A culture-based study on information density of e-commerce websites

This study investigates cultural effects on computer performance of users to e-commerce websites with different information density, and ways to design appropriate interfaces to accommodate cultural effects in order to enhance computer performance for Chinese users. There are many differences in page layout and information density of Chinese and Western e-commerce websites. An experiment was conducted to examine the usability and reliability of the selected Chinese and Western e-commerce websites. Thirty Chinese participants in China participated in this study. Information search tasks with different information density websites were designed to study selected websites´ usability. And questionnaires were used to research their reliability. Results indicate that, for Chinese users, higher information density website is associated with lower usability and higher reliability.