Cross-Cultural Human-Computer Interaction and User Experience Design: A Semiotic Perspective

People from diverse cultural backgrounds use software systems with their standard user interfaces (UIs) around the globe. As a result, crosscultural interface design is an important factor when developing such UIs. Much research has been conducted to understand how people perceive UI elements and how they make decisions based on those perceptions. In his book, Jan Brejcha presents an overview of semiotic and linguistic theories, placing them in the context of human-computer interaction (HCI), specifically on UI design and evaluation. Primarily intended for user experience (UX) researchers and interaction designers, this book was written on the premise that linguistics and semiotics can provide effective methods for mitigating problems in interaction and communication design. The book also provides a semiotic design and evaluation framework, various examples on perception development based on the UI language, and case studies on the application of semiotic analyses of user interfaces and systematic comparisons with heuristic evaluation. I found the systematic approach provided for semiotic analysis very relevant for both my research and 654904 ERGXXX10.1177/1064804616654904ergonomics in designergonomics in design book-review2016