Literature review by Mohamed Sajjad Hossen, The guideline to follow designing website in

cross-cultural context

This article has tried to cover the best practices in the form of a guideline of how to design
websites for different cultures. It further focuses on coming up with research-backed guidelines
for making the user experience and usability better for users belonging to an array of cultural
groups. It has shown how imperative it is for the designer to incorporate the cultural factors of
the country while making design decisions for the product. As there is not enough detail in the
earlier guidelines for cross-cultural website design and there was no usability evaluation done
to validate the proposed guidelines, i.e. whether incorporating the proposed guidelines in
website design improves the usability or not, the author of this article was motivated to do
data-backed guidelines for cross-cultural website designing.

This article has done an investigation of the perception of users is affected because of the
degree of uncertainty avoidance factor of the culture. Along with the uncertainty avoidance, the
study has also delved into the relationship between user reactions to websites and other
variables like economic and social condition of the culture.

Our project is to design a website that will help people to learn about culture through food. It
will be a website where users can find the recipes of a wide assortment of dishes, snacks and
others from different cultures. It is a website that will cater to users from different countries.
For example, a Bangladeshi wants to make something special for EID - the most special
celebration for the people of Bangladesh. He has decided to make something from
Mediterranean or Lebanese cuisine to woo the guests at the house. She can visit the website
and learn about the recipe of how to make the dishes. Similarly, a Finnish can try making Indian
food for the Vappu. As we need to design different versions of the same website for different
segments - culture wise - of the target group, we need to understand the intricacies and the
changes in the layout and design elements(navigation bar, color, links, multimedia, text) that
would differ for making website versions for different countries.

Title of the 1st articles: Cross-Cultural Web Design Guidelines

Goal of the articles: To develop a data-informed guideline for designing cross-cultural websites
and to check how the usability of the website depends on the interplay of cultural factors and
HCI factors and design elements.

Methods: At the beginning, the research started with the existing literature done in the area of
cross-cultural design. The author has mentioned the limitations of previous related work and
these have provided a base of why a wider research should be conducted to find a new
guideline. Next, the author has tried to find the relationship between website design elements
and culture by doing a comparison evaluation of the usages of different design elements(footer,
display density, use of links, images, text headings, colors etc) among different cultures. In this
comparison analysis, the author has picked Australian, Chinese and Saudi Arabian. To check if a
design element is more inclined towards a particular culture over another, he counted the
occurrence of that design element found in the websites of that culture. If the difference of the
occurrence of that design element between the cultures is found to be 40%, that design
element would be considered as a prominent design element for the respective culture. The
same process is repeated for an array of design elements generally seen in a website. Following
this, the same three cultures are evaluated in terms of cultural factors by categorizing as “high”
and “low”. Next, the cultural factor is mapped against the HCI factor to understand the
relationship between the two variables. For example, the information speed will be low for a
low power distance culture and high for a low individualistic culture. Finally, a guideline is
developed in a tabular form with cultural factors, web attributes and features. However, it is not
clear to me how the author has derived it since not much explanation has been written behind
the rationale of the guideline. It is important to be noted that there is not much information
about the data collection process though the author claims it to be a large scale study at the
beginning.

Findings: The study has shown that for a low power distance culture, the human presence in
images is low. When the culture has low individualism, the human presence in images is high. In
low individualism, there is more focus on organizing links with a clear user’s goals. In low
uncertainty avoidance cultures, there is a high amount of redundant information with less
structure. As for long-term orientation culture, the information complexity is low with more
hierarchy in information architecture.The research gap is no user test has been carried to
validate the guidelines and to check if new real cross-cultural websites designed with
incorporating the newly derived guidelines could bring efficiency in the usability by capturing
quantitative data like task success rate, mean time taken to complete the task, number of error
made to complete the task with making a comparison of before and after the new guideline.

