Website information architecture influences on user performance: an experimental approach

Abstract

This paper investigates on how the information architecture (IA) of culture-specific website influences user performance in information seeking task. In our study, we bring forward groundbreaking work of Faiola (2006) and Faiola and Matei (2006) on Cultural Cognition Theory (CCT) that provides the linkage among culture, cognition and website IA. Based on CCT, we prescribed that the IA of culture-specific website, facilitates cognitive metabolism and subsequently increase performance. In our experiment we used Islamic culture as the case study with 44 Middle East and 44 Malaysian students as Muslim subjects. The IA of culture-specific website was constructed based on Hotsfede's culture dimensions that are in-line with the Islamic culture religious prescriptions. The results showed that Middle East and Malaysian subjects performed information-seeking tasks faster when using the IA for website created for Muslims.