User Interviews
Lisa
The first user we interviewed is Lisa. Lisa does not really like traveling in foreign countries; she prefers to spend her summer holiday in Europe. But as she married an Indonesian, she now sometimes spends some weeks there. Her first stay there (some month after the marriage) took 9 weeks. During this time (she was living in her husband ’s family) several problems occurred. Lisa speaks English, and a little French. Before she went to Indonesia she visited one course in the Volkshochschule. So she had little, but basic knowledge about the language. As she traveled with her husband, she did not read a travel guide. She thought her husband would tell her everything. But that was really hard for him, as everything was normal for him, and so he did not understand the problems Lisa had. Here are some of the problems she described:- She was not used to all these noises which are normal in an Asian city like . In this point her husband could help and explain it to her
- The low water quality was a problem for her.
- It was strange to her to eat three warm meals a day.
- Lisa also mentioned problems with the interaction with other people. She says that there was less distance if you get to know new persons, for example it was usual to enter a sleeping room of a not well known person without knocking. Lisa had really problems with this, as her husband thought this to be usual, but she did not know how to behave, because she was new in the family
- Another problems was the hierarchical structure, Lisa did not know how to behave towards butlers.
Karl
We interviewed another potential user, let's call him Karl. Karl travels a lot. Because of his job he leaves Germany about twelve times each year, usually for about a week or so. His trips mostly are business-trips and he travels to Asia as well as Eastern- and Middle-Europe. In addition to German, Karl speaks English and Netherlands. Because he travels quite frequently, Karl has some experience interacting with people from different cultures and claims, that he hasn't had any problems at all. When he has some spare time, he sometimes visits tourists attractions like museums, temples or similar locations. Karl has never had difficulties finding out about the rules of behavior in those places, because as he says the places where they expect and accept lots of tourists visiting, signs are set up, telling the tourists in multiple languages, what rules they have to obey (dress codes, rules of behavior, i.e. "It's not allowed to take pictures"). In addition to this he finds information about places to visit in flyers, he can get at the hotel. This way he can also learn business-hours or fees. He has no problem rejecting food, offered by a host, if it looks strange, even if this means that his host might be offended. Karl doesn't mind, if people are offended if he violates a rule he could not have known about, in his opinion nobody can expect him to know about rules that where not explained to him. When we were talking about menus in restaurants, Karl remembered a hot summer day in Paris, where he ordered Beef Tartar and was quite surprised when he got raw meet. Still Karl doesn't consider it a problem, to order food in foreign countries, because if you don't know what to order at a local restaurant and you're not willing to take any risks, you could always find a KFC, McDonalds or Burger King. He does not prepare himself for his trips by reading travel-guides; he thinks the information provided by them is aimed at tourists more than at business men. The only information he would consider useful is information about what vaccinations to get, which flights are available, safe means of transportation in the country in question or which regions might be dangerous to travel. In general Karl is not interested in a system as we proposed it. The only information he seeks is best supplied before you even leave your own country, so you can easily look it up on the web or get it from the Foreign Ministry. He probably would not benefit much of a system of the kind we propose, so he would be very unlikely to buy one, should it ever exist. Karl also doubts that it could ever become reality. He doesn't question the technical feasibility, at least not a few years from now (all we need is cheap access to GSM and Bluetooth-technology) but he thinks, that it would be far to much effort to gather all the information about all the countries worldwide and enter them into a database, for you would have to have employees all around the world collecting the necessary information. Karl thinks this would be far to expensive to ever be a commercial success. An author ’s remark: since we will use a PDA (for practical reasons) equipped with GSM and Bluetooth our product will essentially be software. This will enable us to forget about commercial applications, making it an open source project, thus getting the open source community all around the world to contribute to the gathering of rules of behavior, information about people and places of their countries. Unfortunately Karl has no use for our system himself, so he didn't give us any clues about what features he would like to have, since he would have none.Alexander
Our last interviewee is Alexander. He is German and now is living in Norway. He works in Norway as technical director for Nordic at an IT-company. So he travels more than 50 times a year but almost to other european countries -just like Sweden, Netherlands, U. K. or Germany. He can speak german, norwegian, english fluently and korean a little. Actually he has not had problem in any European countries, although he has common knowledge about other cultures or languages.
But he had some problems in other country once. Alexander is married a korean, so he was in Korea about 2 weeks after his wedding. It was the first time for him to go to Asia, but he thought, it would be not difficult. His wife told him about korean tradition or important rules about interaction with korean. Hence for him interaction with korean people is not so difficult, but when he wanted to go to anywhere alone, he couldn't do it. Because he could not read or interpret korean characters. Normally he has not had such problem, in Europe he can read or guess the meaning, even if he can't speak the language. In Korea he could not read the traffic sign and also the destination of public transport. He found that going to somewhere is difficult without knowing the language.
After showing the story boards and explanation of eMARU he is interested in the object recognition, especially about the character recognition and translation. Before traveling he can search and gather the needed information about the country or culture, but he can't learn the language. Alexander would like to learn other cultures by experience, that means, it is not necessary for him the function of showing the custom of the country. He wants to try to know about new thing by himself. But he can't learn foreign language in a short time. On the other hand he doubts the correctness of information which eMARU is given the user and the possibility of usage in every countries. To use eMARU is needed some infra structure of telecommunication but it is not usual to access the internet anywhere and anytime. According to his thinking eMARU should be easy to use and light. He said, if the system is reliable and fast enough, he would like to use it.
Interview Findings
Generally our interviewees are interested in eMARU, but they don't think that this system would be really helpful during the travel. They can find some books or ask their friends or anyone .Every interviewee is interested in the different function of eMARU, e.g. Lisa is interested in the cultural advice, but Alexander in the scan function.That means, eMARU has relatively many functions and the user doesn't need all function of eMARU, just one or two functions. After interviews we can conclude that eMARU could be not useful for traveler. The reasons are following:- No distinct merits in comparison with existing devices
- eMARU doesn't have obvious function which can appeal attractive for the user.
- The target user group of eMARU is immense, not enough specified.
According to the result of interviews eMARU is not useful and makes no sense if we continue the project with these functions. So we have decided that our project should be changed and we start new. You can find detail here.