Culturally Adaptive Software: Moving Beyond Internationalization

So far, culture has played a minor role in the design of software. Our experience with imbuto, a program designed for Rwandan agricultural advisors, has shown that cultural adaptation increased efficiency, but was extremely time-consuming and, thus, prohibitively expensive. In order to bridge the gap between cost-savings on one hand, and international usability on the other, this paper promotes the idea of culturally adaptive software. In contrast to manual localization, adaptive software is able to acquire details about an individual's cultural identity during use. Combining insights from the related fields international usability, user modeling and user interface adaptation, we show how research findings can be exploited for an integrated approach to automatically adapt software to the user's cultural frame.