Culture Effects of Communication Style and Time Orientation on Notification Systems and Anti-virus Software (title in journal:Effects of Communication Style and Time Orientation on Notification Systems and Anti-virus Software)

The objectives of this study were (1) to investigate the cultural effects of communication style and time orientation on people’s perception of and proficiency in responding to notification systems, and (2) to study the applications of these effects in the design of user notification in anti-virus software. Significant effects were found in the experiment; the results showed that users with a low-context communication style can remember and make sense of the information provided by the notification system better than users with a high-context communication style. Polychronic users perceive a lower level of interruption of the notification messages than monochronic users; polychronic users prefer rapid and accurate responses to the stimuli provided by the notification system, while monochronic users tend to avoid responding to the stimuli. Four sessions of focus group discussions were then carried out with users of different cultural patterns, which focused on the virus attack warning provided by anti-virus software. The results should prove useful to aid designers in creating more effective and appealing ways to notify users of virus attacks, depending on their different cultural patterns.

By: Ding-Long Huang, Pei-Luen Patrick Rau, Hui Su, Nau Tu, Chen Zhao

Published in: Behaviour and Information Technology, volume 29, (no 5), pages 483-95 (DOI: 10.1080/01449290903490641) in 2010

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