[IxDA Discuss] thumbs up gesture

[Tori Egherman]

In cross-cultural encounters, you want to be understood -- as a bare
minimum. This, however, is not enough to build a relationship. You
need to be liked, and your customer wants to be appreciated. In
today's world, the less American you come across to your international
customer, the better for you. Sorry to say, but the days of blind
admiration of all American are long over. Speak to locals in something
other than English, and you'll get it quickly in very different
corners of the world.

In more than a decade in cross-cultural research, I rarely saw it
differently. It's often all right on the surface; scratch it, and
you'll be surprised. A study we did recently for a major multinational
investigated differences in user satisfaction with their new Portal
for business partners worldwide. The US users loved the new site, the
Europeans were pretty cold about it. The US-based client deeply
believed in language deficiencies being the major reason (not all
parts of the site were available in local languages). We used UK users
as a control language group. Guess the results... The British were as
far from the Americans in their scores as the Germans and Italians
were. Across Europe, the users were unhappy with the site being "too
Americanised", from spelling and writing style to the content itself.
They used it, because they had to and because a lot of the content was
useful -- but they didn't relate to it. To quote a British
interviewee, "They are saying it's a global site, but it's not -- it
is American-regional."

>Aren't you just making the point that has been made by several
emailers: that there is no global way to communicate? Why worry about
small gestures like thumbs up or thumbs down when we should worry
about why we want to make everything so bland that it does not mean
much to anyone? (BTW, I no longer use the thumbs up gesture after
living in Iran for several years)

Anyone who has head to modify their gestures, language, and manners
knows that you cannot communicate globally. Isn't the beauty of the
computer that we can modify some things: make them more local, more
comprehensible? Why should we try to find a global answer when a local
one may be more effective?

 Tori