Website Usability in Asia “From Within”: An Overview of a Decade of Literature

Abstract

As the number of website users in Asia grows, there is an increasing need to gain an overview of human–computer interaction (HCI) research about users and websites in that context. This article presents an overview of HCI research on website usability in Asia “from within,” which outlines the articles written by researchers with affiliations to universities in that part of the world. Based on a key word approach to major HCI research outlets, 60 articles from 2001 to 2011 were identified and analyzed. Results indicate that academic websites, e-commerce websites, and tourism websites were the most studied website domains in Asia. Typically, university graduates were used as participants in a laboratory setup and asked to navigate and find information on a website. No systematic use of cultural variables or theories to code, analyze, and interpret data and findings was found. The article discusses the results and the need for a greater sensitivity to what is “local” and “from within” in HCI research and what this can add to the existing literature on website usability.

Acknowledgments

We thank Yanan Chen from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Science, for identifying a sample of papers in Chinese language journals on website usability. We also thank the referees for their helpful and constructive comments.

Notes

¹Asian countries were chosen on the basis of United Nations Geoscheme. The macrogeographical regions are arranged to the extent possible according to continents (United Nations, n.d.).

²The macrogeographical regions of western Asia (United Nations, n.d.).

³An overview of Internet usage, data, and statistics worldwide (Yadav, 2010).