Automatic Adaptation of UserInterfaces to Cultural PreferencesAutomatische Anpassung von Benutzeroberflächen an kulturelle Vorlieben
Katharina Reinecke, Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Cambridge, MA, USA
Summary Our culture strongly affects which Web sites weperceive as beautiful and usable, and we are less likely to en-gage with those that we don’t. With today’s Internet userscoming from a variety of cultural backgrounds, it is not re-alistic to provide one interface design that is perceived asappealing by everyone. We therefore developed an approachto culturally adaptivity, which enables an automatic composi-tion of personalized interfaces by taking into account a user’scurrent and former countries of residences. To exemplify the ap-proach, we created a Web application that offers more than115 000 different versions of its interface in order to adequatelyadapt to various combinations of different national cultures.Our evaluations of the Web application with participants fromRwanda, Switzerland, and Thailand, as well as with multicul-tural users from all over the world, demonstrated that theapproach is able to anticipate 61% of user preferences onaverage (compared to 33% that the system achieved when ran-domly generating its interfaces). Moreover, the results of anexperiment with 41 multicultural participants showed that theywere significantly faster with their personalized version com-pared to a standard US interface, they needed fewer clicksto complete tasks, and made fewer errors. These results werealso supported by participants’ subjective impressions of ap-peal and work efficiency, showing that cultural adaptivity isa feasible way to increase the user experience for a multi-cultural audience. ��� Zusammenfassung Unser kul-turelle Hintergrund beeinflusst welche Webseiten wir als schönund leicht benutzbar empfinden und mit welchen wir unsnäher beschäftigen. Mit der grossen Vielzahl verschiedener
Benutzerkulturen im Internet ist es daher nicht mehr realis-tisch, Webseiten mit einem Standarddesign anzubieten unddamit jedem Geschmack gerecht werden zu wollen. Wir habendaher eine Methode erarbeitet, die es erlaubt, automatischauf den persönlichen kulturellen Hintergrund einer Personabgestimmte Benutzeroberflächen zusammenzustellen. Um dieMethode zu veranschaulichen haben wir eine Webapplikationentwickelt, die sich mit mehr als 115.000 verschiedenen Kom-positionsmöglichkeiten ihrer Oberfläche an die Vorlieben einergrossen Anzahl verschiedener Landeskulturen, sowie an mul-tikulturelle Benutzer, die in mehreren Ländern gelebt haben,anpassen kann. Evaluationen dieser Webapplikation in Ruanda,der Schweiz, Thailand, sowie mit multikulturellen Benutzernaus den verschiedensten Teilen der Welt, zeigten, dass un-sere Methode durchschnittlich 61% der Benutzerpräferenzenrichtig vorhersagen kann (verglichen mit 33%, die durchzufällig generierte Oberflächen erreicht werden konnten). Ineinem weiteren Experiment mit 41 multikulturellen Teilnehmernkonnten wir zeigen, dass diese effizienter mit ihrer perso-nalisierten Version arbeiten konnten, als mit der US-Versionderselben Webapplikation. Die Teilnehmer brauchten zudemweniger Klicks, um die ihnen gestellten Aufgaben zu erledi-gen und machten weniger Fehler. Die Resultate wurden durchdie subjektiven Eindrücke der Teilnehmer bestätigt, die dasAussehen und die Benutzbarkeit der personalisierten Versionim Durchschnitt als besser bewerteten. Kulturelle Adaptivitäthat sich daher als eine praktikable Methode herausgestellt,um das Benutzererlebnis für eine multikulturelle Zielgruppe zuverbessern.
Keywords H.5.2 [Information Systems: Information Interfaces and Presentation: User Interfaces]; culture, intelligent userinterfaces, cultural adaptivity ��� Schlagwörter Kultur, intelligente Benutzerschnittstellen, kulturelle Adaptivität
The dissertation is entitled “Culturally Adaptive User Interfaces”. The examiners were Prof. Abraham Bernstein (University of Zurich) andProf. Anthony Jameson (German Research Center of Artificial Intelligence). The dissertation has been recommended to the GI-Dissertation Award2010 by the University of Zurich.
