7.1.2 Cultural Adaptation It is not always desirable that ported software behave inexactly the same way as the original. There are many reasons why different behavior maybe wanted. Many though not all of these are related to the user interface. We define the process of meeting the varying behavioral needs of each environment as cultural adaptation. This may take several forms: Adapting to user experience. The type of user interface preferred by a travel agent for booking airline flights is very different than that preferred by a casual user. In the same way, a user experienced with Macintosh systems will not want anew application to behave like a Windows program, unless they are even more familiar with the Windows version of that application. Adapting to human cultures. This involves many processes identified under the heading of internationalization and localization. It maybe necessary to translate all text, including labels, etc, to different languages with very different structure from the original. In addition, issues as diverse as the sort order for databases or the use of color to convey certain meanings must be reconsidered. Adapting to environment capabilities and constraints. One example of this is the need to use different computational algorithms for different high-performance parallel computers. Another is the problem of economic portability (Murray-Lasso 1990). Many users in schools, nonprofit agencies, or less developed countries continue to work with computers much less capable than today’s state-of-the-art. To avoid leaving these users behind, software should be adaptable to these older environments, even if its performance and functionality are reduced. 1. 2. 3.
