2004/05/13 by Ravikiran Vatrapu, Vatrapu, Ravikiran, Manuel A. Pérez-Quiñones +2
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Digital Communication and Language #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Focus Groups and Qualitative Methods #H5.2 #Human-Computer Interaction (cs.HC) #Software Engineering (cs.SE) #Usability and User Interface Design #cs.HC #cs.SE
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cs/0405045
8 pages
arxiv created 2004/05/13 · openalex publication_date 2004/05/13 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The global audience for software products includes members of different countries, religions, and cultures: people who speak different languages, have different life styles, and have different perceptions and expectations of any given product. A major impediment in interface development is that there is inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability engineering methods used for developing user interfaces. This paper presents a controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of structured interviews in usability testing. The experiment consisted of usability testing of a website with two independent groups of Indian participants by two interviewers; one belonging to the Indian culture and the other to the Anglo-American culture. Participants found more usability problems and made more suggestions to an interviewer who was a member of the same (Indian) culture than to the foreign (Anglo-American) interviewer. The results of the study empirically establish that culture significantly affects the efficacy of structured interviews during international user testing. The implications of this work for usability engineering are discussed.