A Framework for Thinking About the Maturity of Cultural Usability

Interaction design and usability have become important contributors to economic and cultural development in emergent economies in today’s global distribution of the use and production of IT, but research and practice that incorporate cultural and non-western perspectives on software and interactive products are still in their infancy. This chapter presents theory of cultural cognitive styles and standard usability, and a framework for thinking about the maturity of cultural usability. The framework has five levels. Level I concerns the localization of the user interface, level II focuses on the localization of the usability evaluation methods, level III emerges with new user groups, level IV concerns historical changes in the concept of usability itself, and level V deals with managing a complexity of user groups. The chapter uses recent empirical results from studies of culture and usability to illustrate the need for the framework for thinking about the maturity of cultural usability.