Identifying Cultural Markers for Web Application Design Targeted to a Multi-cultural Audience

This paper addresses the problem of defining a Web design process suitable for the multi-cultural audience of a Web application in the globalization era. Traditional usability guidelines implicitly depend on the background of the audience, and may overlook specific preferences dictated by the cultural context. To overcome this limit, the notion of culturability has been proposed, which extends traditional usability to take into account usage preferences stemming from multiple cultural conventions. The paper builds upon a case study (the comparison of Chinese and Western e-commerce Web sites) and proposes a working definition of culturability, based on cultural markers; moreover, an effective methodology for identifying cultural markers and turning them into design guidelines is established and validated by letting groups of users with different cultures evaluate exemplary Web applications incorporating different versions of the candidate cultural markers.