With approximately two months delay my bachelor thesis is finally available online. Written at the institute of information sciences, university of zurich, this paper focuses on wether the ‘culturalization’ of websites is economically viable. Personally speaking, I find that adapting the layout and content of websites to different cultures is extremely important and will be increasingly discussed in the future. Alone the fact that Google is not the major search engine in South Korea, China, and Japan is puzzling. Is it the layout and the functionality of Google that prohibits the giant to rise to the top in Asia? Probably not, but it is still worth an analysis. I also conducted a user study among 30 students in Bangkok in order to evaluate whether a newly developed software tool (‘MOCCA’), which automatically changes the layout according to the user’s cultural background, is doing a good job. I found that it does and my findings got confirmed by other studies conducted in Rwanda and Switzerland by Katharina Reinecke (she is largely involved in this project).

Executive Summary

As a consequence of the globalization of the internet over the past few years, companies need to address an international audience with different cultural backgrounds. This paper analyzes whether companies could benefit from adapting their websites to the different cultures of different countries. A user study conducted in Thailand demonstrates that it is possible to accurately predict user preferences of user interfaces using adaptation rules based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions, which reduce the costs of adapting websites. Furthermore, the paper finds that even without such adaptation rules companies could greatly benefit from adapting their websites to the culture of a specific country. Future research however will have to validate the adaptation rules by studying cultural aspects of other countries.

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Bachelor Thesis “The Economic Influence of Culture on User Interface Acceptance”