Cognitive and Cross-Cultural Adaptations of Products, Systems and Services

Abstract

The aspects that have to be taken into account while developing systems or services for different user groups worldwide can be categorized into 4 levels (Sturm, 2002): technical, linguistic, cultural and cognitive. Both the technical and the linguistic adaptations can be applied straight forward in that best practices and guidelines were established throughout the last decades. In contrast, cultural and even more the cognitive variations across user groups still present a tremendous challenge. Therefore, it is argued to focus on the latter ones while working on a research agenda for adaptation to worldwide user groups.