Webpage designs for diverse cultures: An exploratory study of user preferences in China

Abstract

A wealth of studies has revealed a cross-cultural difference in the user preference on webpage designs. Users from other cultures often criticize a widely accepted webpage design in one culture. Designs for diverse cultures are thus expected to be specific to address diverse user preferences. This study investigated the preferences of Chinese users on four essential design elements related to the readability of texts of the result pages of search engines. The results suggested that the search result pages of the Bing search engine designed for typical 'US users' did not satisfy Chinese users. Chinese users, in general, preferred huge-sized texts for titles, a more compact layout of the search result pages, and keywords to be highlighted in red. The findings of the study contributed to webpage design guidelines for Chinese users, and may serve as a catalyst in exploring user preferences in designing for diverse cultures. © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.