title: Culture differences in design of portal sites.
abstract: Two experiments were carried out to examine the effects of cultural differences between the Chinese and the US people on the perceived usability and search performance of World Wide Web (WWW) portal sites. Chinese users in Taiwan and US users in Chicago were recruited to perform searching tasks on two versions of Yahoo! portal site: the standard Yahoo! and Yahoo! Chinese. The layout of Yahoo! Chinese is the same as the layout of Yahoo!, and categories on Yahoo! Chinese have been translated from its US counterpart. A special browser was programmed to record all the keystroke data and participants were asked to fill out a satisfaction questionnaire after finishing the tasks. Significant differences of satisfaction and steps to perform some tasks were found between the two groups. The experiment results also provided more detailed insights into the cultural differences between the Chinese and the US users.
authors.affiliation: School of Computer Science, Telecommunications and Information Systems, DePaul University, 243 S. Wabash Avenue, Chicago, IL 60604, USA. xfang@cti.depaul.edu
authors.forename: Xiaowen
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Fang
authors.forename: Pei-Luen Patrick
authors.initials: PL
authors.lastname: Rau
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D002641:Chicago; D003071:Cognition; D003258:Consumer Behavior / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D018864:Cultural Diversity; D006804:Ergonomics; D006801:Humans; D016247:Information Storage and Retrieval / Q000379:methods*; D020407:Internet; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013624:Taiwan; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis; D014584:User-Computer Interface