Social: Theories and Models - Foundations for Designing User-Centered Systems - page 261

national cultural factors. When you are designing systems you need to study the
environment in which the system will be deployed to make sure that it will be
acceptable to the users and to reduce the risk that any assumptions or misunder-
standings will lead to an unusable or unsafe system. There are numerous examples
of lessons learned in this area (e.g., Olson and Olson 2003 - 2004 ).
There is no magic bullet for avoiding these risks. There are several steps you
can take. You can study the culture and laws by visiting the environment the
system will be in, something that is advocated by techniques such as contextual
design (Beyer and Holtzblatt 1999 ). You can read about the culture or have your
own team members visit and work in the culture. You can include members of the
culture in your design team. These members will not be perfect representatives,
but will help avoid some problems and decrease the risk of system problems. You
can also include time to pilot test and get feedback from users in that culture using
a spiral design process (Boehm and Hansen 2001 ; Pew and Mavor 2007 ).
9.3.3 Summary
This section reminds us that, in addition to the users and their teams, there are
higher social levels that will influence system design. These levels are important,
but vary much more than users and even teams. As you start to design systems you
should also consider that differences between your understanding and the actual
levels can pose a risk to the success of your system.
You should study these levels for a system to the point where you understand
whether they pose risks and, if they do, reduce the risks through appropriate
actions. Some of these may be done by changing the organization (difficult, but
worthwhile where appropriate), or by changing the system to reflect the organi-
zation, laws, and cultural reality.
9.4 Models of Social Processes
9.4.1 Introduction
Models of social processes can serve as more concrete theories and they also
''have enormous potential to resolve the problem of system-team design''
(Kozlowski and Ilgen 2006 ). There is a range of models of social processes that
can be created using existing tools and methods. These range from less formal
representations that are not computer-supported that can help system design on the
ground to computer-supported models of social processes that help provide policy
guidance for governments (Fan and Yen 2004 ). This section introduces the range
of these models by providing examples at several levels.