1 IntroductionSurfing the Web has become as much part of our livesas walking down the street in the real world. And justas we expect our local shopping street to have a certainlook with more or less advertisements lining the way, weapply the same expectations and preferences to the virtualworld. The bustling, colorful streets of Seoul, for example,are mirrored in South Korea’s most popular search engineNaver.com shown in Fig. 1a. The site’s high complexity,its blinking animations, and the variety of services that itoffers are usually perceived as an unsettling informationoverload to Westerners. In fact, Google, with its minimal-ist design and focus on search (Fig. 1b), holds a marketshare of more than 90% in most Western countries. InSouth Korea, however, Google’s share of searches in 2011remains below 10%.
The example of Google and Naver suggests that usersacross the world have divergent preferences towards thedesign and functionality of Web sites. I observed similarlystriking differences when developing an e-learning portalin Rwanda several years ago. While my initial design wasvery consistent with what I thought was a universal de-sign principle to “keep it simple”, I very quickly had tolearn that Rwandans preferred a more playful and morecolorful look, a linear navigation without many learningchoices, and a wizard similar to Microsoft’s office clipthat would lead them through the learning process. Itwas only several months later that I realized that this is
Figure 1 Search engine competitors Naver and Google.
very consistent with the Rwandan culture. A primarilyteacher-centered education, for example, can determinehow comfortable users are with the non-linear navigationscheme of the World Wide Web. And a wizard does notonly serve as a buddy for the community-loving Rwan-dans, but it also provides comforting guidance when toomany choices might otherwise seem overwhelming.
Thus, a key to understanding people’s preferencesfor certain user interface designs is to understand theirnational psyche, including cultural influences such aspolitical orientation, the way society is organized, oreducation [11]. Indeed, user interfaces that have beenadapted to the needs and preferences of a certain targetculture have been found to be more usable, more ap-pealing, and more trustworthy [3; 4; 6]. Yet to date, onlyfew Web pages offer a different look & feel for users fromother countries than that of the developers. In fact, the so-called localization of user interfaces is usually restrictedto an adaptation of the language and date/time formats,but does not involve a whole re-arrangement of the userinterface. As a result, many Web sites fail to attract aninternational audience: In an online world where the nextsite is just a click away, users are often reluctant to engagewith Web pages that they find unappealing, untrustwor-thy, or unintuitive.
To contrast today’s one-size-fits-all designs, we de-veloped an approach to user interfaces that automaticallyadapt their look & feel to a user’s cultural preferences.Such culturally adaptive user interfaces require as inputthe user’s current and former countries of residence aswell as the duration that the user has lived in each of thesecountries. Based on this, the system calculates a weightedaverage of cultural influences on the user’s “extendednational culture”, looks up the corresponding adaptationrules, and presents a modified interface. We hypothesizedthat culturally adaptive user interfaces improve the over-all usability, and specifically, increases work efficiency anduser satisfaction.
2 Mapping Culture to Interface PreferencesAnticipating the optimal interface for a person of a spe-cific cultural background is probably impossible given theintangible nature of culture. The concept remains a fuzzycollection of possible influences such as a person’s nation-ality, the parents’ nationalities, education level, religion,or political orientation – all of which affects preferencesin different ways [11]. There are arguably not two peoplewith the same culture, yet cultural groups often share atleast similar world views and values. This has been alsopreviously observed at a country level: People belongingto the same “national culture” have mostly been exposedto very similar cultural influences throughout their life,and show comparable behavioral patterns, principles, andpartialities. In the field of human-computer interaction,users of the same national culture have been also foundto share similar design preferences.
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Automatic Adaptation of User Interfaces to Cultural Preferences ���
To compare cultures and their particularities re-searchers have often referred to cultural classifications,one of the most widely used ones being by culturalanthropologist Hofstede [8]. Studying differences in orga-nizational culture between a large number of countries,he derived the five dimensions Power Distance, Mas-culinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Individualism, and LongTerm Orientation (please refer to [7] for an explanationof the dimensions). Each country receives a score on eachof these dimensions, which indicate whether a country ishighly individualist, such as the US, or has a high powerdistance, such as many Asian countries, where hierarchiesare often deeply-rooted in society.
