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This chapter further develops the framework of CLUE with a consolidated discussion of five use cases presented earlier. It situates those cases on a broader horizon and reviews the trends of user localization across the sites. Thereby it illuminates how a holistic view of user experience is both situated and constructed in local contexts: To explore the “situatedness,” the first section of the chapter looks at how a local use of mobile messaging technology is situated in the surrounding contexts as the outcome of the interactions of various cultural influences; to investigate the “constructiveness,” the second section demonstrates how user localization functions as cultural consumption and how “genius loci” is achieved. Based on this holistic view of user experience, the third section examines affordances as dialogic relation through a dual mediation process of messaging use and suggests designing beyond operational affordances and cultivating social affordances for local use.

This concluding chapter suggests future directions for the research and practice of cross-cultural technology in a glocalization age. Centering on a dialogical approach, it analyzes what the cross-cultural design community could learn from the user localization efforts to design for, invoke, nurture, encourage, support, and sustain culturally localized user experience —the consummate experience—for emerging technologies. It studies the characteristics and value as well as the role and functions of user localization in a technology’s whole design, production, and use cycle and discusses how to route those user efforts into the design process to better address user needs and expectations in this rising participatory culture. Real-world examples are supplemented to further the discussion beyond the case study when needed.

A holistic vision of user experience is essential for integrating action and meaning in cross-cultural design. This chapter answers the questions How and What in developing a holistic view of user experience. It first explains how this holistic view of user experience forms and functions by bringing in three strands of practice theories—activity theory, British cultural studies, and genre theory—to investigate a dual mediation process in technology use and to study affordances emerging through use. It then advances a methodology for analysis and design in cross-cultural design, Culturally Localized User Experience (CLUE). The CLUE approach highlights the praxis of use, i.e., user localization that makes a usable technology meaningful to an individual. Seven defining features of CLUE are outlined to describe what the framework of CLUE is. This chapter lays the foundation for the presentation of use cases and the development of the CLUE framework in later chapters.

The CLUE framework advances cross-cultural user research as praxis—a dialogic design activity that has its ethical and political implications in local contexts as well. This chapter explores the methodological consequence of the CLUE. The first part of the chapter introduces the case of the book, the comparative study of mobile messaging use in American and Chinese contexts between 2003 and 2006. It reviews the phenomenon of mobile messaging use in a larger context and investigates what challenges and implications this case has brought to the practices and research of cross-cultural design. The second part of the chapter discusses the analytical values and methodological potentials of the CLUE framework for cross-cultural user experience research with the case study as the example.