Detriments to Cultural Sensitivity in HCI Design Processes: Insights from Practitioners’ Experiences in India

Abstract

Culture influences human preferences and behaviour. Many HCI products are being designed and developed in cross cultural contexts. Culture’s influence needs to be accommodated in the HCI design process. There is a need to understand how the current design processes for HCI products are accommodating for culture’s influence. Discussion with HCI designers is one possible method to do this. This paper reports findings of interviews with 30 HCI designers from India. The one on one semi structured qualitative interviews were conducted to understand whether the current design processes under practice are sensitive to culture’s influence on design and what are the detriments to accommodate cultural influences in the design process. The key findings suggest that the inclusion of cultural concerns in the design process are directly influenced by the project leadership’s awareness and the client’s awareness of the impact of culture in acceptance of HCI products. In projects where the client had not specifically asked for cultural sensitivity of the HCI product, design processes did not include the cultural concerns in the development of the product.