The Impact of Different Cultures on E-Business Web Design--- Comparison Research of Chinese HTUwww.joyo.comUTH and American

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1 TP PT Abbreviation The Impact of Different Cultures on E-Business Web Design--- Comparison Research of Chinese HTUwww.joyo.comUTH and American HTUwww.amazon.comUTH Xiaowei Yuan, Hui Liu, Shengyuan Xu, Yabo Wang Beijing ISAR User Interface Design Beijing China Abstract 1 The statistics of CNNICTP PT show that there are 94 million Internet users until the beginning of This number tells Chinese E-business market is huge, which attracts increasing international enterprises. They enter this market by cooperation or directly purchase, for an example, American HTUwww.amazon.comUTH had purchased Chinese HTUwww.joyo.comUTH. Web design is influenced greatly by culture. This paper discusses the influential factors of user interface made by the different western and Chinese cultures, comparing the web design of Chinese biggest E-business website HTUwww.joyo.comUTH with that of HTUwww.amazon.comUTH. 1 Introduction 1.1 The Development of E-commerce in China The statistics of CNNIC shows that there are 94 million Internet users in China. With the increase of the Internet user and the consumer s recognition of online shopping, China s E-commerce business has achieved a great deal. However, while developing substantially, they are losing a lot of potential orders. Therefore they have realized that a more friendly interface will make the consumers feel good in the process of net-purchasing and thereby bring huge opportunities to the website. While foreign capitals and enterprises are entering China s E-commerce market, such as the purchasing of Chinese HTUwww.joyo.comUTH by American HTUwww.amazon.comUTH, the domestic websites are being internationalised. Given the fierce competition, the design of interface is becoming more and more important. 1.2 The Research on Hofstede s Cultural Theory and Cross-culture Interface Design Hofstede s theory is very popular in current cross-culture research. It analyzes the differences between different cultures by using five culture dimensions. In the past, there were some research on the relation between cultural differences and interface design by using this theory, but most of which were theoretically comparisons, like Aaron Marcus s User-interface Design and Culture which only analyzed the influence of five cultural dimensions on five components (metaphor, mental model, navigation, interaction, appearance) of interface design respectively. There is very little research on the comparison between two specific cultures with regard to the influence of cultural differences on interface design. 1.3 Our subject Our company cooperated with some E-commerce website in the past. During our cooperation, we found that it is impossible to make excellent interface design by using the principle of usability alone. Once we analyzed the 1 for China Internet Network Information Centre, which issues statistical reports on the Internet development, information quantities on the Internet in China and in other countries and regions.

2 successful. HTUwww.amazon.comUTH and planed to apply the successful experience with regard to usability into the design of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH, only find that neither our client-- joyo website nor the end user of the website-the consumers accepted that design. Why did the principle of usability not work in this project? In order to make it clear, we made another comparison and analysis of these two websites. We found that in spite of the obvious distinction in visual design, there are greater differences in the website structure, interaction and metaphors, which cannot be explained with the traditional principle of interface design-usability. After our internal discussion, we came to the conclusion that the special cultural background is the major cause. We have also found the relevant theories to explain it. This paper is just trying to explain some special phenomena in HTUwww.joyo.comUTH from the perspective of culture. 2 The Specialty of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH (Compared to HTUwww.amazon.comUTH) 2.1 The Design and the Function of Homepage In terms of usability, the design of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH s home page is not a success. The page layout is not clear. There are too many focuses in one page like pictures and animations. The page is flood with characters (all kinds of commercial web information), very inconvenient for the users to bro and read. 2.2 The Marketing Philosophy The first page of Hwww.joyo.comH is full of advertisement on sale. The Internet users could find the inter-link of many popular products. Fact has proven that this strategy is very successful. In contrast, in Hwww.amazon.comH there are less advertisements or recommendations, instead, it shows the products through different level of guidance by relying on the perfect classification. This website is more convenient for consumers to find their own favourite through searching. 2.3 The Recommendation of Best Sellers The first page of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH has fully demonstrated the website is recommendation of the collective hobbies. So does the first page of each product category. Under the category navigation, there is a popular category district listing several kinds of products, which are most frequently browsed through. Under the search box there are the most popular searches -the most frequently used key words. At the noticeable place there are several popularity lists from the chart of different product category to the 24 hours sales volume of each product. While this kind of list is quite few in HTUwww.amazon.comUTH. Figure 1: Category Navigation on Homepage of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH

3 Figure 2: Key Words Search and Bestsellers list on Homepage of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH 2.4 The Individualized Function In Hwww.joyo.comH, there are not too many individualized functions for the registered subscribers. Generally speaking, what people see are the same page and the same recommendation. In contrast, Hwww.amazon.comH offers a much individualized function, which enables the consumers to choose their own favourite product category, so that the website could recommend different products to different consumers. 3 Conclusion In order to explain these phenomena in the interface design of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH, we reviewed the related cultural theories and found that Hofstede s cultural dimensions will help to explain these phenomena. His theory explains the differences between cultures based o the five basic dimensions. -Power Distance -Individualism -Uncertainty Avoidance -Masculinity -Long-term orientation Here is the comparison of China s and America s five cultural dimensions: Table1. The Comparison of China s and America s five cultural dimensions Country PDI IDV MAS UAI LTO HChinaH HUnited StatesH From this comparison we can see that there are big differences between China and America on Power Distance and Individualism. Thereby, according to the theory, we can come to the conclusion that Chinese culture has the following features: High PD: -Focus on expertise, authority, experts, certifications, official stamps, or logos: strong.

