ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an overview of the design issues involved in cross-culture human-computer interaction, as well as some interface design guidelines for international users.
When conducting cross-culture studies, it is most obvious, though not enough, to examine the differences in the language, orthography, symbols, images and number formats used by people with different cultural backgrounds. Culture is defined as “the total pattern of human behavior and its products embodied in thought, speech, action, and artifacts, and dependent upon man’s capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations through the use of tools, language, and systems of abstract thought.” People from around the world may be different in their appearance, perception, cognition, and style of thinking. They may hold different cultural assumptions and values. They may view the world differently and they may have very different customs that make people of a specific culture unique and distinctive from people of other cultures. To consider designing computer interfaces for international users, it is important to study cultural traits of different cultures in a more profound fashion other than simply language or symbol translation.
