so on), enabling customers to implement the application to reflect their business processes, providing for customization and extensions, and for individual workers to personalize their user experiences.

                                                                                                               1  Intuit's Scott Cook on Failed Global Expansion: 'We Should've Known Better' [Online] Available from: http://www.inc.com/chris-beier-and-daniel-wolfman/intuit-quicken-scott-cook-global-expansion-failed.html (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)

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Figure 1: Oracle E-Business Suite tax localizations configuration (Image via Ultan Ó Broin)

Exploring context of use demands that no assumptions be made about how people work. Instead, it must be researched by observing real workers performing real tasks, experiencing real interruptions, relying on real assistance, all in a real work environments (be it at home, in the office, or on the go). Generalized best practice usability guidance read on the web must be validated for enterprise applications suitability by testing with user groups in their working world.

Enterprise applications designers must be informed by usability best practices and by user expectations globally but they must also accommodate the reality of working in an environment subject to requirements such as access control, security of assets, legal compliance, reporting conventions, complex business rules and processes, application performance, integration, scalability, and so on.

UX Context of Use versus L10n Conventional Wisdom

Take the widespread localization (L10n) guidance about the dangers of portraying body parts in icons. Reasonable as a general principle in the past, but years of business globalization, the influence of the Internet and worldwide social media use have changed perceptions about what is acceptable in the stuffy old world of work.

So, a “thumbs up” icon commonly used by social media is now widely accepted as meaning “approval” in the enterprise context too, where many tasks performed are inherently social anyway. Using the human-based gesture on the context of the streets of Bangladesh, Iran or Thailand, is a different matter.

Figure 2: Thumbs Up: Accepted by enterprise apps users worldwide due to increased globalization and social media use. (Image via Facebook)

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Furthermore, icons may have become globally associated with actions even when the icon’s inspiration has long since faded as relevant. What remains as universally recognized is the metaphor behind that icon. So, although Scandinavian applications customers may be bemused at a 3.5-inch disk icon used for the save command and refer to it as the washing machine, they know what that icon means and how to use it.

User experience expectations about the quality of enterprise applications are now super critical, due to the consumerization of information technology (COIT). Enterprise applications have long stopped being green screen behemoths and must now be simple to use, deploy and sell for desktop, cloud, and mobile deployments alike. Localization guidance needs to reflect this. A bare footprint icon used to indicate the size and distribution of installed software components on a system might be risking offense in some cultures, but realistically it should have been rejected as a poor user experience choice for an enterprise app in the first place.

Figure 3: Gone but not forgotten. The 3.5-inch disk icon save metaphor is globally accepted. Seeking agreement on a replacement may be more trouble than it is worth. (Image via Ultan Ó Broin)

What is Context of Use?

Exploring context of use begins with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Common Industry Specification for Usability – Requirements (CISU-R) document.2

NIST CISU-R was created to help website developers, usability professionals, and IT implementers to define usability requirements for their projects (and levels of usability testing criteria and methods too). My employer, Oracle contributed to the initiative. CISU-R defines context of use as:

“The users, tasks, equipment (hardware, software, and materials), and the physical and social environments in which a product is used. [ISO 9241-11:1998]”

                                                                                                               2 NISTIR 7422 Common Industry Specification for Usability - Requirements [Online] Available from: http://zing.ncsl.nist.gov/iusr/documents/CISU-R-IR7432.pdf (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)

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Context of use provides information on intended use of the product or service. It does not specify product globalization requirements or methods, although it does recommend including “nationality” and “culture”. The CISU-R underlying compliance (Level 1) for user requirements gathering provides for seven context of use areas. Adding local UX examples illustrates how context of use varies by location:

1. Stakeholders: Refers to end users and other parties who have a legitimate interest in the product throughout its lifecycle. For a financial accounting application, such stakeholders might include the external auditors, taxation authorities, other functional departments in the company, as well as the accountants.

Naturally, the list of stakeholders varies even for the same application in the same enterprise if located in different parts of the world. Labor unions, or work councils (such as the German Betriebsrats) may need to be involved in the design and deployment of new technology. How people are organized in work determines what features might be used, and when. Consider that requirements stakeholders for global applications might include internal L10n departments or external vendors too.

