Exploring Cultural Differences in HCI Education

The discipline of human-computer interaction has become a subject taught across universities around the world, outside of the cultures where it originated. However, the intercultural implication of its assimilation into the\ud syllabus of courses offered by universities around the world remains underresearched. The purpose of this ongoing research project is to provide insights for these implications in terms of the student and teacher experience of HCI. How this subject is socially represented across the different universities studied is a key question. In order to develop intercultural awareness of these questions\ud universities from UK, Namibia, Mexico and China are collaborating in a multiple case study involving students and lecturers engaged in evaluation and design tasks. Findings will then be used to propose an international HCI curriculum more supportive of local perspectives. This paper describes the initial steps of this study and some preliminary findings from Namibia, India and Mexico about cognitive styles and cultural attitudes

Emotions in human-computer interaction: the role of nonverbal behaviour in interactive systems

Until recently, the area of human-computer interaction was based on a traditional, cognitive approach, which separated the study of usability from that of emotions. The recent research has shown that emotions play an important role in our life, which led to focusing on the need of studying the emotions in the domain of interactive design. This paper underlines the role of emotions as part of the interactive human-computer process, reinstating the importance of nonverbal communication in this domain. The main issues of this paper are concerned with aspects such as: emotional design approach, the importance of nonverbal as an instrument of usability evaluation and the role of emotions in human-computer interaction.Emotional design approach, nonverbal communication, emotions, usability, Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

Methodological development

Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research

Incorporating service quality tools into Kansei Engineering in services: A case study of Indonesian tourists

Due to market dynamics and challenges, it is imperative for companies to put their concern on strategic marketing orientation. In facts, products and services of similar quality are ubiquitous in today’s global market. Basically, functionality and usability alone are no longer prominent success factors in product and service innovation because customers today concern themselves more on satisfying their emotions than merely their cognition. Kansei Engineering (KE) has shown its superiority in investigating and modelling customer emotion (“Kansei” in Japanese) for product development. In dealing with customer needs, service quality tools such as quality function deployment (QFD) and the Kano model, have been applied extensively. But none have been able to incorporate and model customer’s emotional needs. Some attention has been given to investigate this but, thus far, there is no formal methodology that can account for customer emotional needs in service design. To fill this niche, this study proposed an integrative framework of KE incorporating the Kano model and QFD applied to services. This study extended the work by Hartono and Tan (2011) and Hartono et al. (2012) and presented a survey on luxury hotel services involving more than a hundred Indonesian tourists as the subject of study. Luxury hotels are reported to have greater strength of emotion than any other hotel segment. This work confirmed that emotion is to be more important than cognition in impacting overall customer satisfaction. Practically, it gives insight on which service attributes deserve more attention with regard to their impact on customer emotion. Indonesian tourists shared a common response to the Kansei word “elegant” which correlates with their common cultural dimension of “power distance”. Performing a Kansei evaluation to understanding cultural backgrounds may yield valuable insights for international tourist marketing strategies and companies’ business sustainability

Reflecting on the usability of research on culture in designing interaction

The concept of culture has been attractive to producers of interactive\ud systems who are willing to design useful and relevant solutions to users\ud increasingly located in culturally diverse contexts. Despite a substantial body of\ud research on culture and technology, interaction designers have not always been\ud able to apply these research outputs to effectively define requirements for\ud culturally diverse users. This paper frames this issue as one of understanding of\ud the different paradigms underpinning the cultural models being applied to\ud interface development and research. Drawing on different social science theories,\ud the authors discuss top-down and bottom-up perspectives in the study of users‟\ud cultural differences and discuss the extent to which each provides usable design\ud knowledge. The case is made for combining bottom-up and top-down perspectives\ud into a sociotechnical approach that can produce knowledge useful and usable by\ud interaction designers. This is illustrated with a case study about the design of\ud interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya