WeChat Redesign for Foreigners Living in China from Culturally Adaptive Design Perspective

Large companies like Google, Microsoft, and IBM have spent an increasing amount of money on adapting their software applications to users from different countries [12], which contributes to improving customer loyalty in global market places. Reinecke and Bernstein [11] have previously proposed an approach called ‘cultural adaptivity’ to bridge this dichotomy between the need for internet products that cater to individual culture.

WeChat, similar to the Facebook app, released in 2011 by Tencent, Inc., has become the most frequently used application in China, with 900 million daily active users. Besides some usual functions such as instant messaging, video calls, posting moments, and mobile payment, the powerful app offers many services for daily life. The following are some representative examples: users can hail an Uber car or order delivery food by WeChat; citizens can pay the telephone, electricity, and water fees by the app; customers can book any tickets including train, flight and movie tickets with the help of it; even they can purchase stocks and insurances from WeChat [3]. Therefore, it is inevitable for people living in China to rely on WeChat for social communication and life services.

Nowadays, WeChat has a strong influence and has landed in many countries and regions. The survey in [14] indicated that foreign WeChat users are distributed in all age groups but relatively concentrated in 20–29 years old (44.0%) and 30–39 years old (25.5%). About 60.0% of foreign WeChat users have stayed in China for more than one year. The overwhelming majority of exotic users have a higher educational level; 84.2% of the respondents have undergraduates degree or higher education level. Non-Chinese WeChat users living in China send 60% more text messages than typical users. They send 45% more stickers or emoji. The research also indicates that foreigners send ten red pockets a month, and 64.4% of expats use WeChat Pay.

WeChat aims to expand the overseas market and attract more expats, but it is unwise to design one universal app interface for local and exotic audiences. The target user of our study is international students living in China. At the ideation and prototype stage, we consider the influence of aesthetic and internal emotions differences between East and West on interface design and then use statistical methods of measuring experience to compare different ideas. In the final evaluation, with ten users of distinct cultural backgrounds, the majority of subjects preferred their culturally adaptive interaction ways compared to the current version.

As we know, besides the language-translation function, WeChat has not applied cultural adaptive factors into the app design. With developments in globalization and world cultural communication, cross-cultural adaptation has become one of the concerns of researchers in different fields. The anthropologist Hofstede [7] conducted comprehensive research about classification with five cultural dimensions: Power Distance (PDI), Individualism (IDV), Masculinity (MAS), Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI), and Long Term Orientation (LTO). Heimgärtner [8] demonstrated cultural models to serve as a basis for the identification of cultural distance between countries, shown in Table 1.

Zurich researchers [11] have developed a “culturally adaptive” system using an approach to cultural adaptivity, acquiring the influences mentioned above storing in a personal user model instance, and mapping onto user interface adaptations. Also, Australia researchers connected essential HCI elements such as information speed and Information density with cultural dimensions [8], illustrated in Table 2. The references of cultural adaption dimensions provided the empirical baseline to support the new cross-cultural redesign guidelines.

In this study, we propose a culture adaption design framework for foreigners living in China. Five main steps are included, which are separately addressed as follows. This study adopts triangulation methods for data gathering.

3.1 Data Collection

The step aims to gather data and explore the WeChat usage scenario in order to find cross-cultural usability problems.

• Firstly, ten foreign participates (half male and half female) are respectively invited to fill in a questionnaire about their demographic information. Subsequently, each respondent is interviewed approximately 15 min and answers the following opening questions: the frequency and aim of using WeChat; the most commonly used functions of WeChat; the shortcomings of WeChat.

• Secondly, based on interviews, we explore that the WeChat use scenarios mainly focus on the following three aspects, contacting people, using the mobile payment to buy things, and sharing personal life. After analyzing survey results, the usability problems of foreign users are summarized below in Table 3.

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3.2 Problem Definition

As clearly stated by the level connection of HCI and cultural factors, we map the cultural factors of the western and China to HCI factors. From Table 1 and Table 2, we conclude that information density, interaction speed, and interaction frequency are low in some western countries. However, China, in contrast, has been shown efficiently filter such dense information. Therefore, high complexity is often comprehended as information overload by Westerners [9]. After initially sorting out, we plan to redesign interfaces closely related to Problems 2, 4, and 6, which helps foreigners utilize functions of WeChat smoothly. Then, according to the previous survey, we take a functional icon ‘+’ of the home interface as a redesign example. ‘+’ is a collection of the most routine functions, as shown in Fig. 1, which does not conform to the cognitive model of expats.

Home page of WeChat. It shows the function of ‘+’. Users can create a new group with others, add new friends by QR code, scan code for entering anything and pay.

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3.3 Ideation Process

In the phase of ideation, the reason for cultural preferences is analyzed from culture adaptive theories and aesthetic perspective.

• Due to the cultural dimensions like higher PDI, lower IDV, although eastern users cannot understand the meaning of a design at first, they rarely tend to refuse it and will accept it.

• From an aesthetic perspective, the Chinese emphasize abstract aesthetic feeling rather than the description of the actual shape of things [11]. In contrast, Western pursue the accurate meaning and linguistic world. Most importantly, the western interface layout has more horizontal information. Traditional culture influences the form of the interface layout. For example, the ancient Chinese used to go from top to bottom, While Greek-speaking sloping field called “boustrophedon” from the horizontal view [5].

Supported by Nielsen’s ten usability heuristics [10], designers must make objects and options visible. The aim of the redesign is to make icon design consistent with the standard semantics of foreign users and also select one usual function to optimize like the payment process. The research in [15] demonstrated that user evaluations are better if users can compare several alternatives. Under the guidance of this analysis and principles, we design five solutions and invite eight participants to vote for the favorite one. Figure 2 shows that the two most popular sketches that we choose.

Two final alternatives after sorting from five solutions. One is arranged directly and another adopts an icon stack arrangement.

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At the evaluation of the ideation phase, participants are required to score from 1–10 for the two design alternatives, and we use a statistical method named paired sample t-test to compare means and know whether there is a difference between the two prototypes. As with the independent sample’s output, the p-value is 0.004411518, indicating that there is a significant difference between the two designs since this number is smaller than 0.05. Combining the analysis of Table 4 and metrics data, we select the No. 2 design as a prototype implementation.

3.4 Prototype

Comparing icon design of the most popular Chinese apps with that of Instagram, Stem, and Facebook, we find that the semantics of ‘+’ function means creating a new activity rather than function storage.

The prototype follows metaphor and affordance principles proposed respectively by Jakob Nielsen [10] and Naoto Fukazawa [6]. For example, one of the screens (shown in Fig. 3) applies principles mentioned above to prototype implementation. This user interface matches the virtual system and the real world, which gives users instantaneous knowledge about how to interact with it. The stacked icons (used in the current version) creates affordances that provide users with stronger cues and hints for how to interact with the object.

The comparison between two versions.

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3.5 Evaluation

This evaluation mainly employs observation and quantitative methods to obtain the user’s feedback on each step of operation [1].

WeChat payment is selected as one of the tasks and set up a simple usage scenario for users: when buying a large coke in the KFC, you pay it by the WeChat payment code as Fig. 4 shows.

We set up a simple usage scenario for users: when buying a large coke in the KFC, you pay it by the WeChat payment code.

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We choose combined metrics to exemplify how to conduct user tests, through which the whole test procedure can be explained. Independent completion rate, the number of operation paths, and user satisfaction and are utilized to evaluate the availability, accessibility, and applicability of the improved version. An independent completion rate can measure the difficulty of tasks by completing a task in a limited time. The number of operation paths means how many clicks or slides users have to trigger the function. User satisfaction could partly reflect the user experience with the help of a 5-point SUS system scale.

