Daily reporting from the UPA annual conference (2)
Jakob Biesterfeldt (User Interface Design, Germany) and Robert Gillham (Amberlight, UK) continue their reporting from the annual conference of the Usability Professionals’ Association (UPA) in Austin, Texas.
In line with their talk on Thursday, they took part yesterday in a full-day workshop on cross-cultural user interface design/analysis, held by Aaron Marcus, and learned more about how to define cultural dimensions and how these affect user interface design.
Jakob Biesterfeldt: “Culture is usually referred to as patterns of values, attitudes and behaviours which are shared by a group of people. Cultural differences affect how people from different cultures interact with products, software or websites. In turn, this affects how we go about designing interactive products. It affects our methods, our designs, our products. It can simply influence the choice of UI colours all the way to the decision to sell the product in a specific target market or not.”
Amberlight (UK) and User Interface Design (UID) are founding members of the International Usability Partners (IUP). The IUP are a network of independent usability companies who provide usability services worldwide, based on a common understanding of best-of-class quality and methodology.
On Thursday Jakob and Robert will present the paper “Guidelines for Successful Recruiting in International Usability Studies” exchanging experiences from numerous usability studies across borders, cultures and languages. Their ideas on successful recruiting in international usability studies are available here.
