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Katre D. S. (2006), ‘Position Paper On Cross-cultural Usability Issues of Bilingual (Hindi & English) Mobile Phones’, In the Proceedings of Indo-Danish HCI Research Symposium, Hosted by Department of Design, Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India.

Main contributions of this research paper-

Definition of Cross-cultural Issues in HCI

Cross-cultural issues are basically the unique requirements of different civilizations or societies or communities of people asking for change in the design of product or technology or system or service to make it more usable and acceptable.

The cross-cultural issues can be studied in terms of racial characteristics, life-style, traditional practices, geographical and political contexts, social rules and values, histories, religions, languages and mental models of people.

Linguistic Usability Heuristics for Bilingual Mobile Phones

Following linguistic usability heuristics are identified and applied during our evaluation of bilingual mobile phones. The heuristics will be useful for qualitative evaluation of any other languages introduced in mobile phones and also serve as design guidelines.

1. Represent the language in its original form
2. Maintain the original form and structure of script
3. Uniform representation of the language
4. Avoid influence of English or any other language
5. Maximum 4 alphabets / characters per key
6. Least typing effort
7. One-to-one correspondence between keys and alphabets typed
8. Avoid uncontrolled mixture and trade-offs between languages
9. 100% legibility of text
10. Readability / comprehensibility of text
11. Memorability of characters and keypad layout

This research has been cited in many international Books and Conference Papers. Some of them are mentioned below-

1. Nanda, Parul / Kramer, Kem-Laurin, Chapter on Usability Challenges in Designing Foreign Language Keypads for Handheld Devices, Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) Series, Book on Usability and Internationalization. Global and Local User Interfaces, Volume 4560/2007 Springerlink 2007.

http://www.springerlink.com/content/2256186543570321/

2. Huiyang Li, Xianghong Sun, Kan Zhang, Culture-Centered Design: Cultural Factors in Interface Usability and Usability Tests, In the proceedings of IEEE Societie’s ACIS International Conference on Software Engineering, Artificial Intelligence, Networking, and Parallel/Distributed Computing, 1084-1088, 2007.

http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4287452/4287802/04288011.pdf?arnumber=4288011

 

Another short article by Dr. Dinesh Katre

The Missing Visual Explanation in Bluetooth Headsets

Dr. Dinesh Katre presently heads the National Multimedia Resource Centre of C-DAC, Pune, India. He is the principle designer of many software products that deal with digital library, cultural informatics, e-learning, multimedia authoring and computer game design. He has special interest in the cognitive study of technology users and behavioral design of products. Journal of HCI Vistas is his community building initiative. It is meant to promote research oriented, multi-disciplinary thinking in the field of Human-Computer Interaction in India. This e-publication is open for usability practitioners and UX designers to publish short articles.

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