Observing the Influence of Cultural Differences Within India on User Experience of an E-Commerce Application: An Experimental Investigation

Abstract

Though several studies have reported differences in online behavior across different cultures where countries have been treated as a single cultural unit, there are limited studies on the influence of subcultural differences on the online behavior of users within a country. Especially within India, there is a dearth of literature investigating the influence of subcultural differences on user preferences on mobile application designs. This paper reports an experimental investigation into consumer preferences for e-commerce mobile application users from three distinct cultural regions within India. Culturally suitable design variations for the three regions were created using user interface markers from literature. This was followed by remote usability testing and structured interviews with participants. It was observed that there were differences between preferences of users from different cultural regions within India and the users from a particular subcultural region preferred the design variation made for that region using culturally suitable user interface elements.