Cross-cultural web design guidelines

Abstract

© 2017 ACM. 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 at-tributes 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 cul-tural factors, organisation of HCI factors, and finally development the cross-cultural design guidelines. It is hoped that these evi-dence and research based guidelines will ultimately enhance web-site usability for users from different cultural backgrounds.