________________________________________________________________________________________________ Author Addresses: G. Ford, School of Accounting and Finance, University of Natal – Durban, King George V Ave, Durban, 4001, South Africa, fordg1@nu.ac.za J.H. Gelderblom, Department of Computer Science and Information Systems, University of South Africa, P O Box 392, UNISA, 0003, South Africa; geldejh@unisa.ac.za. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, that the copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than SAICSIT or the ACM must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © 2003 SAICSIT Proceedings of SAICSIT 2003, Pages 218 – 230 The Effects of Culture on Performance Achieved through the use of Human Computer Interaction GABRIELLE FORD University of Natal, Durban and HELENE GELDERBLOM University of South Africa ________________________________________________________________________________________________ The user interface development process focuses on understanding users and their individual differences. These differences result from, inter alia, differences in culture. The primary goal of this research project was to determine whether Hofstede’s [1991] cultural dimensions affect the performance achieved through the use of human-computer interaction. In order to achieve this goal, it was necessary to (1) identify the characteristics of the cultural dimensions; (2) identify test subjects and test interfaces displaying appropriate cultural dimensions and (3) assess the impact of these cultural dimensions on the speed, accuracy and satisfaction levels achieved by test subjects using the test interfaces to perform data collection tasks. Test subjects and website interfaces were identified in terms of the cultural dimension characteristics. The test subjects were selected based not only on their cultural dimensions, but also by controlling for user profile variables. The data resulting from the experiment was then analyzed to establish whether these dimensions had any impact on the performance achieved when using these websites. The results of the experiment did not provide sufficient evidence to conclude that any of the tested cultural dimensions affected human performance. However, the performance levels attained suggest that the usability of the interfaces was increased for all users, as a result of accommodating high uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, collectivism and high power distance characteristics into the design of the interfaces. In addition, two main categories of further research have arisen as a result of this research. The first category comprises new research questions. The second focuses on the changes that should be made to the research design used for this research effort. Category of Submission: Full Paper Categories and Subject Descriptors: H5.2 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: User Interfaces - Evaluation/methodology, Graphical user interfaces, Interaction styles, User-centered design, Screen design, Theory and methods, Web-based interaction; H.1.2 [Models and Principles]: User/Machine System - Human factors General Terms: Design, Human Factors, Experimentation, Measurement, Performance, Theory Additional Key Words and Phrases: Human-computer interaction, culture, cultural dimensions, usability, user interfaces, design guidelines, user performance ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION This paper 1 evaluates the impact of a selected subset of cultural dimensions on human performance achieved through the use of web-based interfaces. Specifically, this paper compares the performance achieved by users using web sites that display cultural dimension characteristics that correspond to those identified in the user, to the performance achieved by users using web sites with opposing cultural dimensions. This research arose as a result of considering the impact of the global market on user interface design, in conjunction with the usability concept of consistency. The ultimate purpose of a computer-based information system is to improve human performance [Mayhew 1992]. Numerous user interface principles and guidelines have been identified in an attempt to enhance usability so that human performance is improved. Many of these principles and guidelines are encapsulated into the fundamental usability design technique of User Centered Design (UCD), which focuses on designing software interfaces that are consistent to the users’ skills, knowledge, habits and tasks. 1 This paper has been substantially condensed for submission purposes. The full paper is available from the authors.