Assessing the different needs of local markets may be taken for granted in most industries, but many software firms have taken a more convenient route toward product development. They focus on functionality that they feel will be globally applicable (“internationalization” in the parlance), and then add language-specific user-interface features for different countries (“localization”).But customer satisfaction among software users is dependent on a number of product attributes, not just capability, reports a growing body of research. And the importance of each product attribute changes depending on the geographic market, according to “Quality Dimensions in E-Commerce Software Tools: An Empirical Analysis of North American and Japanese Markets,” a forthcoming paper in the Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce.The paper compares North American and Japanese users of an e-commerce development tool across five variables —capability, usability, performance, reliability and documentation — and reveals differences between the markets that suggest internationalization does not work. For example, North American customers prize usability as the most important quality attribute, while Japanese customers place a stronger emphasis on capability.Other differences include the lack of importance of usability and documentation in Japan, a finding that surprised the authors, M.S.
