A Culturability Research On Portal Sites In China And United States

Usability is one of the key issues when designing a website. Once having a usability study, most of the concerns are the general principles such as HCI (Human-computer Interaction), cognition, psychology etc. All these theories are critical and universal to the users worldwide. Differently, when designing a product for a group of users in a specific culture, considerations about what they like and dislike, their preferences and bias and even tiny differentiation will improve the entire usability and the user experience.In 1998, the first principle about usability and culture came out and was named Culturability by two scholars, Barber & Badre. Their study was to find out the relationship between these aspects and synthesized a set of guidelines so as to enhance the website's usability.China has a unique culture, people's preferences, bias, and behaviors are more than what it looks like, the portal sites in China is quite different from those in America, in terms of general layout, color scheme, navigation module, etc. So the main purpose of this study is to find out the inner consequences, which lead to the outer presentation, culture issue is the way we are going to follow.The first part of this paper concentrates on the analysis of Culture Marker, which is another principle refers to some culturally influenced elements, features and sorts of behaviors in websites. Only culture markers are found and analyzed, can we tell what they are and how they look like differently among those portal sites. Secondly, we are going to organize a survey about the culture markers previously found, to see how users think about those markers. Thirdly, to have a culture perspective's point of view, we will find out the relations between the culture and those elements by means of mass communication point.