Beautiful, usable, and popular: good experience of interactive products for Chinese users

User experience (UX) is essential for creating successful interactive products. However, whether the evaluation of user experience is universal across different cultures is questionable. In the past decades, a large number of researches have demonstrated consistently that different cultures play an important role in influencing people’s perception and cognition of the world. These cultural differences can also influence people’s aesthetic judgments and experience of products. The main goals of our research were two-fold: 1) to develop a standardized Chinese questionnaire for assessing the UX of interactive products, and 2) to evaluate the experience of Chinese users in interacting with three different mobile phones, Nokia, Blackberry, and iPhone. The study results identified three main factors or dimensions contributing to the experience of Chinese users: Hedonic Quality (Stimulation), Pragmatic Quality, and Conformity, as compared to the four dimensions in the AttracDiff, an English questionnaire popularly used in western cultures. Among three mobile products, iPhone was considered the most beautiful, usable, and popular, providing the best user experience overall.

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