Culture influences to website information architecture: an empirical investigation

Abstract

This study explores the relationship between culture and website information architecture (IA) that is under-represented in the Human Computer Interaction (HCI) literature. Our study drew from the works Wan Abdul Rohim et al. (2006, 2007, 2008), who provided the IA framework from architectural perspective and later incorporated Islamic cultural dimensions into the context of website IA. In this study, we enrich their framework by conducting empirical investigation to test the hypotheses linkage between culture and website IA. The research method involves using Islamic culture as the case study and web-based survey on 427 Muslims from Islamic countries. The result of the ordinal regression analysis suggests culture does influence website IA. This result contributes to the growing body of IA literature and has both substantive and methodological implications for future research.