Much of what we know about the varying design pref-erences in different cultures is based on these dimensions.Previous research, for example, has demonstrated thatusers from countries with a high uncertainty avoidance(e. g., many Latin American countries) prefer a linearnavigation paired with an increased guidance [2]. Highlymasculine cultures (e. g., Slovakia, Austria) tend to likehighly saturated colors [5], and low individualists oftenchoose a much more colorful design than the tone-in-tone style found in many Websites of high individualistcountries [1].
3 Cultural AdaptivityIn our approach, we made use of Hofstede’s classificationof national cultures by linking each of his dimensions tocertain user interface preferences based on studies in therelated literature. The dimension long term orientation,for example, has been found to relate to a preferencefor a certain degree of complexity at the interface level.The score that a country received in Hofstede’s studythen defines whether the interface should be adapted tooffer a low, medium, or high complexity. The whole setof adaptation rules (listed in [10]) therefore predicts thedesign preferences of people of a certain national cul-ture. Additionally, our approach enables user interfacesto adapt to a user’s extended national culture by factoringin his or her different countries of residence as well as theduration that the user has lived in each of these countries.
To exemplify this approach, we have built a cul-turally adaptive to-do list Web application calledMOCCA [9; 10], which can change its modular user in-terface to more than a 115 000 different looks dependingon a user’s extended national culture. MOCCA takes asinput a user’s previous countries of residence as wellas the durations, and presents a personalized look fromthe beginning on. In addition, users have the ability tolater manually modify the interface. A built-in collabora-tive filtering algorithm, similar to Amazon’s “Users whohave bought this book also bought...”, observes thesemodifications, and matches them to a specific culturalbackground. If several users of a similar culture showsimilar preferences, MOCCA learns new, or modifies itsexisting adaptation rules.
4 Evaluation of a Culturally Adaptive WebsiteOur evaluations of MOCCA were targeted to answer twomain research questions:1. Does MOCCA present interfaces that users would have
chosen themselves?, and2. Is such a culturally adaptive system superior to a non-
adapted Website in terms of work efficiency and usersatisfaction?
To answer the first question, we conducted studies with105 participants in Rwanda, Switzerland, and Thailand,and with multicultural participants who had lived inat least two different countries. Participants were leadthrough a number of questions asking them to choosefrom paper-based mock-ups of MOCCA’s user interface.Their self-designed interface was then compared to theversion that MOCCA presented after we entered a par-ticipant’s current and former countries of residence.
This first experiment demonstrated that MOCCA isable to anticipate 61% of participants’ preferences onaverage across all adaptable user interface aspects. Bycomparison, only 33% accuracy could be achieved ifMOCCA randomly composed its interfaces. We alsofound that our participants in Rwanda, Switzerland, andThailand designed very similar user interfaces for them-selves within a country, but that the interfaces lookedvery different between the three countries (see Fig. 2).This suggests that preferences are at least partially similarwithin a national culture, but it also suggests that learningfrom users’ preferences based on cultural similarity is verywell feasible.
While these results showed that MOCCA can antici-pate most of user preferences, they do not clarify whetherusers would actually benefit from culturally adaptive in-terfaces in terms of work efficiency and satisfaction. Dousers perceive MOCCA’s personalized interfaces more in-tuitive and work with them more efficiently? Do theyfind them more appealing than a standard version?We evaluated these questions with 41 participants from25 different nationalities who had previously lived in2–5 different countries. Participants were asked to per-form a set of tasks with MOCCA’s “standard” US version,as well as with their culturally adapted version withoutknowing which user interface was their personalized one.The US version looks very similar to the Swiss versionand mostly corresponds to Swiss preferences, as shownin our first study. According to conventional localizationapproaches where users either select their country of res-idence, or this is automatically detected based on their IPaddress, our participants would have received MOCCA’sSwiss version, because all of them were currently livingin Switzerland.
