Cultural user interfaces: a silver lining in cultural diversity

• Authors: Alvin Yeo
• Venue: ACM SIGCHI Bulletin
• Year: 1996

Many software applications marketed outside the country of origin are internationalised and/or localised. In this article, I propose a strategy to localise the software by creating Cultural User Interface a (CUI) for each of the target cultures. A CUI is a user interface that is intuitive to a particular culture. The CUI takes advantage of the shared or common knowledge of a culture which could be defined by country boundaries, language, cultural conventions, race, shared activities or workplace. An application that is CUI-enabled allows the use of many different CUIs. These different CUIs are developed collaboratively with the target cultures, thus problems associated with localisation such as misinterpretation of elements in the CUIs, are unlikely to occur. A CUI can be used not only for one application but for a range of applications.Most software developers have accepted the fact that it is worthwhile economically to internationalise their software. This trend is evident in the growing number of companies that provide internationalisation and translation services for software marketed outside the United States (US). Also, many resources are now available on internationalisation and localisation of software. These resources include books (Kano (1995), Fernandes (1995), O'Donnell (1994), Uren et al. (1993), Apple (1992b), Digital (1992), Madell et al. (1992), Taylor (1992), Nielsen, (1990)), mailing lists (INSOFTL, intercultural.CHI), newsgroups (comp.software.international, comp.std.internat) and FAQs (ISO 8859-1 National Character Set FAQ, Programming for Internationalization FAQ, Globalizing Applications for Windows FAQ). Some examples of current articles written on these topics include Yeo and Barbour (1996), Karat and Karat (1996), Belge (1995), Chris Miller (1994), Hall (1994), and Nakakoji (1994). CHI Workshops have also been conducted (Kellogg and Thomas, 1993). Presently, there is an even further need for internationalised software that allows the use of non-Romanised characters given the popularity of WWW (see. http://www.w3.org/pub/WWW/International/).Current internationalisation and localisation of software has mainly focused on modifications of the language/character sets, collating sequence, the date, time, number and currency formats. As pointed out by Russo and Boor (1993) and Marcus (1993) there are many aspects that need to be addressed. One of these aspects is making provisions for the different perceptions of the diverse cultures.In this article, I discuss the differences in perception of user interface elements across cultures. A proposal and justification for many individually unique Cultural User Interfaces (CUIs) will be put forward. Lastly, technical implications of this proposal and a strategy to develop CUIs will be discussed.