Online Surveys in Collecting Cross-Cultural Qualitative User Experience Feedback

Globalisation of markets means that many interactive technology products and services need to be usable and provide a positive User Experience (UX) to people in various target market areas. Simultaneously, over the last decade, positive UX has become an important quality attribute and a business-critical asset in the design of interactive technology products and services. Different countries have different cultural values, which direct the way in which people interpret and use technology products and services. Therefore, to ensure that products and services are easy to use and that they provide a positive UX across cultural boundaries, there is a need to understand how local cultures may affect the use of and interaction with technology. Cultural issues affect not only the UX of technology products and services but also the UX research methods. Culture itself is a complex concept affecting a vast area of human life and interaction. Consequently, designers are facing challenges in creating a delightful UX for an increasing number of users from different cultural backgrounds.In this thesis work, we aim to produce original contributions by investigating and developing better online survey tools and insights about their applicability in cross-cultural remote online UX research. Remote online methods are needed in increasing cross-cultural UX research, and they are considered practical, and may have extensive and wide scale samples suited to cross-cultural UX research. In particular, we aim to understand how an online survey fits into a cross-cultural UX research in terms of collecting qualitative feedback. As the goal is to understand online UX surveys and users in different local cultures it is our aim to gain knowledge about what kind of cultural issues affect these surveys and how they should be taken into consideration in human-centred design (HCD). We focus on studying how qualitative material such as textual and visual materials can be used in cross-cultural online UX surveys. We reflect on the practical implications of the results in a theoretical concept of cross-cultural online UX survey process. Our research has a multiple-case research design strategy and most of our case studies were executed in a real product development context with an emphasis on the qualitative research.We found that online surveys with sentence completion, diaries and storyboards are well suited to crosscultural UX research in collecting qualitative feedback. The central cross-cultural issues having implications for cross-cultural, qualitative online UX surveys concerned textual and visual materials. With regards to the textual material in collecting cross-cultural, qualitative UX feedback, we found that there are cultural differences in how respondents understand, interpret and share their experiences in an online UX survey. For example, culture has an effect on language and communication style, which in turn have an effect on the answers. Furthermore, we found that the use of the sentence completion method in an online UX survey is relatively fast and easy way to collect a large amount of cross-cultural, qualitative UX feedback regarding the different UX dimensions for product development purposes. The use of Hofstede’s cultural dimensions in the data analysis gives a better understanding of the impact of specific cultures on the results.Concerning the visual material, we found that storyboards assisted respondents in providing rich answers to a long survey because of a sound understanding of the intended situations, and ease of imagining themselves in different usage scenarios. The use of internationalised and localised storyboards allowed us to collect UX feedback, even though respondents had never used or seen the intended product. They were able to give feedback and ideas for design in the early phase of product development in requirement gathering. Using culture as a resource for design involving local users in the design process supports HCD principles. We presented the main phases in a theoretical concept of cross-cultural online UX survey process to help designers include cultural issues in the design of a cross-cultural online UX survey

