Cultural differences and end-user computing

Most computer applications arc designed and developed by researchers and designers in North America. These researchers and designers unintentionally apply their cultural values and systems of thought while designing and developing computer applications. Even though some development organizations, such as Microsoft, now take cultural issues into account, most of the cultural issues considered involve language translation and visual aspects of the interface rather than the underlying structure of the application. As a result, users who are culturally different from the researchers and designers might have difficulty using the computer applications. In this work, I define the term "end user" as a computer application user who uses not only the features provided with the software, but also engages in end-user programming in order to complete a task. An example of end-user programming is creating formulas in a spreadsheet program. An empirical study of culturally diverse end users from different countries, who perform end-user programming tasks, is proposed. The findings of this study will help verify whether cultural effects exist in the design of software features that inhibit effective end-user programming.