A Cross-cultural comparative study on users’ perception of the webpage

Abstract

This study aims to reveal the relationship between the cognitive style and webpage perception, especially, webpage perception of people with different cognitive styles are compared. Based on Nisbett’s theoretical model about cognition at where proposed that thoughts of East Asian and Westerner differ greatly, and differences can be classified as Holistic and Analytic. Holistic people have a tendency to perceive the context and field as a whole. And they tend to focus on the relationship between objects and the field. On the other hand, Analytic people have a tendency to perceive objects separately from the scene. And they tend to assign objects into categories. Based on Nisbett’s cognitive model, this study hypothesized that the differences between Holistic thought and Analytic thought can be reflected by the webpage perception as well. Since the eye movement data can provide specific information about users’ cognitive process, eyegaze device can be a tool to examine user’s cognitive process when they browse the webpage. An experiment was carried out to examine the hypotheses. American (Analytic thought), Chinese and Korean (Holistic thought) participants were recruited and their eye movements were recorded when they were browsing the prototype of webpage. Different language versions of prototypes with identical contents and layouts as well as identical webpage elements were designed. An eye tracking data analysis tool named “EyeGo” was developed to process eye movement data. Two methods were used in data interpretation: Top-down approach which begins from hypothesizing, and Bottom-up approach which is based on observation. A “Mixed between-within Subjects Analysis of Variance” was conducted to validate results found in the experiment. Hypotheses were supported. Findings from the analysis suggested that Chinese, Korean and American have different viewing patterns on the webpage and showed positive relationship with Nisbett’s cognitive theory. By bewaring of ...