The outcomes from Table 5 indicate that a culturally adaptive version greatly improves usability performance over the current version. The rate of independent completion goes up to 100%, and the number of path operand immensely declines.

It can be seen from the table below that the culturally adaptive statistical data of aesthetics satisfaction is not significantly different from the universal system (Table 6).

In order to find out the reason for statistically insignificant difference in aesthetics satisfaction, we conduct hierarchical task analysis, a way in which researchers collect usability problems for a range of practical applications including interface design and evaluation. Coupled with the observation for users’ operations and interviews in experiments, the whole process of paying by QR code is reorganized and divided into four steps from opening WeChat to tapping the payment button, leading to a map of hierarchical task analysis, as shown in Fig. 5.

The problems listed of hierarchical tasks.

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This subsequent analysis details users operating process and interactive patterns. After listing every step problem, we find that the most confusing part for participants is about stack icons and they are not able to perceive the stacked form as the semantics of unfolding with limited time. To address the triggering problems for payment, we change the color of different icons when overlapping and unfolding.

Figure 6 shows the improvements made in adjusting the size of icons appropriately to increase the range of touch and the optimized function structure. In the new adaptive version, the foreigner users can easily understand the operational metaphor of the stacked icon at the right corner since the icon redesign eliminates unnecessary confusion on the main page. Foreign users trigger the commonly used functions more efficiently by simpler information architecture and fewer information density.

The problems listed of hierarchical tasks.

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This discussion section comprises two parts. Firstly, we revisit the levels of cultural attributes in western countries and China and review the correlations between culturally dimensional levels and HCI factors. Secondly, we compare the usability test results and analysis to cited theories about the connections of cultural elements and HCI factors.

5.1 Applications of Previous Theories

The research integrates the cultural attributes in different countries and the correlations of those and prominent design metrics, which contributes to understanding possible usage difficulties and confusion. The model explains the contribution towards HCI and the cultural influences. Based on the research [8], the interaction frequency (the number of interactions per time unit) shows a negative correlation with individualism and uncertainty avoidance and a positive correlation with power distance and long-term orientation. To contrast with Asian, western users represent high individualism and uncertain avoidance, but lower power distance and long-term orientation. Therefore, we can deduce that the level of interaction frequency is relatively low. Low interaction frequency constitutes layout, visual display, navigation and hierarchy related principles. To summarize, it can be seen that these levels of culturally different dimensions and characteristics [7] in different countries, can perfectly match the corresponding cultural level in theory [8] so that the corresponding level of HCI factors can be further deduced. These HCI indicators, to a greater extent, are broken down into key design elements. Similarly, due to the corresponding relationship between two complicated models, we can draw an inference about other HCI factors in the usage of the western scenario. For example, when compared with the standardized universal WeChat interaction, the culturally adaptive version of WeChat provides a time saving alternative to reach the commonly used functions. Thus, the improved version reduces the number of interactions and optimizes the way how buttons are presented in order to give additional support in a structured way and rebuild an easier hierarchical structure resulting in a lower cognitive load.

5.2 Validation of Previous Theories

The prior works and theories provide a shortcut for researchers and designers to find cultural usability problems quickly and make redesign assumptions easily. Conversely, subjective feedback and quantitative data from user tests confirm the validity and reliability of prior theoretical models. According to usability performance in Table 5, the improved version shows fewer operations and better overall satisfaction performance. Also, participants reflected that the understandable analogy and additional details eliminate confusion. The hierarchical task map indicates that exotic users are still not accustomed to a new interactive mode and need to rely on more explicit information. we can verify relations and connections between culture, HCI factors, and design elements.

In an overall comparison of the two versions, our result demonstrates that culturally adaptive user interfaces can reflect different preferences owing to cultural background. Also, it proves that cultural adaptation of user interfaces makes a huge difference in enhancing the efficiency and acceptance in a diverse traditional context. This research selects the interactive design of the functional icon as an example, and the next phase will be to redesign the information structure and interactive flow, which can adapt to foreigners’ preferences.