The Cultural Impact on User Interface Design: The Case of e-Government services of Kingdom of Bahrain

摘要

The internet and web services continue to grow rapidly and so does the needs of users. Users prefer easy and fast services that can be accessed everywhere such as paying utility bills and scheduling appointments. In doing so, on-line services need to be provided by governments to facilitate easy access. In this age of globalization, we live in a highly diversified world in which people from different cultural backgrounds live together. Users interactions become more appealing if cultural characteristics are incorporated into the interface design. Culture could have an important impact upon people using the web services. Thus, designing web services for a multi-cultural society will require studying in depth the effect of the society cultural characteristics. The user interface can be designed using those characteristics that help in gaining user’s attention. This paper investigates the influence of culture on the user interface design of Bahrain e-Government services to examine the views of cultural effect on the user interface design. The results also show the positive and negative impact of users’ culture on the interface design.