The impact of cultural differences on perceived website quality

The object of this master’s thesis is web sites, and the goal is to explore how cultural differences influence the perception of web sites quality. This goal is achieved by completing the following tasks: to explore the concept of culture; to find a relationship between the individual and the culture and the impact of culture to individual perception; to explore the Internet and culture-related studies, to find the most commonly used models of cultural dimensions to analyze the website between cultures; to examine the impact of cultural differences on web content; to investigate and ascertain whether there is a significant difference between the perception of website quality from distant and nearby cultures. The paper analyses scientific literature as well as quantitative and qualitative data collected through online questionnaire survey. The analysis of scientific literature showed that different researchers perceive the concept of culture in its own way. However, all authors commonly perceived culture as a way of thinking shared by group of people. The scientific literature dealing with culture and web sites usually uses Hall (1997), Hofstede (2001), Trompenaars and Hampden-Turden (1997) cultural dimension models. These models allow each culture to be defined on certain groups of scales, and thus reveal the essential differences between cultures. Culture forms the mindset of the individual and affects his perception of Web sites. Thus web surfers from different cultures have different perceptions of the importance and significance of various web site elements. The websites have different culture specific elements and there is different emphasis given to certain information, reflecting the culture. Furthermore sites from different cultures may vary in use of color, the specific use of symbols, information classification methods, and etc. So culturally congruent website reduces the cognitive effort needed to understand web content and creates an atmosphere in which communication messages are clearer, interaction is better. The empirical examination showed that cultural differences has a statistically significant (p