A major impediment in global user interface development is that there is inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability engineering methods used for developing these global user interfaces. This paper presents a controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of structured interviews in international usability evaluation. The experiment consisted of a usability evaluation of a website with two independent groups of Indian participants. Each group had a different interviewer; one belonging to the Indian culture and the other to the Anglo-American culture. The results show that 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.
Archives: JUS
Introduction
Welcome to the first issue of volume 2 of JUS! There is one thing about usability professionals: we always ponder, wonder, reflect, and introspect on the state of our own profession. Arnie Lund in his invited essay “Post Modern Usability” suggests that while the usability profession has adopted some post-modernistic principles such as focusing more on user experience and less on the formalism, the profession needs to move on beyond post-modernism to shape “a practice that is a synthesis of the understanding of the user and context, and the growing understanding of the principles of how people interact with the world”. The first peer-reviewed article in this issue is appropriate for the voting season the United States. Selker, Rozenwieg, …
The System Usability Scale and Non-Native English Speakers
Abstract The System Usability Scale (SUS) was administered verbally to native English and non-native English speakers for several internally deployed applications. It was found that a significant proportion of non-native English speakers failed to understand the word “cumbersome” in Item 8 of the SUS (that is, “I found the system to be very cumbersome to use.”) This finding has implications for reliability and validity when the questionnaire is distributed electronically in multinational usability efforts. Practitioner’s Take Away The System Usability Scale (SUS) as originally conceived may not be suitable for electronic international distribution. Many non-native English speakers do not understand the word “cumbersome” in SUS Item 8, but do understand “awkward”. A simple fix for SUS Item 8 is to …
Animated Character Likeability Revisited: The Case of Interactive TV
Abstract Animated characters have been a popular research theme, but the respective desktop applications have not been well-received by end-users. The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of an animated character for presenting information and navigating music videos within an interactive television (ITV) application. Information was displayed over music video clips with two alternative user interfaces: 1) semi-transparent information overlays, 2) an animated character. For this purpose, the differences between ITV and desktop computing motivated the adaptation of the traditional usability evaluation techniques. The evaluation revealed that users reported higher affective quality with the animated character user interface. Although the success of animated characters in desktop productivity applications has been limited, there is growing evidence that animated …