The Aesthetic Dimensions of U.S. and South Korean Responses to Web Home Pages: A Cross-Cultural Comparison
Anthony J. Faiola, Chin-Chang Ho, Mark Tarrant, Karl Fredric MacDorman · International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction · 2011
Culturally influenced preferences in website aesthetics is a topic often neglected by scholars in human–computer interaction. Kim, Lee, and Choi (2003 Kim, J., Lee, J. and Choi, D. 2003. Designing emotionally evocative homepages: An empirical study of the quantitative relations between design factors and emotional dimensions. International Journal of Human–Computer Interaction Studies, 59: 899–940. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) identified aesthetic design factors of web home pages that elicited particular responses in South Korean web users based on 13 secondary emotional dimensions. This study extends Kim et al.'s work to U.S. participants, comparing the original South Korean findings with U.S. findings. Results show that U.S. participants reliably applied translations of the emotional adjectives used in the South Korean study to the home pages. However, factor analysis revealed that the aesthetic perceptions of U.S. and South Korean participants formed different aesthetic dimensions composed of different sets of emotional adjectives, suggesting that U.S. and South Korean people perceive the aesthetics of home pages differently. These results indicate that website aesthetics can vary significantly between cultures.