Meaning, the central issue in cross-cultural HCI design (original) (raw)
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There are as many arguments against as supporting the accommodation of culture into user interface design. One argument suggests that it is necessary to match the subjective cultural profile of the interface to the cultural profile of the users in order to enhance usability and performance. In contrast, we argue that the interface design characteristics required to design interfaces to accommodate one side of four of the five cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede will result in an increase in usability for all users, irrespective of the users' cultural profile. Secondary data analysis of a prior experiment somewhat supported our argument, but we conclude that further research into the effects of Hofstede's cultural dimensions is required before our hypotheses can be accepted.
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This paper presents research carried out to explore the implications of giving users a specific vocabulary to express their perceptions and opinions about opportunities to make contact with cultural diversity in human-computer interaction. This two-step study is part of a broader research project that aims at investigating users' perceptions and reactions when interacting with crosscultural systems. Our current findings point at the expressive power of the proposed vocabulary and the promising outcomes of using it in the interaction design cycle of cross-cultural systems.
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This paper focuses on the significance of culturally tailored digital products for Arabic-speaking users, examining how cultural relevance influences user satisfaction and engagement. This research study aimed to provide guidelines for incorporating cross-cultural designs in interfaces for Arabic-speaking users. Utilizing Hofstede's cultural dimensions as a framework, the study employs A/B testing, surveys, and interviews to reveal the importance of cultural inclusivity in interface design. The finding of this research demonstrated that the ease of understanding and interaction with digital products varies for native Arabic speakers and that feature and functionality requirements differ based on users' nationality. This, in turn, highlighted the pivotal role of culturally adapted UI/UX in improving user experience, advocating for digital products that are both empathetic and inclusive. By emphasizing cultural considerations, this research contributes to the broader discourse on creating user-centric digital environments that resonate with a diverse global audience, aiming to enhance connectivity between brands and their diverse user bases.
ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 1996
Many software applications marketed outside the country of origin are internationalised and/or localised. In this article, I propose a strategy to localise the software by creating Cultural User Interface a (CUI) for each of the target cultures. A CUI is a user interface that is intuitive to a particular culture. The CUI takes advantage of the shared or common knowledge of a culture which could be defined by country boundaries, language, cultural conventions, race, shared activities or workplace. An application that is CUI-enabled allows the use of many different CUIs. These different CUIs are developed collaboratively with the target cultures, thus problems associated with localisation such as misinterpretation of elements in the CUIs, are unlikely to occur. A CUI can be used not only for one application but for a range of applications.Most software developers have accepted the fact that it is worthwhile economically to internationalise their software. This trend is evident in the ...
Augmenting usability: Cultural elicitation in HCI
Human Work Interaction …, 2010
This paper offers context and culture elicitation in an inter-cultural and multi-disciplinary setting of ICT design. Localised usability evaluation (LUE) is augmented with a socio-technical evaluation tool (STEM) as a methodological approach to expose and address issues in a collaborative ICT design within the Village e-Science for Life (VeSeL) project in rural Kenya. The paper argues that designers need to locally identify context and culture in situ and further explicate their implications through the design process and at the global level. Stakeholders' context, culture, decisions, agendas, expectations, disciplines and requirements need to be locally identified and globally evaluated to ensure a fit for purpose solution.
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Technical Communication Quarterly, 2006
Current localization practices suffer from a narrow and static vision of culture resulting in usability problems for IT product and design. To address this problem, this article compares user localization efforts of mobile messaging technology in two different cultural contexts with a new methodology of cultural usability. It calls for expanding the scope of localization practices and linking user localization efforts to the IT product design cycle. SMS [short messaging service ] was an accidental success that took nearly everyone in the mobile industry by surprise. … [It] was the triumph of the consumer-a grassroots revolution that the mobile industry had next to nothing to do with and repeatedly reacted to. (MobileSMS, 2004) When mobile text messaging was designed and introduced as a voice-mail alerting service a decade ago (Hill, 2004), nobody imagined the great impact it would have on culture and communication technologies. Mobile text messaging has been a popular communication mode in East Asia, Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world no matter how different the local cultures are. In China, 274 billion messages were sent in the first 11 months of 2005, a 40% increase from the same period in 2004 ("Festive," 2006). In the United States, a country well-known for lagging in the use of mobile messaging, the increase is also amazing: 7.2 billion
Usability in the Future - explicit and implicit effects in cultural computing
Mensch und Computer im StrukturWandel, 2006
I present an extension of Kansei mediated communication in the field of cultural computing. I propose to do so by implementing Cultural Computing concept and enriching it with Kansei Mediated Interaction. I present some inspiration for my approach in terms of culture and then discuss them. I relate my work to the Eastern and to the Western world, i.e. I use cultural examples from Japan and England. I propose as a new direction for HCI, cultural computing with its related paradigm I call Kansei Mediated Interaction. Based on a short overview over the different paradigms for human computer interaction I introduce and discuss the most recent paradigm of cultural computing. Cultural computing addresses underlying and almost unconscious cultural determinants that have since ancient times a strong influence on our ontology and epistemology. Different cultures worldwide will have different approaches to address their particular cultural determinants. In the East, the project ZENetic Computer is a first and very promising approach for cultural computing addressing Eastern cultural determinants. In the West, I propose an interactive experience based on the narrative 'Alice's Adventures in Wonderland' to address the main characteristic of the Western culture: analytical reasoning based on formal logic. 1