The Art of Cross-Cultural Design for UsabilityIntroductionThe Forgotten LinksIT Intrinsic ValuesCultural Models -The Rescue-?Understanding the Cultural Flow in a Cross-Cultural ProcessOutlookReferencesC. Stephanidis (Ed.): Universal Access in HCI, Part I, HCII 2009, LNCS 5614, pp. 665–671, 2009. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2009 The Art of Cross-Cultural Design for Usability Heike Winschiers-Theophilus School of Information Technology Polytechnic of Namibia [email protected] Abstract. More and more HCI researchers and practitioners have realized the urgency of addressing culture as being more than just an interface tuning pa-rameter. Recent publications, project initiatives and a growing number of glob-ally dispersed collaborating workgroups explore cultural models for practical solutions. Yet many endeavors focus on singled out aspects thereby missing fundamental factors of cross-cultural design and evaluation such as contextual connotations, dynamics and integration. Thus a common research agenda should therefore be the de-construction of the entire process as a basis for a comprehensive integration of shared experiences, best practices and tested models to enhance cross-cultural design and evaluation. 1 Introduction Designing usable information technology (IT) across cultures is an art, for it being highly creative and sensitive, situational unique, and contextually self-defined, ideally leading to a synergism of the created artifact with its environment. The designer must poses skills and master techniques required for the specific development context. How-ever the understanding thereof has been lacking and the consequent challenges were underestimated in the past. Looking at the history of cross-cultural IT design and usabil-ity evaluation shows the originally naïve assumption that IT, being value neutral, only needs to be slightly adapted to its new environment. However Del Galdo and Nielson [3] at an early stage already discovered the necessity to add two more levels to software localization, namely the adaptation of usability methods to specific countries as well as the design of user interfaces in accordance with cultural models of how local people work and communicate. Many practitioners and a few researchers, rushing to find prac-tical solutions, have overestimated available cultural models. Through a high abstraction specifics, unique to each development situation, are lost. Essential elements and relevant relations within the context are omitted of the process and product. Thus Young [17] argues “that the current state of research representing culture in the design of ICTs serves a limited scope of what culture can be in the design process”. She requests de-signers to rethink the integration of culture in the design process while revealing their need for guidance in the form of frameworks and models. In this paper, the author will illustrate that the manifold experiences and theories in cross-cultural design and evaluation are not comprehensive as yet. Only a full under-standing of the cultural flow will facilitate a complete integration.666 H. Winschiers-Theophilus 2 The Forgotten Links “Current approaches of using cultural models in software design and evaluation do not necessarily imply major usability improvement.” At first this statement seems rather provoking and absurd, as the obvious aim of using cultural models is to overwrite the IT intrinsic values by the users’ values. However, looking at the means of penetration of intrinsic values in IT solutions shows the rela-tive weakness of current approaches of integrating cultural models, to explicitly im-plant users’ values. 2.1 IT Intrinsic Values Commonly, as part of the development process a solution is modeled based on an abstraction of how the creator perceives a given reality [5]. Perception is based on the individual’s cultural background. Thus IT creators model IT solutions according to their cultural background [13]. This is often explicitly expressed in statements such as this: “As designers, we are naturally interested in facilitating these groups to use infor-mation technology in an effective, efficient, and sustainable way to further their goals” [9]. The propagation of western values in IT solutions is therefore established through the believed-to-be universally valid conceptualization of Software quality criteria, established methods and metrics [15]. For example the concept of usability, left un-questioned by the majority of researchers, is commonly considered equivalent to effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. It is therefore measured with methods such as GOMS and Think Aloud Task solving, in terms of number and time of task com-pletion. However previous research by the author and colleagues has revealed that usability criteria such as task completion time are largely irrelevant in the Namibian context [14]. Further brainstorming sessions and focus group discussions with differ-ent Namibian user groups have evidenced a significant deviating understanding of usability from the commonly assumed one [15]. Thus all usability evaluations have, in the absence of a contextually redefined usability concept, examined human com-puter interaction qualities not necessarily applicable to the local user group. The two-fold bias of usability evaluations, one through the underlying definition of usability and two through the application of specific methods has substantially contributed to the preservation of western values in deployed IT solutions [16]. 2.2 Cultural Models -The Rescue-? A number of cultural models have found their way into the HCI community, among the most cited are Hofstede’s, Hall’s, Victor’s and Trompenaar’s theories. These anthropologists have identified cultural dimensions, which explicitly differentiate cultural groups from each other in their way of thinking, feeling and acting. Hofstede [7], for example, differentiates the following dimensions: power-distance, collectiv-ism vs. individualism, femininity vs. masculinity, uncertainty avoidance, long- vs.The Art of Cross-Cultural Design for Usability 667 short-term orientation. Such models are used to guide interface design as well as adapt usability methods. Cultural Model as User interface Design Guidelines. The interest in cultural models by the HCI community has certainly increased since Marcus and Gould [8] have derived user interface guidelines directly from