Mission

Mission

With the advent of globalisation and the information technology revolution in developing countries, we can no longer overlook the aspect of culture in the design of user interfaces and interactive products. We need to understand and accept that there are significant differences in how people with different cultural backgrounds respond to directions and test methodologies. From the lab of the very large IT companies in Beijing to the design departments at India’s finest institutions of higher education, there is a call for adequate methods and techniques for designing human-computer interaction.

This project aims to investigate the impact of culture on the results of established methods of usability testing. The production and use of technologically advanced information and communication applications are no longer restricted to the Western world, and there are indications that usability testing procedures developed for use in, e.g., Europe or the US do not give reliable results in countries such as India, China or Malaysia. This project is an in-depth investigation of the cultural specifics that go into usability test situations in three countries: Denmark, India and China. In a second phase we want to explore possible developments of the testing methods in order to avoid cultural bias and produce comparable results across countries of the world