The cost of omitting a key stakeholder can be costly. CRM applications that require service teams in hotels to scan in bar codes on room doors rather than typing in data might needs to involve the housekeeping department in case they clean them off.3  

2. Intended user groups: Refers to the key characteristics of the main user groups critical to the business or who use the application most often. This aspect usefully covers broad globalization aspects for enterprise applications. Consider what languages the users of applications require, but also what is the language of the business? Are users working in a global company with regional offices or country based subsidiaries. A multinational 24 X 7 operation may use many local languages, or English or French as its business of language. The UI must also be localized to reflect locale formats and information. Consider what information in what format is to be exchanged between parts of globalized operations and other external parties too.

Be wary of the claim that everyone in business now speaks English. Workers often understand domain-based applications terminology best in their native languages even when they can converse in English, and certainly public sector requirements would require translations be provided.

There may be legal requirements that certain terminology or languages be provided, for example by the Office québécois de la langue française. Starbucks in Québec is known as Café Starbucks Coffee. KFC is PFK (Poulet Frit Kentucky). The Australian state of Victoria recommends creating a

                                                                                                               3  Is This The Most Boring Branch Of Enterprise Mobility? [Online] Available from:  http://www.zdnet.com/is-this-the-most-boring-branch-of-enterprise-mobility-7000001427/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  

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language profile for workforces to facilitate compliance with health and safety requirements.4

3. Main goals for each user group: This identifies the intended outcomes from using the application that have value to users or the business. Again, this may vary globally as users do not work or behave the same way, even within the same corporation, and local business processes and rules may impact goals. Accounts payable clerks may have a general goal of avoiding data entry errors, but expenses policies and how expenses are processed vary, in some cases hard copies are required, scanned documents are permissible, itemized receipts need to include names individuals, and so on.

4. Intended computing or other technical environment: Covers hardware and application capabilities and features, and the artifacts they create. This area might cover everything from the national broadband provision or local wireless connectivity to availability of particular devices in a country to identifying the locale-based paper printing sizes (US Letter versus A4 in the UK, for example).

Consider that mobile solutions based on expensive devices, native apps and heavy data consumption may not be appropriate in some countries or regions. Although we know where the next 10 million apps are coming from (BRIC and MIST5), there are other emerging market requirements. The BBC World Service has launched applications for Nokia feature phones, not smart phones, providing localized news content for listeners in emerging markets.6 In some countries, users of mobile solutions may prefer to send SMS text messages instead of making expensive phone calls or images where cost dictates, so design accordingly to those requirements.

Facebook introduced Facebook Zero, a text based-based basic feature version of its service, in 2010 to cater for mid-range feature phones. In Africa, the number of people using Facebook increased 114 percent in 18 months.7 How about this from the developers of leading South African mobile app 2Go, which has more users than Facebook in Nigeria?

                                                                                                               4  Communicating occupational health and safety across languages [Online] Available from:  http://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0003/9228/Communicating_across_languages_CC.pdf (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  5  How to Enter Emerging Markets: Mobile [Online] Available from:  https://dl.dropbox.com/u/409429/presentations/emerging-markets-2012/index.html#/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013) 6  BBC targets emerging markets with World Service news apps for Nokia Series 40 devices, in 11 languages [Online] Available from:  http://thenextweb.com/mobile/2012/10/17/bbc-targets-emerging-markets-with-world-service-news-apps-for-nokia-series-40-devices-in-11-languages/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013) 7  Google, Facebook And The Next Billion Users [Online] Available from:  http://www.npr.org/blogs/alltechconsidered/2012/11/10/164824915/google-facebook-and-the-next-billion-users (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)

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“Building mobile technology for an African market is tough. Data and SMS are expensive, and our users are price sensitive and savvy. That means we have to deliver an application that uses the absolute minimum of system resources and bandwidth. Our response has been to develop proprietary communications protocols and compression algorithms that minimize the app’s data usage.”8

Other environmental dimensions might be availability of cloud computing solutions or data protection coverage. How about loss of connectivity and offline modes requirements? Can user experience solutions cater for such variables in a scalable way?

Technical requirements include the availability of any necessary language technology-related capabilities such as translated versions and tool support. Is there natural language processing (NLP) support for your voice or avatar-based application solutions, or others?

