IEEE GCCE 2024 Kokura - Influence of User Interface Layout on Usability

Every big research idea has to start somewhere. This project is a pilot study aimed at understanding how people from different cultural backgrounds experience web interfaces, specifically looking at whether layout preferences shift across borders.

To get our initial baseline, we set up two prototype websites and conducted an in-person usability test with two participants: one Japanese and one Austrian. To measure how they navigated and felt about the interfaces, we tracked their completion times and used standardized metrics like the System Usability Scale (SUS) and the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ).

The Takeaways & The Reality Check

While the initial usability data gave us some great threads to pull, the most valuable outcome of this pilot was what it taught us about cross-cultural research methodology itself.

Running in-person sessions provides fantastic, high-fidelity observations, but it quickly highlighted a major logistical roadblock: scalability. Finding a diverse, international pool of non-Japanese participants to come into a local physical lab space proved to be incredibly difficult. It became clear that relying on in-person testing would make gathering large-scale data completely unfeasible.

Looking Ahead

This pilot did exactly what a pilot is supposed to do—stress-test the concept. The friction points we discovered here are directly informing our next steps. The goal moving forward is to completely redesign the testing framework into a remote, self-administered format, allowing us to bypass geographical limits and scale the study globally.

I was absolutely thrilled to present this work at IEEE Global Conference in Consumer Electronics (GCCE), a sister conference of the International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) in conjunction with the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, USA. At the conference the project was honored with the Presentation Award!