4 -Prominence given to leaders vs. citizens, customers or employees. -Less powerful people should be dependent on the more powerful; in practice, less powerful people are polarized between dependence and counter dependence. -Subordinates expect to be told what to do. -Might prevail over right: whoever holds the power is right and good. Low IDV: -In this culture, the collective interests teach people that they should set store, emphasis the group cooperation while maintaining humble. Under many circumstances, the opinion of the collective will influence, even change one s own view. -Opinions are predetermined by group membership. -Collectivism implies that people are integrated from birth into strong, cohesive groups that protect them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. In the following part of this paper based on the analysis of the comparison, we are going to explain the specialty of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH s design by reviewing the habit and common cultural phenomena in Chinese people s daily life. 3.1 Homepage Design Based on the analysis of the differences between Chinese and American culture, we can say that the interface design of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH is reasonable, because Chinese people tend to believe in the authorities and like to stay with the majority. This can be demonstrated in many aspects in the real life. For example, Chinese people always like to the biggest, the most crowed and the busiest place, such as the shop, restaurant and cinema. We believe that the designer of the homepage of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH is rightly making use of this mentality of consumers. He /She hopes that by seeing so much products on the page, the Internet user may inattentively get an impression that this website is a very busy place, the biggest online shopping mall with the most various products. Therefore the website could arouse the consumer s interest and win their trust. But our subscribers haven t met too many difficulties in reading this kind of page, and few of them have complained about this. That s because China is a populous country. People have been used to living in the crowded and busy environment and searching things they are interested in among so much information. 3.2 The Operational Philosophy Chinese people lack the rational thinking, so when they shop on line, they are always just looking around without specific objective. Therefore, it is very unrealistic to assume that theses consumers would find what they want through exploring and searching. In order to keep these customers, the website must show and recommend products directly to them. As the first page shown to the customers, undoubtedly, the homage shoulders the responsibility to exhibit products. Attract the customer s attention at the first page, make them stay in the website and finally buy something. That s why there are so many advertisements on the first page of HTUwww.joyo.comUTH. By contrary, American people are more rational when shopping on line. They have their specific objective. They know what they are going to buy. Usually they won t pay attention to those ads, which have nothing to do with them. Therefore, those recommendations don t work on them. They are more likely to search what they want through exploration or category search. 3.3 The Favour of Fashion Chinese people have a strong concept about the collective. In some cases, the collective will can even become the authority influencing individual s choice. The Hot Category, Hot Search and the Popularity List are just based on such kind of consideration, making use of people s ray allen-34 support of collective wills and the authorities. Usually when people see the word Hot or List, they tend to believe that many people are paying attention to these things and then these things must be very good. As a result, they will be attracted to look into the details and buy those things at last.

5 P However, Americans are more individualized. They prefer to believe their own judge and choice and are less possible to follow the collective will and change their own view. 3.4 The Requirement of Individualism In Chinese culture, the individuals are closely connected to the collective; therefore people will not pay much attention to individualism. The excessive specialty will give people an impression of alienation. In many cases, people tend to do what others do. The conformity is more remarkable than the specialty. The American culture attaches great importance to individual development. Everyone wish to be different. They all want get very individualized service while shopping on line. Thus the individualized functions are not only attractive but also important to the customers. Without this function, people might be far less interested in the website. 4 The Limitations In this paper, we chose two representative E-business website in Chinese and American culture, analyzed these phenomena by using Hofstede s cultural theory. We try to explain the factors affecting the design of Chinese commercial website except for the usability from the perspective of Chinese culture s specialty. Given the limited condition, this research still has many limitations: ---We only compared two representative websites. Whether these two can represent the two countries commercial websites still require our further research. ---These two websites are all very big entities, therefore we didn t, and it is also impossible for us to conduct a overall comparison. Here we ve just discussed several aspects, which, we think, are relatively valuable. ---In this paper, we have just analyzed the essence of the special phenomena in HTUwww.joyo.comUTH and didn t offer too much opinion on the specific form of these phenomena. That is to say that we think these phenomena are consistent with Chinese culture does not mean that we agree with the current form of the website. There are still a lot to do in the future: ---We should make efforts to collect more first hand materials by testing with the principle of usability and research Chinese customers opinion on two websites from different cultural background. ---Do more research on how to improve the interface design of China s E-business websites by using China s cultural characteristics so as to enrich our theory in this field. References Geert Hofstede. TGeert Hofstede Cultural Dimensions HTUhttp:// Aaron Marcus, Emilie W.Gould(2000). Crosscurrents: Cultural Dimensions and Global Web User-Interface Design, Interactions, ACM Publisher, Vol.7, No.4, July/August 2000, pp Aaron Marcus, Valentina-Johana Baumgartner, Eugene Chen. User-Interface Design and Culture. CNNIC, TU"15th Statistical Survey Report on the Internet Development in China", January 2005, UHUhttp:// Del Galdo, W.M. and Nielsen, J.(Eds.), 1996, International User Interface, John Wiley & Sons. th Barber, W. and Badre, A., Culturability: The Merging of Culture and Usability, In Proceedings of the 4P Conference on Human Factors and the Web. Hofstede,G. 1997, Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, McGraw-Hill, New York. Raquel Ferreira, Culture and E-Commerce: Culture Based Preferences for Interface Information Design. Nielsen, J., 2000, Designing Web Usability, USA: New Riders Press. Davies, A., A framework for understanding human factors in web-based electronic commerce. International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 2000.