Designing Culturally Sensitive Icons for User Interfaces: An approach for the Interaction Design of smartphones in developing countries

• Autor(a) principal: Marcos André Barroso Soares
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://repositorio-aberto.up.pt/handle/10216/79375
• topic: Outras ciências da engenharia e tecnologias; Other engineering and technologies

The adhesion to smartphones in developing regions, mainly in the Sub-Saharan region, has been steadily growing. Developing countries are characterized by an array of culturally diverse users from different socio-economic and cultural backgrounds. Therefore, cultural diversity must be contemplated in order to ease the interaction process of the users with the system, but also to promote the usage of smartphones among novice users, illiterates and individuals from different cultural backgrounds. Moreover, solutions of Information and Communication Technologies aimed at supporting development in these regions are important, therefore making it essential to ease users' recognition of and interaction with graphical user interfaces.This study aims to assess the level of icon recognition from users from the Sub-Saharan region and attempt to improve it through culturally sensitive icons, defined as icons based upon the preferences of the cultural group. In addition, a repository for cultural material is conceived in order to assist professionals to promote user-centered design techniques for culturally different groups. Besides having the ability to save space in the screen, icons often do not require reading and are immediately recognized once the user is familiarized with their representation, thus constituting an important factor on mobile application usability.The results demonstrate that culture has a substantial impact in icon recognition and interpretation, and professionals must become familiarized with the representations and actions that are deemed common by the target audience. Furthermore, the study reveals the advantages and disadvantages of this approach, mentions the limitations professionals encounter in the development of solutions for developing regions, and discusses future work in the area.