Users Left To Their Own Devices

Where does the working day end and personal time begin? The worldwide phenomenon of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) represents a classic context of use exploration.

The consumerization of information technology (COIT), largely driven by mobilization, sets new expectations about what devices and apps are used to perform business tasks and when, driving a very high quality of enterprise user experience overall. Workers might personally enable corporate-owned mobile devices with apps used in a personal capacity (LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook, and so on) as well as work-provisioned apps.

BYOD is subject to requirements that may vary by enterprise policy but also by country or region, reflecting cultural, social, and political factors. Workers may value leisure time differently by culture and need to “switch off” in different ways.

5. Intended physical and social environments: Covers physical location (such as remote or office-based work), ergonomic factors such as lighting and temperature, and organizational aspects such as how workers are managed or supervised, health and safety issues, financial or security risks, and so on. All vary by location.

                                                                                                               8  The African Mobile App That’s Bigger Than Facebook Nigeria [Online] Available from:  http://www.ventures-africa.com/2012/09/the-african-mobile-app-that%C2%B9s-bigger-than-facebook/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)

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Watch the super video from Human Factors International (HFI) about cross-cultural design9 to understand how medical device design was impacted by attitude of the local caregivers, their literacy level, water quality and even climate. “The only solution is to design for the local customer’s ecosystem and the local customer’s feelings.” says HFI’s Apala Lahiri Chavan, explaining how the design for a banking solution in India (with its hierarchical, caste based society) when applied to less stratified African countries led to user alienation.

Local health and safety regulations in some jobs may require use of gloves so think about those pinch feature on mobile. Very secure enterprises or public sector or government agencies may prohibit the carrying or use of personal devices or applications or any integration with cloud or third-party applications. Remember, using mobile phones while driving is against the law in many places, so designing for headset and audio notifications, and so on is required for some mobile solutions.

6. Scenarios of use illustrating how users carry out their tasks in a specified context: These scenarios describe how users meet their goals. They tell the story about a day in the life of workers’ activities, their motivations, and how they use the product to complete tasks. A mobile application for an insurance company risk assessors based on availability of property owners to interview, and optimized for entering structured data and minimizing free form text that assessors type in will work in the UK.10 But do all risk assessors work the same way internationally, or by domain? Could voice entry, cameras or scanning in of data with OCR work in other places?

7. Prerequisite documentation or training materials: Where required, this specifies what user assistance materials are provided and for whom. Considerations here include localized versions and i18n enabling of any delivering any delivery technology it. Learning experiences may also vary. The evidence from the enterprise space is towards expertise being the key differentiator between types of users rather than culture (or other dimensions), though some cultures might react differently, so research is required. Coca Cola Bottling used Angry Birds to move its workforce to an iPad-based working environment,11 but would that onboarding experience transfer to every country easily? Solutions need to reflect what is appropriate for the culture and workers. This requirement sometimes enforced by law, even in the US where the Occupational Safety and Health Act (1970) requires training to be provided in a language that workers understand.

                                                                                                               9  HFI Animate: Cross Cultural Design: Getting It Right the First Time [Online] Available from:  http://youtu.be/Oak03bdakOg (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  10  Why this $90 Billion UK Insurer is High on BlackBerry PlayBooks  [Online] Available from:  http://scn.sap.com/people/eric.lai/blog/2012/01/20/why-this-90-billion-uk-insurer-is-high-on-blackberry-playbooks (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  11  Is This The Most Boring Branch Of Enterprise Mobility? [Online] Available from:  http://www.zdnet.com/is-this-the-most-boring-branch-of-enterprise-mobility-7000001427/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  

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Starting to Uncover Context of Use

Language professionals, and other non-UX experts, may also gather user requirements or contribute to such efforts. The task doesn’t require special resources, expertise or techniques, and once representative workers and work environments have been located, the process begins.

Gathering requirements and exposing the context of use means engaging with users where and how they work, and observing and recording their activities as they go about completing tasks, while asking them to explain by talking out loud or to tell more about their thoughts and actions.

Observation of even the humblest item’s use is a major UX opportunity. A Post-It (or sticky) note attached to a PC screen might mean a recall failure for a feature, a need for organized information, a collaboration requirement (the note being used to pass information to a colleague), or even a configurable notification message (if used as a reminder). Perhaps, it is just a hot date. It depends on the context of use.

Researching mobile workers in different parts of the world might reveal variances in UX requirements such as: headset use (a legal or consumer preference); number and types of devices carried; preference settings (vibration versus audio notifications); methods of communication (using SMS distribution lists instead of email); use of device features such as cameras or bar codes as determined by law, technical environment or cultural convention; whether NFC or electronic wallet solutions are used for payments, and so on.

As an exercise, the next time you visit a coffee house or store, imagine you are designing solutions for those students, remote workers, or sales professionals in the field sitting there with their devices. How might working in a cafe vary even within the same city? Is there always Wi-Fi? What device and data security arrangements are required? How do noise levels impact using Siri or Google Voice to enter commands)? Is the location accessible? What are the opening hours? Are the chairs comfortable with power outlets within easy reach? Now consider the global aspect. How would you design for varying dimensions?

Figure 4: Cafés in Berlin, Melbourne, and San Francisco provide contrasting contexts of use. (Images via Ultan Ó Broin)

Asking a Local to Find Real Users

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Rely on local knowledge to find real representative workers to start the user requirements process. In enterprises, such people might be selected through works councils, labor unions, departmental managers, HR departments, by reference to job descriptions, and so on. Suitable subjects might be approached through international user groups and user communities, conferences, meetups and other events. Subsidiaries’ sales, marketing, and support organizations will also know where to find customers with users to gather representative requirements from. In some cases, specialist in-country agencies may be employed to source representative worker and role scenarios.

Crowdsourcing for information in the enterprise space is not without problems as expertise and representative tasks are critical to reliable and valid UX research, but subjects with the right characteristics may be found from the community when acknowledged as reputable by other members.

Screening for potential users and companies helps focus the context of use. Having access to professional UX user profiles and personas helps, but relying on the source material of real workers doing real tasks in a real environment is as good a start as you need.

Language professional insight into local markets, trends, and access to resources and information is a rich resource to mine. Translators and interpreters are sometimes required too when non-local researchers conduct usability studies with local workers in the wild. By participating in UX requirements gathering and later stages of the user-centered design process, language professionals have an ideal opportunity to proactively identify translation issues early, or start terminology development, especially important in the enterprise space where specialized domains abound. Knowing context of use is powerful insight for language professionals to enabling the delivery of a quality localized product reflecting the domain and what workers really require.

You can read more about studying users in the wild worldwide (“ethnography”) on the Oracle Usable Apps website,12 and about how language and UX professionals working together benefitted everyone on Blogos.13 Context of Use: Some Local Anecdotes

As a best practice, design flexibly, with i18n, L10n, customization and personalization in mind, enabling multimodal and fallback solutions where necessary. Always provide for scalability, migration of solutions, and continuance of business in the enterprise whether workers are in the office, on the street, or at home. Consider these local stories:

                                                                                                               12  [Online] Available from:  http://www.oracle.com/webfolder/ux/applications/customerInput/081219_goingNative.html (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013) 13  Translation and UX Working Together: Oracle Mobile Applications Example [Online] Available from:  http://www.multilingualblog.com/?p=1623 (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  

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In Germany, Volkswagen agreed with the company’s works council to stop sending emails to employees’ Blackberries outside of work hours. Henkel has agreed a New Christmas and New Year period amnesty for work-related email. UK trade unions in response emphasized their role as stakeholders and called for contextual solutions.14

Irish mobile users found out those SMS texts in Gaeilge cost more than in English because of the síneadh fada diacritic. Users were charged for the equivalent three English text messages if they included a single síneadh fada in a text of 160 characters. It is cheaper to send a digital image.15

In Africa, dual SIM mobile phones enabling users to use different SIM cards from one device are used to deal with variances in network coverage and roaming costs. Broadly, this approach has potential ideal for reducing number of devices carried and for providing separate numbers for regional use or user roles.16

Apps used by users in Islamic locales need feature support for religious customs and rituals such as those relating to Ramadan.17 Oracle E-Business Suite supports the Hijri calendar. The BlackBerry Call to Pray app includes features for prayer times, Qibla direction, Athkar and a Hijri calendar, with automatic geographic updates for prayer timings and social sharing through BBM, SMS, email and Facebook.

