A Cross-Cultural Comparative Study of Users’ Perceptions of a Webpage: With a Focus on the Cognitive Styles of Chinese, Koreans and Americans

Since its creation, the World Wide Web (WWW) has become the most popular medium of communication around the world. At present, websites can potentially be visited by people from many different countries. Considering that people from different cultures may employ different usage strategies on a website, an effective site requires consideration of these differences and should be designed to accommodate the needs of people with diverse cultural backgrounds (Faiola, 2005). Many studies have been carried out to shed light on the effects of cultural differences on web usability. The term “culturability” emphasizes the importance of the relationship between culture and usability in WWW design. That is, a user interface should be designed to accommodate cultural preferences and bias so as to increase its usability (Barber & Badre, 1998). The webpage acts as an interface, allowing people to interact with the internet. Good interface designs can enhance the user’s capacity to process the information on the webpage. Additionally, a number of crosscultural web design studies, grounded in Hall (1959, 1976) and Hofstede’s (1980, 1991) cultural theories, have been carried out. These studies compared websites from different countries by using cultural dimensions as criteria and derived characteristics of webpage design for different cultural contexts (Marcus, 2000; Yuan, Liu, Xu, & Wang, 2005; Singh, 2005). Research on cultural differences from various perspectives, including linguistics, cultural patterns, models of cultures, and cognitive style, has contributed to cross-cultural web design. Cognitive style plays an important role in the design of web content because a web design should ultimately accommodate an individual’s typical mode of perception, thinking, remembering, and problem-solving in order to promote usability. Differences in cognitive style are magnified when East Asians and Westerners are compared. Nisbett’s (2001) recent research on cultural cognition provides a theoretical framework for cross-cultural study. Through observation of how people from diverse cultures view images, he has defined two different cognitive styles: holistic and analytic. Nisbett (2001, 2002, 2003) combines cultural and cognitive perspectives that enrich the understanding of cultural influence in web usability research, thus creating a new approach in this field.