Identifying cultural markers for web application design targeted to a multi-cultural audience

This paper addresses the problem of defining a Web de-sign process suitable for the multi-cultural audience of a Web application in the globalization era. Traditional us-ability guidelines implicitly depend on the background of the audience, and may overlook specific preferences dic-tated by the cultural context. To overcome this limit, the no-tion of culturability has been proposed, which extends tradi-tional usability to take into account usage preferences stem-ming 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 effec-tive methodology for identifying cultural markers and turn-ing them into design guidelines is established and validated by letting groups of users with different cultures evaluate ex-emplary Web applications incorporating different versions of the candidate cultural markers.