Cultural Differences and End-User Computing

Most computer applications are designed and developed by researchers and designers in North America. These researchers and designers unintentionally apply their cultural values and systems of thought while designing and developing computer applications. Even though some development organizations, such as Microsoft, now take cultural issues into account, most of the cultural issues considered involve language translation and visual aspects of the interface rather than the underlying structure of the application. As a result, users who are culturally different from the researchers and designers might have difficulty using the computer applications. Hofstede [1] identified five dimensions on which cultural groups vary. Other research on systems of thought [4] has indicated that Americans and Japanese have different foci of attention. Americans are likely to focus more on a focal object, whereas Japanese tend to focus more on contextual or situational factors rather than each individual object. In addition, Beckwith et al. [2] discovered that males and females were different in spreadsheet feature acceptance and use, which significantly impacted their effectiveness in debugging. Hofstede’s work and the above gender results raise the question whether cross-cultural effects exist in end-user computing that impact end-user effectiveness. The general research question that I address is whether people from different cultures interact differently with end-user software and whether Hofstede’s five dimensions can explain the differences. More specifically, I ask whether culture impacts people’s willingness to learn and use features of software to accomplish end-user programming tasks. In this work, I define the term “end user” as a computer application user who uses not only the features provided with the software, but also engages in end-user programming in order to complete a task. An example of end-user programming is creating formulas in a spreadsheet program. An empirical study of culturally diverse end users from different countries, who perform end-user programming tasks, is proposed. The findings of this study will help verify whether cultural effects exist in the design of software features that inhibit effective end-user programming.