»my web app«

To sum it up: what do I want my web application to be like?

The target group are people being sent to work abroad. To be specific my web application is aiming at people who need to prepare themselves for this mission. They might eventually attend a language course but they do not benefit from a cross-cultural training prior to their departure. Based on recent studies it is 40% of companies who do not prepare their employees. I still need to find numbers for this but it's presumably small and middle-class companies who do not afford preparational training courses for their employees.

The web app wants to alleviate the effects of a missing preparation. I use the word alleviate because I am aware of the fact that even the nicest web app will never be able to substitute a proper training. Thus the purpose of a web app has to be to raise awareness, to allow future expatriates a glimpse into the foreign world, to support understanding of the cultural differences.

So, into what will I have to further investigate?

• I will need to know more about the Polish history. Since my web app is specifically about working in Poland, I am not sure in how far I will integrate the Polish history in general but nevertheless it is essential background knowledge. Especially after the turbulent and adverserial past Germany and Poland share.
• The educational system. Which subjects are stressed in general? How is education valued? How to people get into their jobs?
• Which significance does work have? In which relation do leisure time and working time stand? Is there a strict separation of the two fields?
• How is work organized? When are meetings held? Who carries which responsibilities?
• Style of communication. Within the company as well as towards the head office? How does communication with partners work? How with clients?

I'll hope to find an answer to these questions in the interviews as well as in books and articles. Some questions sound to be rather specific and I expect specific answers, too, but actually I see each answer, story and piece of information to lead to a more general picture. Osland and Bird had described the learning process to be analagous to putting a jigsaw puzzle together. It's about learning an internal logic rather than learning the exact rules.

PS: This is not meant to be a full list of best intentions. It's a start. Suggestions are always welcomed :-) and I needed to free some memory space in my head so I can continue to think...

So, now I started to sort information I have about Poland. Every icon on the structure board will in the end be at least one page in the web application. Thus I try to collect which will be the content of these pages.

One will be on the model employee:


One will be on issues such as motivation and feeback:



I started some more but to all of them I will need to add much more content. So this is just to give an impression.

and then I call it a day.

Is it necessary to present interviews as films? Do I need to see a moving face the whole time? What's the alternative? Film stills (or photos)? A form of visualizing the content of the things said?

I mean I still need to figure out how to visualize all the other things but the interviews are at least something very specific...

Don't see how I want to use pictures and film yet. I definitely don't want to use them the way they are but include them into something drawn myself.
My visual material will have to reflect different aspects of history, the education system, ... as well as interviews and photos of modern Poland - all that I want to express in one visual language.

The interviews will be the main part of my web application. From the interviewees I want to learn how they came about and what it is like to work in Poland. I want to learn about the challenges as well as about the rewards.
Though I focus on the individual stories I don't want to show the interviewee talking the whole time or even at all. My emphasis lies on the content. I want the interviewees to remain rather anynomous and don't want to merely draw attention on their faces. Thus I rather want to use the voices combined with some kind of animation.

When I was talking to Frank yesterday about the interviews, he suggested to programme an online questionnaire. But the thing is that I'm not looking for numbers. The numbers are what bugged me most about all the studies I read: they try to clarify things but just make everything very abstract.

Freya gave me a nice word for what I wanna do: qualitative survey. I want to hear stories, I want to create an image of the country. My former boss would call it the look and feel.

This actually goes pretty much in line with the culture assimilators which try to approach cultures by means of presenting critical incidents.

I will need facts and figures, too. Sure. But the question is: how to present them? After all I'm not a scholar but a designer (to-be ;-)

It's done. What a relief. The structure board for my web application. I tried to put in all possible aspects of work. This might seem a little crowded at first but it reflects pretty much the collage I have in mind. Additionally, I will have to kick out points to which I will not get enough information. Thus:



click to enlarge ...

Tomorrow I'll add specific information about Poland to this abstract. Stay tuned ;-)

I decided on the structure board to be so fullfullfull because it is reflecting the collage-character of the web application. There will not be a typical navigation bar with the main categories and their sub categories. Each screen will include several linkages which will take the user to different sights.

