While designing manuals, every technical developer knows that the user is the first priority. However, it becomes more difficult to meet users’ requirements as the potential users are more and more diverse, and users from different cultures have their own specific preferences.
Instead of designing a separate document for each culture, international companies choose to design one document that is translated in other languages. This may be due to the enormous cost of designing various versions. And another noticeable reason may be that nobody knows to what extent cultural differences influence users’ preference and performance. Therefore, it is essential to conduct research about the behavior of users from different culture background.
Among all cultures, Chinese and western cultures are regarded as the most distant from each other. It has been found that there are some differences in:
- the customs, needs, and preferences of users, which may reflect true cultural differences between China and the Western world.
- the writing habits that have developed independently of each other throughout the years.
- the different stages in the development of the field of technical communication: Technical communication and document design have a longstanding tradition in the Western world, but are only beginning to emerge in the Chinese context.
We argue that user research is the key to an understanding of cultural differences between Western cultures and China, and is also the key to developing a technical communication body of knowledge within the Chinese context. For Western technical communication, such user research offers a mirror to reflect on the established technical communication principles that we may hold for universally true.
Therefore, I would like to introduce to you my research about cultural differences and user manuals. The research includes an experiment to test the preference and performance of users from China and Western countries, discuss the status of technical communication in China, and summarizes the structural differences found by previous researchers. In summary, my research tries to answer the following issues:
- What’s the structural differences between the Chinese and Western manuals?
- How users react to the culturally adapted manuals?
If you want to know more about this topic, you are invited to join me on June 8, 2016 in Utrecht at Information Energy.
''Designing for users with different cultures''
PhD Student,
University of Twente
Cultural Differences in Technical Communication
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