Culture and International Usability Testing: The Effects of Culture in Structured Interviews

TL;DR

This study empirically demonstrates that cultural differences significantly influence the effectiveness of structured interviews in usability testing, impacting the identification of usability issues across diverse user groups.

Contribution

It provides the first controlled empirical evidence on how culture affects structured interview outcomes in international usability testing.

Findings

Participants identified more usability problems with culturally similar interviewers.

Cultural congruence increased the number of suggestions made by participants.

The study confirms that culture significantly impacts usability testing effectiveness.

Abstract

The global audience for software products includes members of different countries, religions, and cultures: people who speak different languages, have different life styles, and have different perceptions and expectations of any given product. A major impediment in interface development is that there is inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability engineering methods used for developing user interfaces. This paper presents a controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of structured interviews in usability testing. The experiment consisted of usability testing of a website with two independent groups of Indian participants by two interviewers; one belonging to the Indian culture and the other to the Anglo-American culture. Participants found more usability problems and made more suggestions to an interviewer who was a member of the same (Indian) culture than to the foreign (Anglo-American) interviewer. The results of the study empirically establish that culture significantly affects the efficacy of structured interviews during international user testing. The implications of this work for usability engineering are discussed.