A Thousand Times No

By day, I design interfaces for web applications at a major research university. From time to time, I don the hat (or the hair shirt) of being an advocate for our international users. While we can expect most of our visitors to read English passably well, we can’t expect them all to be immediately familiar with non-metric mileage, 12-hour clocks, 10-digit phone number formatting, and placing the month at the front of numeric dates.

Often, this sets off the eye-rolling. “Well, they’re here now, and that’s how we do it in America,” I’m told. Later, people wonder why there are data entry issues with supposedly self-explanatory information, such as date of birth. Guess what? Oranges are not the only fruit, and American is not the only standard. Any American abroad who has tried to decipher street signs where they don’t employ Roman letters, much less bother with writing in English, knows this fact by heart.

Though it can be a hard sell here on the home front, thinking about the rest of the planet does pay off from time to time. Tonight I took part in the 2007 Philly CHI (Computer-Human Interaction) Design Slam. Professional information architects, web designers, user interface developers, and others from throughout the Philadelphia metropolitan area worked together in randomly assigned teams as part of “a fast-paced race to create the best design solution to a real-world problem.” It was frenetic and terrifically fun, with Post-Its and chunky colored markers flying in every direction. We needed to interview imaginary clients, create a portable electronic concierge device for visitors to a fictitious South Pacific island resort, and to prepare a pitch presentation with visuals, all in just under 50 minutes.

Most teams converged on some sort of push-to-talk technology for the emergency contact function requested by the client. That’s when my International House of Patois reflex kicked in. “Uh, that’s not really helpful if the dispatcher can’t speak Arabic, or Russian, or whatever the guest with the emergency is shouting at the time,” I insisted. So we globalized the interface, adding a screen with icons and short phrases written in the guest’s native language to back up the walkie-talkie communications. (After all, nobody in the room seemed to know offhand how to say “#$@#%$, shark bite!” in Japanese.)

The hypothetical client took the bait, and our icon-happy team came in first place. “You thanked the client for the opportunity to present your proposal,” one of the judges commented in his critique. “Your team was very professional, and it’s always good to kiss ass.” Ah, yes — now that is something that needs no translation.