Hoft wrote an influential chapter on “Developing a Cultural Model,” in which she reviews various models of cross-cultural communication including the models of Hall, Hofstede and Trompenaars.
Honold research on “cross-cultural usability engineering” has changed
-In the first phase (1975-1988) classical ergonomic research was applied to non-Western countries.
-In phase two (1990-1995), practical solutions of user-interface design for non-Western markets became critical.
-In phase three (1996-1998) the need for a underlying theory of cross-cultural usability
Two of the standard books on international user interface design—Nielsen’s 1990 Designing User Interfaces for International Use and del Galdo and Nielsen’s 1996 International User Interfaces. they focus on ways to display non-Western scripts and stand alone programs.
Sun describes many models in his attempt to unify “engineering views” of cultural usability with “humanist views.” In the end, he uses a modified version of Hall’s “circuit of culture” with general and ethnic cultural factors.
Yeo [29] makes the good point that usability evaluations themselves will be culturally bound; so, for example, subjects in a usability evaluation made lie in order to allow the designer to “save face.” Plocher, Garg and Chestnut [21] provide a general overview, and make strong claims that culture affects user characteristics which in turn affect choices in user interface design.