Introduction - Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design - page 1

1 Introduction
“What pattern connects the crab to the lobster
and the orchid to the primrose
and all four of them to me? And me to you?”
Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature
The present work seeks to describe implicit patterns based on natural language and
culture in human-computer interaction (HCI), and user experience (UX). For our pur-
poses we shall use the term HCI as concerned about the structure of the system, while
the term UX shall be used for the activities related to the HCI design process, such
as planning, researching, analyzing, designing, implementing, evaluating, document-
ing, training, and maintaining (Marcus, 2009). The user interface (UI) is the external
effect (or representation) of both HCI, and UX.
Although extensive research has been done in the fields of HCI semiotics, and
the cultural aspects of HCI, we seek to bring novel insights by informing these
fields through the linguistic perspective, and to propose a set of design guidelines
for the international HCI/UX practitioners. The goal to achieve this is twofold: First,
to define the semiotic and linguistic system of HCI and create a UX methodology
(Part I), and second, to apply the acquired methodology for cross-cultural comparison
(Part II).
We consider semiotics as a foundation of interaction and communication design
in HCI, because it is concerned with meaningful arrangement of UI elements across
space and time.
However, the above method can work well only when we acknowledge the influ-
ence of our native language and culture on our thoughts and actions. The potential
differences are further accented by globalization, because when using communica-
tion technology, we are faced more and more with UIs coming from rather different
cultural backgrounds. In order to tackle the differences in a meaningful manner,
there is a growing need to design UIs that are usable and well accepted in the target
culture.
Cross-cultural testing of UIs is the most comprehensive way to meet this goal,
but it is also the most financially demanding. Therefore, by defining a usable set of
UI design guidelines for a target culture, designers could market their products with
lower costs and with better acceptance.
We chose to work from the semiotic perspective, which helps us uncover the
sense-making processes of the users. We used semiotic methods to build a common
framework to gather and analyze cross-cultural data. And, we started our analysis by
looking at the UI as an example of complex language.
To acquire the necessary preliminary insights about users from diverse cultural
backgrounds, we carried a pilot study targeted at the habits, mental models, and UI
preferences of Chinese and Czech users. The scientific rationale of choosing Czech
and Chinese respondents for comparison was to search for meaningful differences
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