hightext

Asian countries dominate e-government performance

I'd love to know how South Korea zoomed up from 86th to 1st place in this study by Brown University of e-government performance. Japan moved up from 53rd to 8th too. Other surprises in the top 20 - Dominica and Azerbaijan... And isn't Bulgaria supposed to be joining the EU in January 2007? Being ranked 113th out of 150 (lower than Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan) is not good enough surely.

Cultural determinants of search behaviour on websites

Useful academic paper(note - link is to a pdf) entitled "Cultural Determinants of Search Behaviour on Websites" from Anett Kralisch and Bettina Berendt, of the Humboldt University Berlin, for the IWIPS 2004 Conference on Culture, Trust and Design Innovation 8-10 July 2004, Vancouver Canada.

Their research confirms their hypotheses that people from high context cultures prefer to use the links and hierarchies provided by the website to access information, whereas people from low context cultures prefer to use a search engine. In other words, high context people want to know what the context is for the information they are looking for and low context people think it is enough just to get the information.

Similarly, they confirm that people from high Power Distance cultures have a stronger preference for following links in a deep hyperstructure than people low Power Distance cultures (who don't care about hierarchies) and that long-term orientation people are happier to follow links than short term orientation people (just give me what I want!).

Interestingly, their hypothesis that people from high Uncertainty Avoidance cultures (people who don't like taking risks) would prefer to follow links than use a search engine was not confirmed. They suggest that perhaps this is because people from high Uncertainty Avoidance cultures want to get a lot of information, for fear of missing something, so a search engine is more likely to provide this than one link.

English still dominates corporate websites

A survey by US research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory finds that nearly 90% of leading firms in the world's largest economies offer English as a second language on their websites.

The survey analysed the websites of the top 25 revenue producing companies in 16 countries from Western Europe, Asia and the Americas, encompassing 28 market segments including aerospace, beverages, consumer products, pharmaceuticals, retail and telecommunications.

One of the authors of the survey said in a previous report that "visitors linger twice as long [at websites in their own language] as they do at English-only URLs, business buyers are three times more likely to buy if addressed in their own language, and customer service costs drop when instructions are displayed in the user's language." However this more recent survey found that companies in Anglophone countries tend to offer English-only sites. 42% of US companies, 50% of British firms and 80% of Australian websites offered only English content. So presumably they might be missing out on gaining non-Anglophone customers? If they are local retailers or utilities, they might not be targetting non-Anglophone customers anyway.

It's difficult to say without paying for the report and reading it in more depth, but I wonder whether they investigated the corporate HQ websites only or also acknowledged that these companies had local websites in the local language at separate URLs (Vodafone would be an example of this).

Having separate websites makes sense in terms of localising for the market, but it is intensely annoying if the corporate website offers much more information in its native language than it makes available in the language of the local market.

Interestingly, the survey found that website design varies little by geography. The authors attribute this to a high degree of adoption of border-hopping technologies like newer browser versions and Flash, and the reliance of larger companies on big advertising firms and designers worldwide. They do not comment whether or not this is wise...

Shirkiphiles and Shirkiphobes

I see that the Clay Shirky article from 1999 I linked to in a previous entry has already been the subject of criticism in the past. Multilingual web usability consultants based in Canada, content.nu (who don't seem to exist any more as their website tells you bluntly that it hasn't been updated since 2001) accuse Shirky of saying something I don't think he was saying - that thanks to the internet, English will conquer all and minority languages will wither away.

Actually I think his underlying assumption is one that both Content.nu and I would probably agree on, which is that people will always and everywhere prefer to look at websites (and any other IT interface) in their native language. This means that parallel worlds of knowledge - in different languages - can result, rarely intercommunicating. Yes you can have multilingual websites, and that's where contenu.nu's advice will come in handy. But most multilingual websites are designed to make sure that customers feel comfortable buying online from a company that isn't from their home country, rather than attempts to exchange knowledge.

This criticism of Shirky's article was resurrected on blogalization.org, which is itself a self-declared example of a gateway or cultural spanner - as I was discussing in a previous post. Interestingly, all the bilingual blogs there I've seen are bilingual in the sense of English plus another language. So maybe English is the gateway language. Perhaps this was what Shirky was getting at when he said the English was the Official Second Language, and that's different from saying that English will wipe out other languages on the web.

I'm still getting to grips with what blogalization.org is all about and have a lurking fear that given the rather snippy tone of some of the contributions there, I may be about to get a whole newbie earful of grief about my ignorance of previous debates on Clay Shirky and no doubt others. But both Ton and Olaf have been very welcoming of me since I linked to them, so here's hoping!