A process model for developing usable cross-cultural websites (2004)

This paper from 2004 investigates methods of cultural modeling for the purposes of designing usable interfaces on an international scale. Despite its age and slight divergence from my area of interest (I’m less interested in usability and more interested in the ways interfaces either support or operate against the traditional forms of cultural interaction), it offered several key insights that I can take forward in future studies.

The paper starts by making a strong case for studying cross-cultural design as a means for smoothing intercultural communication.

Using the Internet to facilitate communication may be a relatively new phenomenon but in order to fully understand it we need to start by investigating the much wider research area of intercultural communication….

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall has described culture as a selective screen through which we see the world, and believed that basic differences in the way that members of different cultures perceived reality were responsible for miscommunications of the most fundamental kind.

It then goes on to say that, while designing for cross-cultural audiences seems as simple as addressing language and formatting, much of usability actually comes from the less straightforward aspects of design.

Cultural diversity makes it unrealistic for designers to rely on intuition or personal experience of interface design. However, designing multiple interfaces for different user groups adds significantly to the cost of development. It is important to focus on design characteristics that are sensitive to demographic differences, but it is often not clear what these are. We identify two broad types of usability issue inherent in international website design. Firstly there are easily identifiable ‘objective’ issues, such as language and format conventions, that are straightforward to address. Although important, such issues are not the concern of this paper. Here we are interested in ‘subjective’ issues, those that focus on the ways in which people in different cultures interact with computers and websites. The underpinning cultural and cognitive dimensions of website usability have major implications for the process of international website design.

Researchers have been applying frameworks for cultural assessment to interface design with varying degrees of success.

(p 67–68)

It touches on how research regarding Hofstede’s cultural framework has been used to analyze websites with inconclusive results with regard to usability. It introduces “cultural fingerprints” as a more nuanced way to evaluate relevant factors for developing interfaces.

In order to design the user interface of the website that is culturally optimised, that is an interface that matches the cultural expectations of a particular cultural group, it is necessary to first understand how existing sites in a country/culture are built within, and for, that particular target culture or sub-culture.

I also personally wonder how certain cultures without a strong digital design identity might make it difficult to understand what cultural expectations might exist.

The paper touches on the importance of semiotics in HCI, and that semiotics are certain to vary between cultures, because semiotics are the result of a relationship between a sign and the way it is perceived.

Semiotics is the discipline that connects meaning, meaning making, communication and culture through an understanding of acts of signification. Computer-based signs in this context include textual cues, images, icons, and sounds. There are a variety of semiotic discourses and traditions, most noticeably that of Peirce (1953) and Saussure (1974) and there have been similarly various recent attempts to apply semiotic principles to the design of user interfaces (French, 2002). Semiotics does not recognise that any particular sign (e.g. on-line brand sign) is truly ‘universal’. It all rather depends on the context: both local and global. Previous studies have tried to define and quantify the difference between a sign and its meaning (Blankenberger and Hahn, 1991) without much success. This ‘failure’ is not, however, surprising, since it is due to a fundamental semiotic principle: that both the context of the sign and the interpretant of the sign alter the meaning of the sign itself. This field of semiotics, therefore, implies that signs and their meanings would vary in different cultures.

The authors present “cultural attractors” as elements of interfaces that are used to express meanings to local cultures. In other words, cultural attractors are semiotic elements of interfaces.

Cultural attractors: colours, colour combinations, banner adverts, trust signs, use of metaphor, language cues, navigation controls and similar visual elements that together create a ‘look and feel’ to match the cultural expectations of the users for that particular domain.

Use of colour and colour combinations;

Use of culturally specific symbols;

Linguistic cues (mixed, dual language and assimilation of one language into another);

Culturally specific iconography (religious and charity giving, cartoon, geographical);

Trust aspects as instantiated in site branding and signification.

It’s also worth noting that “user-centered design,” co-design, and other similar approaches might not resonate well with other cultures, particularly those with collectivist values.

The authors suggest that the motivation for user involvement may be the result of Western culture’s view that users as individuals have a democratic right to be involved in the development of software they are expected to use, and that these assumptions cannot be automatically transferred to other cultural environments and can cause misunderstandings in cross-cultural development teams. The results of a study of developers’ attitudes highlights that cross-cultural difficulties are to be expected and that the choice and deployment of development methods need to recognize this issue.

These results are consistent with our previous findings which linked UCD with individualist societies and team-work with collectivist societies and is further evidence that UCD a culturally determined concept that cannot be assumed to translate from Western to Eastern societies without modification or reinterpretation.

What to take forward

A lot has changed since 2004—nearly half of India has internet access, for example, and the way that much of the world interacts with digital interfaces has also changed—so it’s unclear how much approaches to cross-cultural HCI has changed as a result of this expanding audience.

What this paper shows, however, is that frameworks for assessing cultural traits derived from other disciplines, such as Hofstede’s and the GLOBE framework” might not be as effective assessment tools as hoped by researchers. The authors’ proposal of a cultural fingerprint as a jumping-off point shows promise, but I question whether it distills cultural and circumstantial nuances.

“Cultural attractors” are also interesting to consider. Though they seem inherently superficial, touching on much of the service-level interactions, in analogous interactions, these factors are frequently the gateway to deeper cultural understanding.