Content area
Full Text
People have always perceived and organized the world in terms that are familiar to them. Why else would the constellation that was called "The Great Bear" in ancient Greece and Rome now be called "The Big Dipper" in North America, "The Casserole" in France or "The Plough" in England? Those "mental models" were strongly influenced by culture, environment and experience. Similarly, anyone who calls into an IVR (interactive voice response) system and experiences the "hear and feel" of the interface will necessarily form a mental model of the interaction. Drawing on past experiences and cultural norms, the caller's expectations about how to interact with the system will be set.
Look Right!
While crossing the streets of London, tourists can be grateful for the signs painted on the roads' crosswalks advising them to "Look Right" for oncoming traffic. If you're a pedestrian from a country where cars navigate the right side of road, you're conditioned to expect that when stepping off a curb, the most immediate danger will come from your left. It's not intuitive to first look right when entering a crosswalk. The local government knows this and has judiciously stenciled arrows and words of warning onto their sidewalks, even though the majority of local pedestrians, being natives, don't need them. The city has provided the extra instructions that we foreigners need to compensate for something that's not intuitive to us, so we can navigate their streets without ending up on the hood of a London taxicab.
The lessons from the "Look Right" example are, as with countless aspects of day-to-day life, applicable to voice user interface (VUI) design. For multilingual applications to be effective and successfui, they must recognize that callers from different cultures will have different notions of what is intuitive, and this can have a profound impact on the design.
Interactions that are intuitive, by definition, don't require any additional instructions to the caller:
System: "Do you want to hear the phone number again?"
It's a simple question in search of a simple "yes" or "no" answer. No further explanation is necessary.
Interactions that are not intuitive require additional guidance:
System: "Okay, I'll check availability for May 13. If I have the date wrong, say 'back up. '"
There's nothing intuitive about...