Cultural diversity in interface design

One of many factors contributing to the lack of application of human factors principles to interface design is that designers fail to appreciate the range of population diversity, too often constructing systems on the assumption that their users are much like themselves. Years of research on individual differences in human-computer interaction have shown that user populations are not homogenous in their ability to utilize a given interface, with performance ranges of as much as 30 to 1 in the time to accomplish a given task. We now have methods to study individual differences factors, identifying the tasks most heavily influenced by variations in human ability, and changing the interface design to make it less susceptible to these factors.