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Culture and Usability: Will Design Patterns ease Problems of Context?
Source: UN, 17 July 2003
Submitted by
Ann Light
Speaking at the 2nd HCI and Culture Workshop at the University of Greenwich last month, Chris Lawson at the University of Luton described his work, supported by Shailey Minocha and Pat Hall of the Open University, comparing the usefulness of guidelines and design patterns for developing artefacts over different cultures.
'The [developer] organisation will simply wish to make the least amount of changes possible to make the existing product acceptable to the target culture,' he said, explaining the background to his evaluation.
He then quoted Shneiderman and his eight golden rules of interface design that Shneiderman claims are 'applicable in most interactive systems'. The first of these is to strive for consistency. However, Lawson pointed out that guidelines were themselves a product of a particular culture, and that consistency was a construct likely to be identified and to appeal in America, which is the second most universalist culture in the world (according to research by Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner).
Showing that other guidelines could be made to yield to cultural analysis, he concluded that this did not invalidate them, but suggested that they might be more effective in some places than others.
He advocated the development of design patterns that could be substituted for each other as a product had to be adapted for new markets. Using the format of problem, context, solution, he briefly demonstrated that the same problem could be given a different solution, according to the context specified.
Discussing contexts, the audience commented that specific industries have their own cultural similarities, which cross other boundaries. Specialists from different countries might all go through the same training, or even the same training institutions, for instance. Therefore, some software would need to be more locally influenced, such as for schools, while other contexts within the same country, such as marketing, would share global characteristics.
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