Abstract
So far, culture has played a minor role in the design of software. Our experience with imbuto, a program designed for Rwandan agricultural advisors, has shown that cultural adaptation increased efficiency, but was extremely time-consuming and, thus, prohibitively expensive. In order to bridge the gap between cost-savings on one hand, and international usability on the other, this paper promotes the idea of culturally adaptive software. In contrast to manual localization, adaptive software is able to acquire details about an individual’s cultural identity during use. Combining insights from the related fields international usability, user modeling and user interface adaptation, we show how research findings can be exploited for an integrated approach to automatically adapt software to the user’s cultural frame.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
References
Yeo, A.: World-Wide CHI: Cultural User Interfaces, A Silver Lining in Cultural Diversity. SIGCHI Bulletin 28, 4–7 (1996)
Barber, W., Badre, A.: Culturability: The Merging of Culture and Usability (1998)
Ford, G., Gelderblom, H.: The Effects of Culture on Performance Achieved through the use of Human Computer Interaction (2003)
Hodemacher, D., Jarman, F., Mandl, T.: Kultur und Web-Design: Ein empirischer Vergleich zwischen Grossbritannien und Deutschland (2005)
Reinecke, K.: Conceptual Design and Development of an XML-based Ergonomic Multimedia Information and Learning Platform for the Education of Agricultural Advisers in Rwanda (2005)
Kobsa, A.: User modeling: Recent work, prospects and hazards. In: Adaptive user interfaces: Principles and practice, pp. 111–128. North-Holland, Amsterdam (1993)
Maier, E.: Activity Theory as a Framework for Accommodating Cultural Factors in HCI Studies. In: Workshop-Proceedings der 5. fachübergreifenden Konferenz Mensch und Computer. A. Auinger, Wien: Österreichische Computer Gesellschaft (2005)
Röse, K.: Kultur als Variable des UI Design, Berücksichtigung kultureller Unterschiede bei der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion als zeitgemässe Gestaltungsaufgabe der nutzerorientierten und ergonomischen Gestaltung von Mensch-Maschine-Systemen. In: Mensch und Computer: Fachübergreifende Konferenz. B.G. Teubner, Stuttgart, pp. 153–162 (2001)
Hofstede, G.: Culture’s Consequences: Comparing values, behaviours and organisations across nations. Sage Publications Inc., Thousand Oaks (2003)
Smith, A., Chang, Y.: Quantifying Hofstede and Developing Cultural Fingerprints for Website Acceptability. In: Designing for Global Markets 5: Proc. Fifth International Workshop on Internationalization of Products and Systems (IWIPS 2003) Berlin, Germany, pp. 89–102 (2003)
Voehringer-Kuhnt, T.: Kulturelle Einflüsse auf die Gestaltung von Mensch-Maschine Systemen (2001)
Marcus, A.: Cross-Cultural User-Interface Design. In: Human-Computer Interface Internat (HCII) Conf. New Orleans, LA, USA, vol. 2, pp. 502–505. Lawrence Erlbaum Associatest, Mahwah (2001)
Marcus, A.: Cultural Dimensions and Global Web Design: What? So What? Now What? (2001)
Dunn, P., Marinetti, A.: Cultural Adaptation: Necessity for Global eLearning (2002)
Dormann, C., Chisalita, C.: Cultural Values in Web Site Design (2002)
Kamentz, E.: Adaptivität von hypermedialen Lernsystemen - Ein Vorgehensmodell für die Konzeption einer Benutzermodellierungskomponente unter Berücksichtigung kulturbedingter Benutzereigenschaften. Universität Hildesheim (2006)
Trompenaars, F., Hampden-Turner, C.: Riding the Waves of Culture: Understanding Cultural Diversity in Business. Nicholas Brealey Publishing Ltd (1997)
Marcus, A.: A Practical Set of Culture Dimensions for Global User-Interface Development (2004)
Bourgges-Waldegg, P., Scrivener, A.: Meaning: the Central Issue in Cross-Cultural HCI Design. Interact Comput. 9, 287–309 (1998)
Marcus, A., Armitage, J., Frank, V., Guttman, E.: Globalization of User-Interface Design for the Web (1999)
Hall, P., Lawson, C., Minocha, S.: Design Patterns as a Guide to the Cultural Localisation of Software. In: Designing for Global Markets 5: Proc. Fifth International Workshop on Internationalization of Products and Systems (IWIPS 2003) Berlin, Germany pp. 79–88 (2003)
