Cross-Cultural Web Design Guidelines

Abstract

Adapting web pages to cultural preferences has been shown to improve communication effectiveness. However, the lack of a set of research-based web design guidelines or best practices renders the creation of culturally tailored versions of a website a time- consuming, costly task which is rarely undertaken by designers. This research aims to develop guidelines for cross-cultural web design to overcome these issues. The authors' prior work has provided empirical data showing significant cultural differences in the usage of design web attributes. These are used to determine a relationship between design attributes, cultural factors, and HCI factors. The result is a synthesis of culturally specific design attributes and published theories of culture to create a set of website design guidelines. The development process involved five steps: evaluation of the usage of design elements between cultures, identification of prominent design elements, organisation of cultural factors, organisation of HCI factors, and finally development the cross-cultural design guidelines. It is hoped that these evidence and research based guidelines will ultimately enhance website usability for users from different cultural backgrounds.