Conclusion and Future Work - Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design - page 160

We presented different HCI ideologies leading the user interaction. We proposed
a framework for analyzing ideology in the context of HCI. The ideology analysis
stands on the semiotic foundation presented in Chapter 2 and proved to bring useful
insights.
Every sign in HCI is cultural and therefore informational.
The UI provides a lens for reading and writing cultural data. The user's native language
and culture determine his or her mentality, rationality, and the discourse involved. By
expressing in different systems of meaning (e.g., languages, UIs), we accent different
objects and experiences, which results in different insights into the world we live in.
When UIs take into account those differences, they can promote both usability and
cultural diversity.
The second thesis has been addressed in Part II, “Culture of Interaction.” In that
part we showed some interesting and actionable differences between user groups, if
any, that we could gather from cross-cultural research. Both the groups were exposed
to similar computing environments that led to similar preferences for the UI structure
in general. However, we found a few cultural markers that were different and were
related mostly to layout and color. The impact of the native language grammar on
the spatial and logical UI organization was not so profound as we expected. More
differences came from habits and cultural background.
The comparison of influences of different cultural backgrounds, namely Chinese
and European, tested the evaluation framework based on semiotics, ideology (mental
models), and culture. Our framework proved to be valuable in finding and under-
standing the cultural differences, and gave us insights on how to design for them.
Future work generated by this project includes the following:
1. Develop a pattern visualization for UI language elements. Such visualization
would help to quickly compare interaction structures with different kinds of
UI in one culture or between two or more cultures.
2. Compare the SA with other semiotic methods. Although we built our method
with the knowledge of other semiotic methods, such a comparison would
show the specific benefits and/or deficiencies of SA.
3. Extend the SA method (Appendix B) to focus more on the pragmatic and
rhetoric function of the UI to allow for a thorough analysis of the inherent
HCI ideologies. It would be especially useful to integrate also an appreciation
of the cultural background.
4. Extend the SA cross-cultural method to study also different cultural (e.g., ru-
ral vs. urban, male vs. female, young vs. elderly) and linguistic environments
(e.g., different sentence structure, different writing direction).