Thissen, F., Wingert, B.: Interkulturelles Interface Design und Interkulturelle Kommunikation (2004)
Heimgärtner, R.: Messen von kulturellen Unterschieden in der Mensch-Computer-Interaktion (MCI). Linz, Austria (2005)
Kobsa, A.: Supporting User Interfaces for All Through User Modeling. In: Proceedings of HCI International, Yokohama, Japan, pp. 155–157 (1995)
Paliouras, G., Karkaletsis, V., Papatheodorou, C., Spyropoulos, C.: Exploiting Learning Techniques for the Acquisition of User Stereotypes and Communities. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on User Modelling (UM 1999) (1999)
Kobsa, A.: Adaptivität und Benutzermodellierung in interaktiven Softwaresystemen. In: Schütt, D. (ed.) Grundlagen und Anwendungen der künstlichen Intelligenz (17. Fachtagung), pp. 152–166. Springer, Heidelberg (1993)
Pohl, W.: Learning about the user - user modeling and machine learning. In: Proc. ICML 1996 Workshop, Machine Learning meets Human-Computer Interaction, pp. 29–40 (1996)
Langley, P.: Machine Learning for Adaptive User Interfaces. In: KI - Kunstliche Intelligenz, pp. 53–62. Springer, Heidelberg (1997)
Adomavicius, G., Tuzhilin, A.: Expert-Driven Validation of Rule-Based User Models in Personalization Applications. Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Journal 5 (2001)
Semeraro, G., Costabile, M.F., Esposito, F., Fanizzi, N., Ferilli, S.: Machine Learning Techniques for Adaptive User Interfaces in a Corporate Digital Library Service. Machine Learning and Applications. In: Proceedings of the ACAI-99 Workshop on Machine Learning in User Modeling, Chania, Crete, Greece, pp. 21–29 (1999)
Pitschke, K.: User Modeling for Domains without Explicit Design Theories. In: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on User Modeling, Hyannis, MA, USA, pp. 191–195 (1994)
Shneiderman, B.: Promoting Universal Usability with Multi-Layer Interface Design. In: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference on Universal Usability, Vancouver, Canada, pp. 1–8. ACM Press, New York (2003)
Greenberg, S., Witten, I.: Adaptive personalized interfaces - A question of viability. Behaviour and Information Technology 4, 31–45 (1985)
Sears, A., Shneiderman, B.: Split menus: Effectively using selection frequency to organize menus. ACM Transactions on Computer Human Interaction 1, 27–51 (1994)
Höök, K.: Evaluating the Utility and Usability of an Adaptive Hypermedia System. In: Proceedings of 1997 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Orlando, Florida, USA (1997)
Höök, K.: Steps to take before Intelligent User Interfaces become real. Interacting With Computers 12, 409–426 (2000)
Stephanidis, C.: Designing User Interfaces for All. In: Proceedings of the 13th Annual Conference Technology and Persons with Disabilities, Los Angeles, USA (1998)
Menkhaus, G., Pree, W.: A Hybrid Approach to Adaptive User Interface Generation (2002)
Lennard, A., Parkes, A.: An Architecture For Adaptive Interfaces (1995)
Badre, A.: The Effects of Cross Cultural Interface Design Orientation on World Wide Web User Performance. Georgia Institute of Technology (2001)
Sun, H.: Building a culturally-competent corporate web site: an exploratory study of cultural markers in multilingual web design. In: SIGDOC 2001. Proceedings of the 19th annual international conference on Computer documentation, Sante Fe, New Mexico, USA, pp. 95–102. ACM Press, NewYork (2001)
Benyon, D.: Adaptive Systems: a solution to usability problems (1993)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Reinecke, K., Bernstein, A. (2007). Culturally Adaptive Software: Moving Beyond Internationalization. In: Aykin, N. (eds) Usability and Internationalization. Global and Local User Interfaces. UI-HCII 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4560. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73289-1_25
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73289-1_25
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-73288-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-73289-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)