Globalization, Culture, and Usability

Abstract

Globalization is a trend in the new industrial era. Global economy has seen a huge amount of product and technology exchanges all over the world. With the increase of export and resulting from that, with the increase of world-wide technical product exchange, a product will now be used by several international user groups. As a result, there is an increasing number of user groups with different cultural features and different cultural-based user philosophies. All these user groups and philosophies have to be taken into account by a product developer of human machine systems for a global market. User requirements of product design have become much more valued than before because cultural background is an important influencing variable that represents abilities and qualities of a user (del Galdo & Nielsen, 1996). However, there is a gap in developers’ knowledge when handling product design according to the culture-dependent user requirements of a foreign market (Röse & Zühlke, 2001), so the “user-oriented” product design has not always been fulfilled on the international market.