Tell me where you've lived, and I'll tell you what you like: Adapting interfaces to cultural preferences

Abstract

Adapting user interfaces to cultural preferences has been shown to improve a user's performance, but is oftentimes foregone because of its time-consuming and costly procedure. Moreover, it is usually limited to producing one uniform user interface (UI) for each nation disregarding the intangible nature of cultural backgrounds. To overcome these problems, we exemplify a new approach with our culturally adaptive web application MOCCA, which is able to map information in a cultural user model onto adaptation rules in order to create personalized UIs. Apart from introducing the adaptation flexibility of MOCCA, the paper describes a study with 30 participants in which we compared UI preferences to MOCCA's automatically generated UIs. Results confirm that automatically predicting cultural UI preferences is possible, paving the way for low-cost cultural UI adaptations. © 2009 Springer Berlin Heidelberg.