Last night, with some time to kill in New Malden, the kids and I decided to pop in to a Korean supermarket. There’s a big Korean community in that part of London, and as well as delicious-smelling restaurants there are lots of minimarts that remind me of the Indian and Caribbean stores in South London I used to go to with my grandparents.

The staff were very friendly and regarded us with curiousity and amusement as did the exclusively Korean clientele, and it was only when browsing that I realised that all of the packaging and labels were in Korean (I know,I know). For a while it was really disorienting and we all ended up gravitating to things that we recognised – Korean pot noodle equivalents for my teenaged son, biscuits for my daughter, and packets of seaweed for me.

It made me realise how the visual components and behaviours that we take for granted when developing our applications could seem just as bewildering to users not familiar with them. It made me glad in turn that we have Mark and Lilamani’s usability expertise to hopefully reduce the sense of vertigo for our end users, and I made myself a promise that we would keep factoring in usability testing for all of our products before they see the light of day.

Anyway, I don’t want to labour the point. The kids and I ended up buying a couple of items, all of which were what we thought except my “savoury snack” Jolly Pong which ended up being a very tasty Korean version of Sugar Puffs. Looking at the picture on the packet (Korean writing over what look like Sugar Puffs) I don’t really have an excuse for my assumption other than it came in a savoury snack looking package What’s Korean for caveat emptor?

Finally, a plug for the shop itself. It was called kmart and they were very friendly and very reasonable, even before the 10% discount we got! We’ll definitely be back to stock up on the Jolly Pong and maybe some more exotic/healthy options.

The song needs no plug as far as I’m concerned, but for readers born this side of the 80s here is a live version on YouTube (sadly I couldn’t find a live performance).