The results of this experiment confirmed our hypothe-sis: Participants performed the tasks 22% faster with theirpersonalized version and made 69% fewer errors. Theseobjective performance metrics were also mirrored in par-ticipants’ ratings of the two versions, which show that themajority of participants thought that their personalized
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Special Issue
Figure 2 MOCCA’s user interfaces for Rwanda, Switzerland, and Thai-land.
version was more appealing and that they could workwith it more efficiently. However, the closer participantswere to the US culture (“Westerners”), the less likelythey were to choose the personalized version over the USone, in line with rating both versions similarly high onaesthetics and usability.
5 Future WorkThe approach presented here was the first to suggestan automatic adaptation of the entire user interface toa user’s extended national culture, and many challengesremain. First of all, cultural adaptivity can be incor-porated into any kinds of user interfaces but requireschanges to the underlying source code, as well as thedesign of alternative version of different parts of the userinterface. In the future, we aim to mitigate this initial in-vestment by enabling an automatic adaptation of existingWebsites based on a visual overlay that is presented tothe user while she is surfing the Web.
Second, it will be interesting to investigate whethera more refined cultural background helps us to antici-pate users’ preferences more accurately. Evaluating thisrequires a high number of participants from all over theworld with a large variety of other cultural influences,such as different education levels (which we controlledfor in our studies). As such, studies like this necessitateonline experiments, which risk that participants “gamethe system”, or are distracted while performing a certaintask. We are currently working on mechanisms to bettercontrol such remote evaluations in order to run large-scale evaluations of our approach in the future.
6 ConclusionIn summary, the results of our experiments supportedthe idea that preferences for a certain look & feel of userinterfaces differ. Cultural adaptivity has demonstrated tobe a feasible approach to approximate these varying pref-erences, resulting in an increased work efficiency anda higher user satisfaction. Moreover, we were able toshow that it is possible to anticipate users’ preferences toa large extent before they start interacting with a Web-site. For international companies attempting to attract aninternational audience, the approach could therefore pre-vent online users to turn to the competition, and insteadconvince them to engage with their site.
References
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[3] B. Corbitt, T. Thanasankit, and J. Haynes. A Model for Culturally-Informed Web Interfaces. In: Internet Management Issues: A GlobalPerspective, pages 1–26. IGI Global, 2002.
[4] D. Cyr, C. Bonanni, and J. Ilsever. Design and e-Loyalty AcrossCultures in Electronic Commerce. In: Proc. of the 6th Int’l Conf.on Electronic Commerce, ICEC’04, pages 351–360, 2004.
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Automatic Adaptation of User Interfaces to Cultural Preferences ���
[8] G. Hofstede. Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Be-haviours and Organisations across nations, 2nd edition. SagePublications, 2001.
[9] K. Reinecke and A. Bernstein. Tell Me Where You’ve Lived, andI’ll Tell You What You Like: Adapting Interfaces to CulturalPreferences. In: Proc. of the 17th Int’l Conf. on User Modeling,Adaptation, and Personalization, UMAP’09, pages 185–196, 2009.
[10] K. Reinecke and A. Bernstein. Improving Performance, PerceivedUsability, and Aesthetics with Culturally Adaptive User Interfaces.In: ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (ToCHI),18(2):8:1–8:29, 2011.
[11] K. Rhoads. The Culture Variable in the Influence Equation. In:Routledge Handbook of Public Diplomacy, N. Snow and P. Taylor(eds.). Routledge, 2008.
Received: November 30, 2011, accepted: December 3, 2011
Dr. Katharina Reinecke received her PhD in computer science fromthe University of Zurich in 2010, and she is now a postdoctoral fellowin the Intelligent and Interactive Systems group at Harvard School ofEngineering and Applied Sciences. In her research, she combines thefields of human-computer interaction, cultural anthropology, and ma-chine learning for an interdisciplinary approach to user interfaces thatadapt to cultural background.
Address: Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, 33 Ox-ford St., 02138 Cambridge, MA, USA,e-mail: [email protected]
