A couple of months ago I had the good fortune to travel to China in order to spend some time to get to know the team at Mozilla Online in Beijing. My goals were twofold: to get to know the requirements of Chinese users, and to better understand what my colleagues in Beijing were trying to do to address those needs.
China is obviously a very different place from Canada, but I don’t think I fully understood how different until I asked Gong Li, Jack, Mi Jia, Sun Bin, Amax, Wendy, Doris, Sharon and Cathy how they would go about finding information. I’m used to a very search-based culture, and was shocked to discover that search - while still important - was a secondary task for all of my Chinese colleagues. Their normal pattern would be to first visit an authoritative source (a portal of some form, either a media hub, a news site, or a topic-oriented site like one for music) and then drill into the information presented. For example, if I’m interested in going to the movies, I would search for “showtimes toronto” and then navigate from there. My colleagues, on the other hand, would more likely navigate to a place where they knew they could find reliable data, follow links to showtimes, and only then perhaps invoke search on the individual movies to find out more about them.
This struck me as incredibly foreign, and quickly made me realize two things. First (and perhaps foremost) was that I carry a great deal of cultural context with me when participating in discussions and decisions about Firefox. Second, that while the Internet is a global phenomenon that connects people together in a web of information, the ways in which people like to interact with that information is likely to be heavily influenced by their cultural contexts. Obviously Internet users are themselves influenced and affected by their experiences online - the speed at which memes travel and cross cultures is evidence of that - but it’s bi-directional. We can’t just assume that everyone wants to or should interact with the Web in the same way, and moreover, we shouldn’t assume that it would be good for the web if everyone did.
None of these observations on their own are particularly original or stunning, of course, and I don’t at all mean to imply that I am reporting some sort of revolutionary news. “People around the world are different and have different needs” is the type of truism that doesn’t need a lot of repeating. It’s just not every day that you have that truism smack you in the face with such a sharply drawn example as happened to me that day.
Awakened, I started to pay more attention, and noticed seemingly tiny differences that carried huge implications. When back at home, if I were watching someone “surfing” the net I’d see them leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and another on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China the keyboard was far less frequently used, and the standard posture was leaning back from the monitor slightly, one hand on the mouse. This isn’t to say that users in China weren’t doing a lot: most of them were watching a video while scrolling through news and perhaps another site. They were, however, letting the information come to them and drilling down when something caught their interest, as opposed to seeking out relevant information and branching out from there.
In addition to these anthropological observations, Gong Li and his team were able to provide a wealth of contextual information about the market. While the challenges they were facing (distribution, awareness, poorly coded sites that had compatibility problems) were reminiscent of those faced elsewhere, the Chinese market seems to move en masse, with most people doing what everyone else does. Almost everyone has Windows XP, many from a pirated version of the CD that shipped with Maxthon and other software, and the idea of downloading and installing new software isn’t as commonplace. The National Banks all use an ActiveX control on their login pages to prevent keylogging (ironic!), and most e-commerce sites use direct-debit from these banks as the primary form of payment.
It was immediately apparent that Gong Li and everyone at Mozilla Online were as passionate about bringing the power of Firefox to the Chinese market as they were knowledgeable about their special needs. This was made clear when they started telling me about the project they were working on: Firefox China Edition, which went into beta today.
This package bundles Firefox 3 along with several features which the Mozilla Online team believes will be useful for Chinese users, such as:
- new mouse-based controls for common functions that are often invoked by shortcut keys in North America and Europe, which isn’t as common a habit of Chinese users
- some Maxthon-parity features such as the ability to close a tab using double-click
- a drop-down button on the toolbar for launching common system utilities like a calculator, a notepad, a screenshot grabber and an image editor (editing images and pasting screenshots is a very common activity in China)
- a new sidebar called “Live Margins” which allows the user to drag any highlighted text to open a new drill-down search which will show you semantically relevant content as well as allow you to store pictures, videos and music you encounter so you can return to it or play it from the sidebar without interrupting your usual browsing tasks (this sidebar is also available as the Add-On known as Juice if you want to try it out in English!).
Firefox China Edition isn’t going to replace the product that we ship as Firefox in China, and as with any bundle, if a user decides they want to remove this extra functionality, they can do so in the Add-Ons manager. Even so, Li and his team have been careful to ensure that as a product produced by Mozilla Online, it adheres to the values and principles our community shares.
I’m really interested to see what the response is in China to a set of features which have been prepared specifically to create a browser for locals. The Mozilla Online team will be tracking response closely, to see if this helps them gain additional traction in China. I’ll also be watching to see what sort of things we should be considering for inclusion in future versions of Firefox, based on what we learn from our colleagues overseas.
The beta launch of Firefox China Edition is a fantastic achievement for the Mozilla Online team, and is leaving me with a lot to think about in terms of what other assumptions we make glibly when building a supposedly global product.
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