A Cross-Cultural Comparative Research Of User Experience For Mobile Applications

With the advent of mobile Internet age,mobile applications developed rapidly under the wave of globalization.During the promotion of mobile applications in different countries and under different culture,the user interface and the user experience will play a significant role in deciding the success of a new mobile application outside its original area.Some mobile application developers just change the languages when adapting their products to a foreign market without considering other aspects,such as interface design,contents and so forth.This may not offer perfect user experience when confronted with users of different culture and custom.Therefore,only by exploring the user experience difference from different culture can the developers design appropriate products for the target foreign market and then improve the total user experience.Firstly,this dissertation extracts the interface signs that influence user experience from the past literature,which includes visual experience sign,interactive experience sign and emotional experience sign.Under each experience sign,some direct elements at the interface are picked up to formulate the user experience evaluation model.Then,after the observation of Chinese and British mobile health applications,a series of new mobile applications are designed based on the interface sign differences.Finally,Chinese and British subjects are picked up to experience the designed mobile applications and finish the questionnaires.After statistical analysis,the semiotic explanation framework will be utilized to illustrate the cross-cultural user experience difference.Based on the above study,this dissertation provides three key suggestions for the Chinese developers who prefer to set feet into the British mobile application market.Firstly,from the perspective of emotional experience sign,unlike Chinese users,British users dislike differentiating extra contents at the interface,whatever it starting point is.Thus,it is of vital importance to avoid adding banner and extra non-related information at the user interface.Secondly,at the visual experience sign level,unlike Chinese users,British users are fond of simplicity and clearness.Therefore,the developers are required to simplify the contents and arrange the amount of information reasonably.Thirdly,in the aspect of interactive experience sign,both Chinese and British users have similar preferences in terms of the time selection page,which advocates the mobile phone calendar layout in the form of directness and high-efficiency.Therefore,the Chinese developers shall keep adopting the original interface style at this stage.In a word,this dissertation discusses the user experience of mobile application interfaces from the perspective of cross-culture in an innovative way and makes use of semiotic theory to offer reasonable explanation towards user experience difference.This may contribute a lot to the Chinese mobile application developers in providing feasible suggestions for cross-cultural interface design.