Interface and Interaction Design Patterns for Intercultural Collaboration

This paper reports about on-going research into interaction design patterns in intercultural remote collaboration. It proposes that interaction and interface design patterns help to communicate and generate new design knowledge in supporting intercultural teamwork. It describes methods used to observe and develop design patterns in collocated, remote and blended collaborative learning and design contexts, and reports preliminary findings of interface and interaction design patterns, which support intercultural remote collaboration

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

Culture and E-Learning: Automatic Detection of a Users’ Culture from Survey Data

Knowledge about the culture of a user is especially important for the design of e-learning applications. In the experiment reported here, questionnaire data was used to build machine learning models to automatically predict the culture of a user. This work can be applied to automatic culture detection and subsequently to the adaptation of user interfaces in e-learning

Examining ‘Race’ in Health Research: the case for ‘listening’ to language

Health researchers must be constantly conscious of the contribution that they may or may not make to the politics of race through language. In order to unpack concepts such as multiculturalism race relations ethnic minority citizenship and so forth at the local level it is necessary to begin to understand concepts of race and racism in a global context through the shifting ontological epistemological and methodological frameworks as they relate to the study of race and racism. This paper unpacks these processes and suggests ways forward for better understanding of the language game and concepts of race in health research. To accomplish this language communication and knowledge transfer in a post-modern era are explored. The 'cookbook' approach to diversity is criticised. A relationship-centred framework is suggested as an alternative with an exploration of the meaning of the terms ethnicity and race constructed dialogically within communities. The concept of meaning itself is discussed as a social and political process constructed through language in health interfaces and power relationships

Exploring sociotechnical gaps in an intercultural, multidisciplinary design project

This paper highlights the need for the creation of artefacts that make\ud visible the gap between social requirements and the technical affordances of\ud technology. Augmenting the visibility of this gap can lead to a better integration\ud of the process and product of interaction design in intercultural and\ud multidisciplinary projects. Sociotechnical matrices are presented as artefacts that\ud can help to explore this gap. This is illustrated with a case study of the design of\ud interactive systems for farmers in rural Kenya. We discuss experiences in the use\ud of these matrices and new challenges that have emerged in using them

Revisiting revisitation in computer interaction: organic bookmark management.

According to Milic-Frayling et al. (2004), there are two general ways of user browsing i.e. search (finding a website where the user has never visited before) and revisitation (returning to a website where the user has visited in the past). The issue of search is relevant to search engine technology, whilst revisitation concerns web usage and browser history mechanisms. The support for revisitation is normally through a set of functional built-in icons e.g. History, Back, Forward and Bookmarks. Nevertheless, for returning web users, they normally find it is easier and faster to re-launch an online search again, rather than spending time to find a particular web site from their personal bookmark and history records. Tauscher and Greenberg (1997) showed that revisiting web pages forms up to 58% of the recurrence rate of web browsing. Cockburn and McKenzie (2001) also stated that 81% of web pages have been previously visited by the user. According to Obendorf et al. (2007), revisitation can be divided into four classifications based on time: short-term (72.6% revisits within an hour), medium-term (12% revisits within a day and 7.8% revisits within a week), and long-term (7.6% revisits longer than a week)