Figure 5: Asgatech’s Call to Pray app for BlackBerry (Image via Asgatech)

                                                                                                               14  Volkswagen turns off Blackberry email after work hours  [Online] Available from:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16314901 (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  15  Texters charged for the síneadh fada [Online] Available from:  http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/breaking/2012/0719/breaking4.html (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  16  Dual SIM mobile phones ideal for Africa [Online] Available from:  http://www.itnewsafrica.com/2011/08/dual-sim-mobile-phones-ideal-for-africa/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  17  Mobile apps increasingly help Muslims observe Ramadan [Online]  http://www.ameinfo.com/mobile-apps--help-muslims-ramadan-306925 (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  

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A security ban by the Indian government on bulk SMS and MMS use by mobile users at times of unrest led to a surge in uptake of mobile messaging apps such as WhatsApp and Nimbuzz. Telemarketers switched usage habits accordingly.18

Validating User Requirements Through Usability Testing

Although CISU-R specifies context of use as a basic requirement, it’s important to establish testing criteria and methods too to obtain buyoff from designs and prototypes and testable implementations. Detailed exploration of usability measurement and testing is an area too long for this article, and may seem daunting on a global scale, but inspiration comes from demonstrated best practices.

Making efficient use of language professional and development stakeholders identifies potential L10n or i18n issues upfront before a single line of code is written, reducing cost of iteration.

The Mozilla project enabled higher levels of localization (L20N) by asking for a localization stakeholder review of the wireframes for the Mozilla Gaia apps.19 The WikiMedia team has published a useful approach to translating wireframes using Firefox Pencil and to testing them in a multilingual environment using Google+ and Google+ Hangouts.20

A Win-Win Investment

A great UX means considering local context of use when designing and developing applications for enterprise applications users.

Knowing local user requirements is an investment that yields high ROI not only for language and UX professionals and ultimately workers, but entire businesses. What you find in one market may yield major innovations and insights for others. Kenya’s M-Pesa simplified mobile money transfer solution has inspired mobile banking innovation to reflect context of use in more “developed” markets.21

                                                                                                               18    India Restricts SMS, Mobile Messaging Apps See Boost [Online] Available from:  http://blog.programmableweb.com/2012/08/30/india-restricts-sms-mobile-messaging-apps-see-boost/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  19  Localizability reviews for Gaia apps wireframes [Online] Available from:  https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.l10n/YvI5gMCn6TU (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  20  Designing for the multilingual web [Online] Available from:  https://blog.wikimedia.org/2012/10/29/designing-for-multilingual-web/ (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  21  M-Pesa: Kenya's mobile wallet revolution [Online] Available from:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11793290 (Retrieved 9-Jan-2013)  

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Figure 6: Safaricom M-Pesa, a mobile money transfer app first used in Kenya, is the most used app in the world, running 200 transactions per second. (Image via Safaricom)

Language is part of UX. But cultural convention, local business and personal practices and technical and other environmental factors also need to be taken into account.

Gathering user requirements and exploring context of use is not rocket science. Existing tools, resources and knowledge make it all very doable even for small companies or individuals. UX and language professionals working together have been proven to have benefits for all. If you are a language professional then offer your services to designers and implementers for gathering requirements. If you are a designer or UX professional then reach out to that language person.

“Tell me more about that” user-centered requirements gathering removes the risk of the dreaded “But, all I wanted was…” user experience feedback from the post-application implementation of the product lifecycle where the cost of change is high and agile processes cannot expose surprises early. What I have not discussed here is how to make trade-offs between the various dimensions of context of use. Using collaborative, iterative design process involving the key stakeholders to agree and obtain buy-in, combined with a change management process, is required.

A true skill is bringing language and UX expertise together to focus on the design problem, referring back to the context of use to remain focused on the issue. Only when the problem is removed for the user, can design said to be truly done. Ultimately that accomplishment must be proven by usability testing with real people performing real work tasks in real settings.

Ultan Ó Broin (@localization) evangelizes on the importance of usability to the product globalization and development community and conducts usability research into how enterprise apps users work globally. He has over two decades of experience of technology globalization experience in blue chip companies and outreach through articles, books, conferences, and social media. Opinions expressed are his own and not the responsibility of Oracle or anybody else. Images used remain the copyright of owners.