Conclusion: In sum, the new evidence-backed guideline has shown that there is a significant link
between cultural factors and the design attributes. The usages of design attributes or elements
differ based on the cultural factors. For the research in this area, the author has utilized a
sequence of methods, starting with literature review of others’ related research, listing down
the design elements, cultural factors and then doing a mapping of cultural factors with design
attributes, which eventually lead to a cross-cultural design guidelines. The future work should
be the usability testing with a new website, incorporating the newly-derived guidelines, for
validation.

Literature review by Mohamed Sajjad Hossen, The guideline to follow designing website in
cross-cultural context

For a designer, it is very important to understand how to make a website design such that the
users would find it trustworthy. This is important for any website as thousands of websites are
popping up and all are not credible. Hence, for our project, as our website is catering to a wide
variety of users from different countries, we need to make sure that website has met the
standards as far as trustworthiness is concerned. It is because,"First impression is the best
impression”. By anyhow, if a user does not find our website authentic, it would be very hard to
gain his confidence back again. Hence, this article will give us the insights that we can
incorporate to make it more credible in cross-cultural context.

Title of the 2nd article: Website design, trust and culture: An eight country investigation

Goal of the article: To do a comparison by testing how the reaction of the users varies based on
different ranges of uncertainty avoidance and to check if parameters like economic situation
and social capital of a culture has an impact on user reactions. Another goal is to use clustering
Theory to see if countries in the same cluster demonstrate more similarity than others.

Methods: Initially, the author has gathered information about the related literature like doing a
comparison analysis of website elements among USA, Germany and Japan ,Cyr and
Trevor-Smith (2004). Similarly, another study of evaluating website attributes like information
design, visual design is done among the same countries. The literature review has helped the
author to construct a set of hypotheses. Once the hypotheses are finalized, a sample size of
1156 from 8 different countries participated in the online survey after the research task. All the
participants were selected from different places like universities and companies. In order to
confirm the participant belongs to a particular culture, the participant is required to live in the
country for the most of his life along with speaking the local language as the first language. The
persona of the participant in the survey was - a young educated online shoppers who has
completed his tertiary education.
Before the participants are asked to fill the questionnaire, the research task was set to assess
the user reactions of B2C websites. In this case, the participants are asked to browse the
homepage of the SonyStyle website in the native language version and select a phone that they
would like to buy in the future. After completing this task, each participant is then asked to
complete an online survey. The questions are set on a Likert scale of 1-7, 1 is “very strongly
disagree” and 7 equals “very strongly agree”. The questions are thematized into categories like
Information Content, Design, Navigation design, Visual Design and Trust and Security

Findings: Having done the descriptive statistical analysis on the data, all the hypotheses are
found to be supported by data. Low risk averse users in high trust countries have given more
points, meaning positive reactions on Information Content, Information Design, Navigation
design, Visual Design, Trust and payment security of the SonyStyle website. Also, clustering
theory also supports the hypothesis that countries in the same cluster show similar user
reactions for website attributes like Website trust and security compared to users outside the
cluster.However, Japan and China have shown exception in the Asian cultural cluster.

Speaking of the limitation of this research, the sample size is small and the participant persona
is mostly student rather than a diverse group. The sample is not selected at random which is
very important in statistical analysis. Also, the user reactions are assessed based on a single
website and it would not be credible to make a conclusion based on it.

Conclusion: The research has used descriptive statistics to test the hypothesis for assessing the
relationship between the user’s reactions on the website’s design elements and uncertainty
avoidance of the culture. For this, the author has first done literature review to set hypotheses
and then quantitative data is collected through online questionnaires. The analysis of the data
confirms that users from low uncertainty avoidance in high trust counties value highly for
websites design attributes. Also, users from similar countries show similar reactions to website
design than others who are not. In this research, a single method is used for hypothesis testing.
However, for future work, other methods like eye-tracking or user interviews should be used to
collect data. Also, the research should be improved with a larger sample size and increasing the
number of tasks for the users before asking them to fill online questionnaires.