Conclusion and Future Work - Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design - page 159

Conclusion and Future Work
The detailed results of our case studies are presented and discussed in each part. For
discussion of the outcome from “Semiotics of Interaction”, please see Chapter 5, and
for “Culture of Interaction”, please see Chapter 9. We appraise our leading theses as
follows:
The UI is a means of sharing and interpreting information between systems.
Our thoughts and actions are guided by intrinsic logic rules, supported by the system
of language and culture. Language provides an architecture of the design space of
HCI/UX. Linguistics and semiotics provide effective methods to solve problems in
communication and interaction design. These methods help define the users in their
culture, rather than as culture-independent agents. Moreover, each UI stands on a
certain paradigm of use which is not always apparent. The UI ideology defines what
relations between users and objects can (or should) be made.
The first thesis has been addressed in Part I, “Semiotics of Interaction.” We provided
an analysis of the UI languages affecting the user's interaction, and presented an
evaluation method based on natural and UI language. Our results prove that taking
the linguistic perspective in analyzing UIs provides important insights into the way
interactive and communicative systems work.
In discussing the HCI ideology (Section 2.3) we presented semiotics as an analytic
method especially in its most complex dimension—pragmatics. Pragmatics stands in
the design process at the beginning because it forms the strategy and purpose of the
developed UI. In the sign context, pragmatics leads the meaning interpretation—what
semantics will be assigned to which syntax elements. Not only is this a process of
interpretation, but also the whole UI development strategy is subject to HCI ideology
to a large extent. Such HCI ideology acquires its specific form in the UI. For the
purposes of developing new UIs and also for interacting with the UIs already in place,
it is important to know the ways in which pragmatics, as an interpreting principle,
is coded and mediated. We can then counter the ideologies by proper education and
analysis.
In the UI corpus (Section 3.3) we presented the transcript of interaction sentences
forming language games that served together with the actual UI as a basis for HE
evaluation and SA analysis. Moreover, the transcript served as input for defining the
different elements involved in the interaction language.
The SA provided the expected kind of data (e.g., conventions, connotations, com-
binations), that gathered a wider context than those from HE. That said, SA can be
used to complement the widely used expert evaluation methods, but could possibly
be defined to have a higher overlap with HE. In the latter case, SA would need to be
evaluated hand in hand with the interaction sentences.
In summary, our study demonstrated the depth of investigation and breadth of
insight that SA can achieve in HCI and how this could enhance the current UX
practice. Both methods could be merged to provide a best-of-both solution.
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