Development of a Culturally-Oriented Website Usability Evaluation

As the uni-cultural studies of website usability have matured, the paucity of cross-cultural studies of usability become increasingly apparent. Moving toward these cross-cultural studies will require the development of a new tool to assess website usability in the context of cultural dimensions. This paper introduces the preliminary results from the first phase of this project and then presents the proposed method for the research in progress that specifically is directed to the development and quantitative evaluation of a measurement scale of a culture sensitive measurement of website usability. The recognition of the need to develop this scale resulted from the identification of culture-related shortcomings of previous measurement tools that have been used widely within the Management of Information Systems (MIS) literature.