Towards effective usability evaluation in Asia: cross-cultural differences

A study of cultural effects on the reliability of objective and subjective usability evaluation of software user interfaces is reported in this paper. Subjects comprised actual users involved in a real system development project. The results obtained indicated that cultural effects exist and exerted a strong influence on the outcome of user interface evaluation. Implications of the findings for practitioners are discussed in the paper. In particular, to account for cultural effects the need to modify `western´ usability evaluation methods for application in the Far East, is highlighted. Initial recommendations for effective usability evaluation in the Far East are proposed