Conformity with User Expectations on the Web: Are There Cultural Differences for Design Principles?

User-centered Web design essentially impacts a website’s success and therefore directly or indirectly influences a classic or digital enterprise’s prosperity. “Conformity with user expectations” as one of seven dialogue principles according to the ISO 9241-110 standard is one critical success factor as it regards efficient and effective task completion. Over the past ten years, numerous recommendations for designing Web elements have been published, and some of them deal with conformity of user expectations. However, there are cultural differences concerning how design principles should be applied on Web elements. In this paper, we outline examples of their implementation, followed by discussing the results of an eye tracking study, which indicates that not all recommendations for design principles provided in related work – especially from the Anglo-American area – are valid for European end users and, finally, that their validity may change over time.