Abstract
A cultural evaluation of Usability Engineering in the Namibian context reveals a number of good practices as well as locally inadequate methods. One major challenge in cross-cultural Usability Engineering is the implicit western understanding of usability and its associated assumptions which often lead to a locally inappropriate usability evaluation. Conceptualisation sessions held with different Namibian user groups confirmed a deviating perception of the term ”usability”. None of the groups mentioned terms ”commonly” associated with ”usability” such as speed, learnable, or memorable. Thus standard usability testing comprises a dual bias through the western definition of usability and the related choice of methods which aim to test an already biased objective. We therefore suggest an ethno-centric software development framework which incorporates a contextual redefinition of usability.
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Keywords
- Usability Evaluation
- Usability Engineer
- Current Internationalisation
- International User Interface
- Agile Development
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Winschiers, H., Fendler, J. (2007). Assumptions Considered Harmful. In: Aykin, N. (eds) Usability and Internationalization. HCI and Culture. UI-HCII 2007. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4559. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73287-7_54
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-73287-7_54
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