User-Centered Service Design for Multi-language Knowledge Communication

Abstract

With the rapid expansion of globalization, knowledge communication becomes more and more important among people from different nations. Information and communication technology (ICT) is expected to play an essential role in such kind of multi-language knowledge communication activities. However, the major problem of supporting multi-language knowledge communication using ICT is the variety of user requirements considering different types of communication fields, languages, and stakeholders. Therefore, the design process should be user-centered. Moreover, combining human activities and machine-supported services is becoming an important issue in such types of service design, which makes it necessary to test the environments for human-computer interaction and study human behaviors. In this chapter, we address the above issues by proposing a user-centered service design approach for multi-language knowledge communication. To achieve this goal, we first use a motivating example of multi-language knowledge communication between Japanese agricultural experts and Vietnamese illiterate farmers to illustrate our problem. Then, we propose the user-centered service design process. Finally, we use a field study proposed in the motivating example to show the effectiveness of our proposed design approach.