ABSTRACT
Following a social semiotic approach, this paper questions the Western cultural assumptions underpinning the web's evolving navigational conventions, and investigates to what extent a group of South African students command the currently dominant Western conventions. South African students (both novices and experienced web users) completed a series of visual exercises, where they interpreted a set of interface and conceptual conventions in common use on the web. Conceptual questions attempted to address to what extent students were familiar with and able to reproduce the conventional Western visual design resources for representing classificational taxonomies or 'tree structures' and various other visual devices for the implicit portrayal of hierarchical information structures (Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Interface questions probed student recognition of common web icons. Some broadly cultural factors were found to explain at least some of the variation in the group. Finally, we consider the implications of our study for training, design, and the diverse range of South African representational resources.
Keywords
Visual literacy, web usability, cross-cultural design, social semiotics
INTRODUCTION
Much has been written in the CHI (Computer Human Interaction) community about the internationalisation of software (see Del Galdo and Nielsen 1996). There are guidelines on the use of language, images, icons, colours etc (Marcus 1996). For a culturally diverse nation like South Africa, one might think that such guides are indispensable. However, our research has shown that the challenges involved in producing interfaces which communicate across boundaries of culture and literacy require much more than superficial changes in appearance. In this paper, we present issues that are critical to South African interface designers if they wish to make their systems accessible to the widest possible community of local users.
‘Visual literacy’ beyond the icon
The role of visual conventions in users' interpretation of the web has been addressed at a rather superficial level in existing studies of usability on the web. These studies tend to originate from a concern with the 'export' of software to culturally different contexts, and consequently focus on the relatively crude practicalities of "internationalisation" and "regionalisation" (e.g. Del Galdo and Nielsen 1996).
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Social semiotic approach
Social semiotics has developed a ‘grammar' of visual design, which codifies the representational resources available to the Western (primarily print) tradition. (Kress and van Leeuwen, 1996). These visual grammatical forms govern the choice and combination of both representational and non-representational visual elements.
The social semiotic argument is essentially a political one: given the currently fluid and dynamic state of new genres of multimodal communication, it is important to identify cultural biases in the visual conventions we use to communicate, and to investigate new, less exclusive approaches.
We identified the hierarchical tree as a key visual form of elite literate Western culture which has a pervasive influence on both the interfaces of websites, and, often, through databases and hierarchical file structures, on their underlying organisation. Here, we investigated
· Tree diagrams (contrasted to linear timelines)
· Breadcrumbs (an implicit directory hierarchy)
· Implicit navigational hierarchies where hierarchy is implied by layout rather than through an explicit tree.
In our study, the hierarchical tree is contrasted to other, more superficial visual forms, where a visual metaphor with Western cultural origins has evolved through several generations of graphical user interface and hypertext design (such as tabs, a filing cabinet, or the spatial metaphors of next and back in hypertextual navigation).
The students' reseponses were analysed and coded in relation to their overlap with Western conventional readings.
Visual information hierarchies
Data gained from these exercises was analysed both heuristically (by interpreting students' diagrams and comments) and quantitatively (by scoring their answers in the exercises). Both the heuristic and quantitative analyses suggest that there are clear cultural dimensions to the interpretation of common visual navigational conventions on the web. These differences did not manifest primarily on the 'representational' level. In other words, for the users we studied, the problem was not the relatively superficial one of not recognising a certain type of mailbox or trashcan. Instead, they involve the assumptions we commonly make about the organisation and visual representation of information structures.
As suggested by Kress and van Leeuwen, hierarchical classificational tree diagrams are a culture-specific visual form which can operate to exclude people on both graphical and ideological levels. The conventional Western family tree by contrast, structures families according to generations, with a patrilineal line of descent. This tree (grandparents, parents, children) is a basic metaphor underlying many of the logical structures we use to structure information.
Several student diagrams clearly illustrated the cultural
specificity of this form. For example, Figure 1 is an example of the
unconventional structure which one student produced when asked to draw a family
tree.
Figure 1: This South African student's 'family tree' constructs two lineages, one maternal and one paternal.
As graphical convention, the hierarchical tree is not particularly complex, and most students in our study did not struggle to access its associational meaning. Its hierarchical meaning caused more difficulties. In the drawing exercises, most students were able to reproduce the horizontal and vertical lines, particularly in domains where they are privy to the dominant organisational conventions. The visual conventions which express tree structures implicitly through layout (such as breadcrumbs, hypertext '^up' and fish-eye view navigational diagrams) proved considerably more exclusive.
The real difficulty, however, relates to some students' exclusion from the hegemonic cultural conventions which govern the organisation of specific domains. This ideological dimension of 'literacy' suggests some intractable and challenging educational and design issues.
Given the vast diversity of human knowledges and cultural frameworks, our most significant finding suggests that the promise of 'internationalisation' or real cross-cultural design is a chimera. Even designing inclusively for a South African audience is an almost impossibly tall order. Nonetheless, this does not mean that we should abandon the task of investigating the most appropriate and effective ways of communicating with specific audiences.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The authors acknowledge the assistance of the National Research Foundation.
REFERENCES
1. Del Galdo and Jakob Nielsen (Eds). 1996. International User Interfaces. New York: John Wiley.
2. Hugo, Jacques 1996 ‘Visual Literacy and Software Design’ http://www.chi-sa.org.za/Documents/articles/ vislit.htm
3. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. 1996. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. London: Routledge.
4. Marcus, Aaron. 1996. "Icon and Symbol Design Issues for Graphical User Interfaces." In Elisa M Del Galdo and Jakob Nielsen (Eds). International User Interfaces. New York: John Wiley.
5. Cohen, David. 2000. slums.surfing.com. Education Guardian.http://education.guardian.co.uk/Distribution/Redirect_Artifact/0,4678,0-383459,00.html