A case study on smart band

학위논문 (석사) -- 서울대학교 대학원 : 공과대학 산업공학과, 2020. 8. 윤명환 .The aim of this study is to prove that the consumer review-based text mining methods proposed in the paper for cross-cultural design are effective. To prove it, we took Mi band 3 as a case study where we compared the cross-cultural differences in product preference of users from different cultural regions with this method. With the development of global market, more and more products and services are sold across the globe. Users from different cultures have different behaviors, cognitive styles, and value systems. Therefore, product should be designed to meet the needs and preferences of users from different cultural groups. In the field of cross-cultural design, existing studies are mainly focused on traditional usability and UX research methods. However, these methods expose some disadvantages when applied into cross-cultural design contexts. E-commerce websites provide a large volume of product reviews and it is easy to collect review data online. There is no need to employ foreign participants or make a survey onsite or remotely, which will save much more cost and time. There is a new trend that customer reviews are examined to know consumer opinions. Neverlessness, there are not many studies by analyzing online reviews in the field of cross-cultural design. Thus, my research proposed consumer review-based text mining methods for cross-cultural design, which consist of aspect-level opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis. We collected review data from the following three websites: Naver of South Korea, Jingdong of China, and Amazon of the United States. Text mining methods including opinion mining, sentiment analysis, and semantic network analysis were performed. Firstly, product aspects were extracted from reviews according to word frequency. This indicates how much users are paying attention to different aspects of the product. Aspect-level sentiment analysis was conducted to find out customer satisfaction with different product aspects. Then, the words most associated with each product aspect were listed. Cluster analysis was conducted and the topic of each cluster was summarized. Data visualization of each dataset was done. Lastly, cross-cultural difference among three countries from the results was observed and discussed. Though there exist similar issues in product preferences of users from South Korea, China, and the United States, cross-cultural differences about Mi band 3 are shown in many product aspects. Korean tend to take Mi band as a fashionable, cool, yet not useful wearable device. They often buy it as a nice gift. They are interested in the appearance of the strap and often buy straps of different colors and materials. Korean do not enjoy outdoor activities as much as American. And the function of NFC is not prevalent in Korea. Thus, the smart band is not useful to Korean. These can explain why Korean do not care about quality of the smart band and do not want to buy Mi band at a high price. Korean think that the language of Korean on the display, application, and manual is the most important feature. The length of Korean texts is longer than Chinese to convey the same information. On the other hand, Korean prefer to check message notification on smart band rather than call notification. Therefore, Korean need a larger size for screen. Chinese are more concerned about different kinds of functions including fitness tracker (step counting, heart rate monitoring, and sleep monitoring), notification, and NFC. These different functions are all important and practical to Chinese. American enjoy outdoor activities and tend to use smart band mostly as activity tracker. They care more about activity tracker function including heart rate monitoring and step counting than Korean and Chinese. They have a higher requirement about the accuracy of measured data and have more negative reviews on activity tracker function than Korean and Chinese. Besides, they need the mode for swimming. Because American usually use the smart band for outdoor activities, they complain a lot that the screen is prone to scratches and is invisible under the outdoor sunlight. Also, they pay attention to the quality of screen and strap, expecting the material make the screen and strap durable. Besides, battery is the most significant aspect to American. They always try to test each function to find which function makes battery life short. The results of the case study prove that the consumer review-based text mining method proposed in the paper can generate cross-cultural difference in product preference effectively, which is helpful to cross-cultural design research. And this method is relatively easy and fast compared to other conventional methods.Chapter 1. Introduction 1 1.1 Background and Motivation 1 1.2 Research Objective 3 1.3 Organization of the Thesis 4 Chapter 2. Literature Review 5 2.1 Cross-Cultural Design 5 2.1.1 Definition 5 2.1.2 Necessity 6 2.1.3 Method 7 2.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 10 2.2.1 Aspect Level Opinion Mining 10 2.2.2 Cross-Lingual Opinion Mining 11 2.3 Semantic Network Analysis 13 Chapter 3. Methodology 15 3.1 Data Collection 15 3.2 Data Processing 16 3.2.1 Text Preprocessing 16 3.2.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 16 3.2.3 Semantic Network Analysis 17 3.2.4 Result Sample 18 Chapter 4. Result 20 4.1 Overview 20 4.2 Opinion Mining and Sentiment Analysis 21 4.2.1 Normalized Frequency 21 4.2.2 Sentiment Analysis 23 4.3 Semantic Network Analysis 26 4.3.1 Associated Words 26 4.3.1 Cluster Analysis 31 4.3.1 Data Visualization 34 4.4 Results based on Aspects 37 4.4.1 Battery 37 4.4.2 Price 39 4.4.3 Function 41 4.4.4 Step Counting 43 4.4.5 Korean 45 4.4.6 Heart Rate Monitoring 47 4.4.7 Sleep Monitoring 49 4.4.8 Quality 51 4.4.9 Notification 53 4.4.10 Screen 55 4.4.11 Exercise 57 4.4.12 App 59 4.4.13 Call 61 4.4.14 Connection 63 4.4.15 Waterproof 65 4.4.16 Display 67 4.4.17 Message 69 4.4.18 Alarm 71 4.4.19 Gift 73 4.4.20 Strap 75 Chapter 5. Conclusion 78 5.1 Summary of Findings 78 5.2 Future Research 80 Bibliography 82Maste

Proceedings of the GPEA Polytechnic Summit 2022: Session Papers

Welcome to GPEA PS 2022 Each year the Polytechnic Summit assembles leaders, influencers and contributors who shape the future of polytechnic education. The Polytechnic Summit provides a forum to enable opportunities for collaboration and partnerships and for participants to focus on innovation in curriculum and pedagogy, to share best practices in active and applied learning, and discuss practice-based research to enhance student learning. This year a view on the aspects of applied research will be added. How to conduct research in a teaching first environment and make use of this. Which characteristics of applied research are important to be used in teaching and vice versa?The Summit will – once again - also provide an opportunity to examine the challenges and opportunities presented by COVID-19 and will offer us all an opportunity to explore the ways in which we can collaborate more effectively using our new-found virtual engagement skills and prepare for a hybrid future. PS2022 Themes: Design (Programmes, Curriculum, Organisation);Practice-Based Learning;Applied Research; Employability and Graduate Skills; Internationalisation, Global Teaching & Collaboration and Sustainability Theme

An aesthetic for sustainable interactions in product-service systems?

Copyright @ 2012 Greenleaf PublishingEco-efficient Product-Service System (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However the application of this concept is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion is hindered by several barriers (cultural, corporate and regulative ones). The paper investigates the barriers that affect the attractiveness and acceptation of eco-efficient PSS alternatives, and opens the debate on the aesthetic of eco-efficient PSS, and the way in which aesthetic could enhance some specific inner qualities of this kinds of innovations. Integrating insights from semiotics, the paper outlines some first research hypothesis on how the aesthetic elements of an eco-efficient PSS could facilitate user attraction, acceptation and satisfaction

Open Education

"This insightful collection of essays explores the ways in which open education can democratise access to education for all. It is a rich resource that offers both research and case studies to relate the application of open technologies and approaches in education settings around the world. Global in perspective, this book argues strongly for the value of open education in both the developed and developing worlds. Through a mixture of theoretical and practical approaches, it demonstrates that open education promotes ideals of inclusion, diversity, and social justice to achieve the vision of education as a fundamental human right. A must-read for practitioners, policy-makers, scholars and students in the field of education.