User experience in cross-cultural contexts

Abstract

This dissertation discusses how interdisciplinary UX teams can consider culturally sensitive design elements during the UX design process. It contributes a state-of-the-art meta review on UX evaluation methods, two software tool artifacts for cross-functional UX teams, and empirical insights in the differing usage behaviors of a website plug-in of French, German and Italian users, website design preferences of Vietnamese and German users, as well as learnings from a field trip that focused on studying privacy and personalization in Mumbai, India. Finally, based on these empirical insights, this work introduces the concept culturally sensitive design that goes beyond traditional cross-cultural design considerations in HCI that do not compare different approaches to consider culturally sensitive product aspects in user research.