Exploring the Impact of Cultural Preferences in Website Design: A Controlled Experiment Based on Three University Websites of Pakistan

In recent years, it is observed that the website users prefer the design of the websites, which are oriented towards their cultural preferences. Due to that numerous researches have been made to figure out the preferences of various cultures and their people. Hofstede [1], [2] proposed six dimensions to distinguish one culture from another, which are well adopted in literature. According to these dimensions, Pakistan is marked as collectivist, high uncertainty avoidance and restrained country. However, preference of Pakistan cannot be identified empirically in the rest of the other dimensions due to neutral scores. Culture fit in website design is an important consideration. As Pakistan is a developing country, no evident has been found in literature that discusses the design practices of the websites of Pakistan. In this regard, we collected the website design practices suggested based on defined cultural variables followed by a controlled experiment of three websites of the universities of Pakistan using 24 participants. The participants evaluated all three websites individually, and provide their preferences. The finding of this study represents the fact that the preferences of the users are influenced by the culture, and those preferences are reflected in the assessment of the websites as well.