Expanding the scope of localization: A cultural usability perspective on mobile text messaging use in American and Chinese contexts

Current localization practices suffer from a narrow and static vision of culture resulting in usability problems for IT product and design. Such a narrow focus of an artifact and its functionalities creates a situation in which such IT is unable to support complex activities in a concrete context. The recent success of mobile text messaging challenges our prior assumptions of technology use and pushes us to think of issues of culture, usability, and localization in a broader spectrum.; To improve current localization practices and better understand cultural issues in usability studies, my dissertation examines and compares multiple cases of local uses of mobile messaging technology in American and Chinese contexts. This study employs a framework of cultural usability, bringing social-cultural contexts into user activities and integrating key concepts and methods from activity theory, genre theory, and British cultural studies. This framework regards usability as a mediation process consisting of an instrumental aspect (mediation of practices) and a social aspect (mediation of meanings). More than 40 frequent users of mobile messaging in the US and China participated in the study. An expanded view of localization is surfacing from various use histories collected by questionnaire survey, diary study, qualitative interview, and observation, which urges us to look at the localization work occurring at the user's site. This study illustrates how each specific local use develops in a concrete activity situated at the intersection of the immediate context and social context and how this local use echoes with both the subjectivity of the user and the ethos of the surrounding culture. It calls for a change in localization practices from localizing for operational affordances by simply applying cultural conventions in localization work to localizing for social affordances with rich understandings of use activities in context.; From a broader perspective, this study has implications for information design and technical communication pedagogy by urging us to move from a functional perspective to a broad socio-cultural perspective to develop information products that resonate with users' lifestyles.