The page on "continued training" for example could link to "motivation" but as well to general "concepts of education". The later would for example link to the "model employee" since the way and content of learning reveal quite a lot about desirable character traits.

I'm not sure if it works. I can understand that people get lost but for now it's my working model. Maybe I can break it down into more general categories later but in the moment that would not help me much - I need the overview...

How do I want to use the interviews?

For sure not as full-length interviews. I would rather want to use bits and pieces and assemble them new.

The most obvious would be to group various answers to one question. This could be done by either putting them together in a film or by to allow the user to click onto the various answers.

When I was younger I had a adventure book. At the end of each page you had to decide what the protagonist was gonna do. Accordingly you had to read further on page xy or on page yz. And at the end of each page you again had to decide between two options. I always tried to read all possible strings of the story at the same time but that of course didn't work.

The narrative concept's of storytelling try to catch up on this idea. Basically it's the whole idea of internet as Chrizi said today. Clicking and thus making a choice. There is no way to always know all the options but still it's the user who actively decides on which content he or she wants to get, to learn, ...

I mean this is not the new enlightment but the question is how to use it. In the moment I follow the results of a project where the user is seeing his/her very own documentation: Florian Thalhofer and Kolja Mensing interviewed the inhabitants of a huge immeuble (1600 people live there) for a project called "13.Stock" (unfortunately the English version is down so there is only a Polish translation). With every piece of interview you watch you get three other pieces to choose next.

I don't like their design that's for sure. But actually in the moment I'm not even sure if I like the idea and what I get out of that. I remember to have seen other projects with the same concepts so I still need to check that out. And hopefully come up with an opinion.

For the moment there is still what Chrizi came up with: take pieces of an interview and stop them at a certain point. The respective pieces would tell a typical story about working in Poland, some special cross-cultural encounter, or something like that. Just before the "strange" behavior the film would be stopped and the usere would have to guess what happens next. Thus to become aware of his/her own behaviorly patterns and expectancies.

This would be quite analogous to the method of culture assimilators and the story telling of critical incidents. Therefore it would also be necessary to find an appropriate Polish explanation for certain behaviors.

An official consultation today revealed the following....

Another possible layer of structure could be categorized into business life with two sub-categories - issues within and issues outside the company -, and a second main category concerned with the individual (private) living situation.

I, too, need to think about user rights. My teacher drew my attention to information that is enterprise-sensitive - thus information they do not want to share with their competitors. On the other hand, employees might not want to share problems they encounter in their private lives with their superiors nor with their subordinates.

I agree that I will at least need to think about it theoretically. This leads to the general question of the level of participation of users: do I want them to put in their own content? While I love things to be interactive I'm very afraid that this web application is growing too big. I don't have the time to put every possible feature into one website. Nevertheless I definitely need to include possible features in my thinking.

While talking about corparate-sensitive content he also suggested to create an extra area that companies can "buy" and design according to their own guidelines, including their logo and stuff like that.


Discussing the interviews coming up he also pointed out that I need to be a bit neutral about the topics I want to talk about. This means that I will have to be open to see which topics are actually relevant for expatriates. Thus even though I anticipate the historical impact on German-Polish relationships to be relevant I should not push people into that direction. He said that for example the rebellion in the Ghetto of Warsaw might come up in one interview again and again but that could be simply due to the location of the company in Warsaw.

After thousand of sketches and numerous files (which were mostly white and thus were deleted).... here the state of the art.

First the image I had gotten stuck with the whole d*** day.



I didn't like the colors and it's just too crappily handmade and whatever. Didn't like it at all.
Now I tried to fix it a bit. It's far from being finished, the colors are by no means fixed (even though I see myself to go for neutral), I'm not patient enough to draw filigran lines in the moment, the typo (what's my problem with type?), don't need to have a line-block-bla-background andandand.... If you don't see much of a difference between the sketches... don't tell me. It was a huge step :-) It's a sketch to finish the day, drink a beer with Rosa and get back to it tomorrow and fill it with life.


(click to enlarge)