This study aims to understanding the effects of culture on websites with emphasis on the website structure and navigation. The website is inherently `cultural` because anyone around the world can access to website if he or she is equipped with appropriate equipment. For the importance of cultural role in website, various researches have been conducted to understand the relationship between culture and website. However they tended to focus mainly on phenomenal matters such as color, layout, icon etc. There have been not so many thorough attempts to causal relationships between website and `thick culture` in depth. The study conducted cross-cultural usability testing of websites between Korea and America.
At first, representative E-commerce websites of Korea and America were selected and they were analyzed by the selected frameworks such as layout, display type, element type, and the relationship with homepage and sub-page navigation. The results were used to construct typical prototypes of website for Korea and America for experiment. Two websites were used for cross-cultural usability testing though specially-developed remote testing. The tool enables remote user to download the browser and participate in usability testing in his or her computing environment, which saves cost and time. All the interaction data such as time taken, click, and pages viewed are automatically transmitted to client server. The interaction can be replayed with navigation pathes visualized. 20 users from each country participated in the usability testing.
The result shows that Korean users performed better usability testing for Korean style structure of website while American counterparts showed better performances in American style of websites. Other various significant findings were revealed.
