Service Design and Cultural Expectations on Services : Applying Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions to Services

The notion of service design as a design field has emerged during the last 10-15 years and seems to be growing more and more; a 2007 textbook on interaction design states: “The new frontier of interaction design is services” (Saffer, 2007, p. 174). Since the field is so young, there still are areas which hardly have been explored. One of these is cultural effects on service expectations. This thesis aims to help to fill in the knowledge gap by applying a model of cultural differences. The model used is the one developed by Geert Hofstede, which has been proved to be valid within a large number of varyingfields. This was done through the research question “Is Hofstede’s model applicable to service design in general, and individualization of services in particular?”. The question was explored through two parallel research processes; a quantitative questionnaire distributed via the web and a qualitative evaluation of 47 different service web sites. The qualitative evaluation was done through a new method called Cultural Walkthrough. Four key countries were chosen; the questionnaire was aimed at natives of these countries and the web sites all came from these countries. The countries in question were Germany, India, the United Kingdom and the USA. The results indicate that Hofstede’s model can’t be applied to service design straight off. Neither can they be used as a basis to deem the want for the possibility to individualize services, which seems to be dependent on the individual. The results indicate a large number of interesting questions for further research