The Impact of Culture on Website Navigation Behaviour

The web offers unprecedented opportunities for worldwide access to information resources, regardless of the user’s country of origin. However, providing information globally raises the question of whether to offer a standardized or a culturally adapted website, often connected to important investment decisions. To investigate the impact of users’ cultural backgrounds, we derived hypotheses concerning the impact of cultural dimensions (Hofstede’s long-term orientation and uncertainty avoidance, and Hall’s mono-/polychronicity) on user behaviour. Behavioural data were collected by sorting through records of navigation steps in the Web server log of a heavily and internationally frequented multilingual website. The results confirmed our hypotheses, indicating that users’ cultural backgrounds influence their navigation patterns in terms of time, amount of accessed information, and (non)linearity of information access. We discuss consequences for usability testing and designing a website’s structure and content.

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