Cultural dimensions for user experience: cross-country and cross-product analysis of users' cultural characteristics

The quality of user experience is intricately related to the users’ cultural characteristics. However, not many studies have dealt with important cultural characteristics which are closely related to user experience. The main goals of this study are to identify important cultural dimensions that are closely related to the user experience of consumer electronic products and to measure them in different countries with different products. Contextual inquiries and online surveys were conducted in four different countries: the United States, Germany, Russia, and Korea. The study was participated by users of four different consumer electronic products: cellular phones, MP3 players, LCD-TVs, and refrigerators. The study identified ten cultural dimensions that were important to the user experience of consumer electronics. The cultural dimensions were also found to vary across the four different countries and four different products. This paper concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications and its limitations.