29Jun / 2010

Munich Newsstand and Honor System

Newsstand in Munich demonstrates the cultural assumption that everybody is fundamentally honest and obedient to the social system. The newsstand design is very simple: a freely openable transparent lid, a tray to put the stack of newspaper, and a simple coin slot on the side. The lid is simply to prevent rain from getting into the tray. There is no lock or any monitoring mechanism in the body.

If you so wanted to cheat, you can just effortlessly open the lid and take as many newspaper as you please. But my German friend describes to me that, “why do you need more than one newspaper? Since it doesn’t make any sense, nobody would do it.” and hence no need to add any anti-theft design to it.

During my week-long stay in Munich, Germany, I also found that the locals are very discipline in obeying the traffic signal. Even when it’s late night with heavy rain and no oncoming vehicle visible at sight, the locals would just stand patiently on the curb and wait until the green walking man signal is on.

In a society that is based on trust and discipline, artifact design would be very different from those that are based on skepticism, cynicism, and the trust-no-one mentality.

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24Jun / 2010

Web Accessibility in Kanji Spacing

ASUKOE, a non-profit web usability evaluation group, ranked 30 local government websites in terms of usability, information architecture, and the ease of use in extracting information about citizen services. In their report I found one usability trick in web design with Kenji/Chinese characters:

This trick applies to website that are designed for older users, whose visual ability is generally weaker. When making an image of section title or sidebar button, it is better to add a space between each character. This way the visually less capable individuals can see the more spaced out word easily.
However, in the ALT attribute of the link or image, which is often used by screen-reader as a pronounceable remark, remove the inner-character spaces so the screen-reader can correctly group the words and read properly.

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24Jun / 2010

Japanese Tweet Translation Service and Thoughts on Online Social Management

Today I discovered a website called Twiyaku which offers Japanese to English translation service for your tweets. The provider mygengo.com guarantees that they have over 900 professional translators to perform high-quality human translations of your Japanese tweets into English. This pricing scheme is as following:

Plan A:

25,000円/月 (monthly fee 25,000 YEN or $276.95 U.S. dollars)
3ツイート翻訳/日 (3 tweet translations per day)
単一アカウント利用 (used by single account only)
12時間以内の納品保証 (guarantee translation within 12 hours)
追加ツイート： 3円/文字 (additional translation: 3 YEN per word per Japanese character)

Plan B:

50,000円/月 (monthly fee 50,000 YEN or $553.9 U.S. dollars)
7ツイート翻訳/日 (7 tweet translations per day)
複数アカウント利用 (used by multiple accounts)
12時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 12 hours)
追加ツイート： 2.7円/文字(additional translation: 2.7 YEN per word per Japanese character)

Plan C:

100,000円/月 (monthly fee 100,000 YEN or $1107.8 U.S. dollars)
15ツイート翻訳/日 (15 tweet translations per day)
複数アカウント利用(used by multiple accounts)
4時間以内の納品保証(guarantee translation within 4 hours)
追加ツイート： 2.5円/文字 (additional translation: 2.5 YEN per word per Japanese character)

2010-6-24 Update: thanks Robert Laing from mygengo.com for pointing out the price mistakes in additional translation)

The service is still in beta right now, so there is a 20% discount for the monthly fee. They even provide a web-service API for easy integration from your companies internal CMS or marketing workflow to their translation engine.

My comment: this is outrageously expensive! 100,000 YEN per month for 15 translated tweets per day is very unreasonable to me, realizing that one tweet is only as long as 140 characters. Also, I am not very confident that these people are capable of translating emotion, attitude and tone of voice (happy, professional, angry, annoyed), as well as keeping a consistent presentation that reflects your corporate image. I am assuming this pricing scheme is targeting mostly corporate clients, who must be very concerned about and protective to their corporate online presence.

In my previous post ”Tweeting in English? There’s a Book for That“, I talked about a book「英語でTwitter！」that teaches Japanese to tweet about their unsuccessful weight loss progress in English. I thought the idea was quite adorable but never for professional purpose. However a good discussion with my Japanese friends made me realize that, it is not that some Japanese people are not capable to writing perfectly understandable English tweets and articles, but it is the fear of public embarrassment when making a single mistake on the Internet, where everything is so open to the eyes of the world, and where published data is irreversible once it’s out in the wild. This psychology might be explained by 恥の文化 (the Shame Society).

Another thought is that Japanese corporates has fallen victim in the Internet social marketing strategy invented by the western world. In the North America, from giant corporates to local bakery and cafe, most of them now have at least one social network presence: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Google…etc. Examples: a bakery tweets when fresh bun is just taken out of the oven. Dell and Comcast has dedicated customer service team to deal with angry tweets about their products and services (this article is written in 2008). Now when the younger generation in Japan are picking up the trendy social networks from the west, the Japanese companies has to follow the food and quickly set up their online presence, even if that means an ad-hoc integration of tweet translation to the existing public relation procedures.

As a consequence of such Internet social marketing strategy, the western corporates begin to hire Online Community Managers, who are special people dedicated to handle tweets, social networks, public discussions and blogs, and all kinds of PR to maintain the online corporate image. Even in the western world, such a kind of industry is still emerging and experimental. I will continue to observe how the Japanese corporates will move beyond ad-hoc tweet translations, and continue to evolve into similar dedicated community management concept.

Credit: the source tweet from which I learned about this service is posted by @HirokoTabuchi.

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21Jun / 2010

Tweeting in English? There’s a Book for That

A walk in a local bookstore is a good way to observe the culture. In a Japanese bookstore I discovered a very interesting book called “英語でTwitter!” (Twitter in English!) It is a book full of short English tweets paired with Japanese translation. The tweets are grouped by categories such as Cosmetic, Work, Relation…etc. Here are some examples:

Can’t sleep lately.（最近、眠れない。）
Just had a tooth removed/taken out.（痛み止めが切れて来た。メチャクチャ痛い！）
Gained 2 kilos this week. Agrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.（今週２キロ増えた．ギャーーー！）

Japan is quite famous for it’s huge variety of manuals, with spectrum of topics including falling love, playing golf, getting married, job hunting, interview, and committing suicide.

While some argue that Twitter is a social network full of useless noise from people broadcasting what kind of sandwich they had for lunch, here is a book full of such examples encouraging you to report every bit of your life that’s very much uninterested to all human kind except yourself. Entertaining cute little book, but not sure if it’s really useful.

Some more self-help manuals:

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21Jun / 2010

Steve Jobs as Momotaro

The illustration shows Steve Jobs popping out from a split apple holding his magical iPad, while scaring the crap out of the poor old couple when they were cutting the delicious looking apple for dinner. The illustration resembles the famous Japanese legend of Momotaro, where the boy was originally said to come out from a giant peach, who ultimately defeated the devils and became a hero.

The poster was seen in a train at Tokyo. It is an illustration of a featured article “なぜ日本はiPadを生み出せなかったのか” (Why iPad was not created in Japan) from a magazine called Wedge (ウェッジ).

This illustration made me smile, not only because it references to the traditional fairy tale that every Japanese knows by heart, but also the detail in the picture such as the「日本一」became「米国一」. I think this parody is very catchy and effective in expressing the cultural pride and envy to American designed iPad.

A picture is worth a thousand words. I strongly believe that a good sketch can effectively communicate great ideas to people, especially in user experience design field where the main goal is to analyze and improve people’s emotional needs while using a product or service.

Here are couple pictures about this story: