When immigrants move to Austria, they often face the challenge of adapting to a new culture and navigating unfamiliar digital interfaces. Cultural adaptation plays a significant role in interface usability, as cultural differences can influence how users perceive, interpret, and interact with digital platforms.
The Impact of Cultural Adaptation on Interface Usability:
Culture and different backgrounds influence people’s expectations, preferences, and their interaction with digital interfaces and adaptation to them. Adapting interfaces to align with people’s cultural backgrounds improves usability and user satisfaction. Research studies have highlighted the impact of cultural adaptation on interface usability.
Our culture, upbringing and background will affect which interfaces (ex: websites) we consider beautiful, convenient in use. For example, the vibrant, busy streets of Seoul are reflected in Naver.com, the most widely used search engine in South Korea, as seen in Fig. 1.
Fig.1
Usually, this would look like too much information for most Westerns, who are more accustomed to using Google. The example of Google and Naver suggests that users across the world have divergent preferences towards the design and functionality of Web sites. [1] This shows how something as “natural” to us as search engines, can differ and provide completely different experiences based on differences in culture.
The website is just an example, but different types of interfaces could help with cultural adaptation. My next step will be researching the main useful features the interface should have and exploring what type of interface I would like to create.
Resources:
[1]. https://wildlab.cs.washington.edu/Publications_files/reinecke_it.pdf
