Shared values and shared interfaces: The role of culture in the globalisation of human-computer systems

✍ Scribed by Donald L. Day

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 424 KB
• Volume: 9
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0953-5438
• DOI: 10.1016/s0953-5438(97)00025-8

✦ Synopsis

If the study of interface usability is a systematic examination of key factors that affect users' perceptions of system usefulness and ease of use, the social and cultural context that users bring to computerised tasks must form the ultimate test of usability. For decades, the HCI literature has attempted to identify those aspects of interfaces that make the most cognitive sense to computer users the design, control and ergonomic features that help well-designed systems approach that holy grail of HCI, the intuitive interface.

Most studies of usability have taken place within the U.S. and Western Europe. Certainly, significant progress has been made in identifying and isolating interface features that impact the way users negotiate their systems. However, all such studies are in fact a special case of more comprehensive phenomena that have only recently come to be appreciated: specifically, they are the elements of cultural context brought to all technology by users, regardless of the their applications, training or goals.

There is an argument to be made that HCI attempts to understand the preferences, mental models and cognitive processing of computer users from Herb Simon to Donald Norman are in fact characterisations of personal culture, of the ways that each user's social context predisposes him or her toward responding to new technology. That, in fact, is the