ABSTRACT
For some 10 years now we reviewed literature in both Chinese and English languages on international design standards, cross-cultural psychology, and cross-cultural user interface research and design. We reviewed over 200 books, conference papers, and journal articles. Many of these are of a theoretical nature, exploring links between culture, psychology, and human behavior. While fascinating and helpful to us in formulating research questions, these purely theoretical works provide little direct guidance on how to design things for users in different cultures. The majority of the books and papers that we reviewed focused more directly on some specific aspect of cross-cultural user interaction with computers. These research reports usually compared a limited number of cultures, often an Eastern one and a Western one. Thus, the results have a certain amount of validity for the specific cultures studied, but practitioners should be cautious about extrapolating the results too widely. Given the locus of economic development in the world today, it is no surprise that the majority of the research papers investigated users in China, India, and the United States or Northern Europe. That said, most of these papers stopped short of providing clear guidance about design that would be useful in a practical way to a user interface designer. This section of the book attempts to fill that void.
