The Influence of Culture on Systems Usability

Usable interfaces are a result of focus on understanding users and their goals, tasks, characteristics, individual differences and environment. These differences between individuals result partly from differences between culture and subcultures. The goal of this paper is to set the scene for research into the influence of culture on the design of information systems for usability. This paper proposes a framework that includes extracting local usability guidelinesfor Arab culture and subcultures based on the issues gleaned from user acceptance test (UAT) reports. The proposed framework adapts a number of UCD methods and phases to suit projects’ circumstances. This adaptation is supported by a proposed UCD team structure. After applying the proposed framework on Web application projects that serve different sectors. The application of the proposed framework led to a decrease of UAT bugs by 95.25%, a decrease of development costs by 30-60%, a decrease in development time by 20-30%, and an increase of customer confidence and satisfaction. Systems’ usability also increased as evidenced by the results obtained from usabilitytests using an evaluation checklist, and user interface analyses.