What? So What? Now What?

User-experience design is at the top of concerns for product/service user-interface development, especially for global deployment. How do culture differences affect that experience? How do the similarities and differences affect emotions, trust, persuasion, intelligence, and even cognition.

These questions cut across all design disciplines, all platforms (e.g., Web, client-server PCs, mobile, appliances), applications (e.g., productivity, entertainment, commerce), user communities (e.g., professional, consumer), and markets (e.g., office, home, industrial), and all content themes (e.g., video/music media, information bases, games, etc.). Mr. Marcus surveys the issues of cross-cultural communication, introduces culture dimensions, and discusses issues, with examples, that are challenging analysts and designers worldwide.

All developers are seeking to embrace this additional set of concerns that impact usability, usefulness, and appeal. Mr. Aaron Marcus helps show the way to improved user experience. He has presented this lecture as an invited plenary addresses at CHI-South Africa 2005; UPA 2005 in Montreal,Canada; the Danube University of Krems, Austria; theVocational Training Institute in Hong Kong, China; the National Taiwan University of Science and Technology in Taipei, Taiwan; IsraCHI, Herzliyah, Israel; and Bezalel Academy, Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel.

Aaron Marcus, President of Aaron Marcus and Associates, Inc. (AM+A), a pioneering user-interface design firm, and an AIGA Fellow and Cross-Cultural Design Center Advisory Board Member, has presented his lecture about cross-cultural user-experience design to international, cross-professional audiences on four continents. He has become a cross-disciplinary ambassador on behalf of effective cross-cultural communication and interaction, building on his 39-year career in information design and visualization, and in user-interface analysis/design. His lecture introduces the importance of cultural intelligence in design, culture models, and ethnographic analysis. Cross-cultural user-experience design will be increasingly important for successful product/service development.

Mr. Marcus was named a Fellow of the AIGA’s Center for Cross-Cultural Design in 2007 for his work in cross-cultural communication at a ceremony at AIGA/San Francisco on 15 June 2007.