  The global audience for software products includes members of different
countries, religions, and cultures: people who speak different languages, have
different life styles, and have different perceptions and expectations of any
given product. A major impediment in interface development is that there is
inadequate empirical evidence for the effects of culture in the usability
engineering methods used for developing user interfaces. This paper presents a
controlled study investigating the effects of culture on the effectiveness of
structured interviews in usability testing. The experiment consisted of
usability testing of a website with two independent groups of Indian
participants by two interviewers; one belonging to the Indian culture and the
other to the Anglo-American culture. Participants found more usability problems
and made more suggestions to an interviewer who was a member of the same
(Indian) culture than to the foreign (Anglo-American) interviewer. The results
of the study empirically establish that culture significantly affects the
efficacy of structured interviews during international user testing. The
implications of this work for usability engineering are discussed.
