Abstract
A review of 3065 Arab e-commerce websites revealed that Web designers mostly adopt Western-influenced interface metaphors and pay scant attention to creating Arab culture-specific visual metaphors. In this research, we first collected and analyzed Arabic stories to extract themes for the creation of culturally attuned visual metaphors for use as Web interface elements. After considering various plausible themes, we specifically focused on the “wish list” metaphor as the object of our study. A subsequent eye-tracking experiment based on alternative designs of a shopping website provided evidence that participants paid more attention to the localized elements of website design. A questionnaire-based study further confirmed that localization of site design in general, and the use of culturally attuned visual metaphors in particular, gains the attention of Arab e-shoppers. The results provide both practitioners and researchers deeper insights into how culture shapes the design of websites.
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Acknowledgments
This work was partly made possible by NPRP grant 5-1393-6-044 from the Qatar National Research Fund (a member of the Qatar Foundation). The statements made herein are solely the responsibility of the authors.
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Liginlal, D., Al-Fehani, M., Gopinath, P., Cheek, A. (2016). Wish Lists and Shopping Carts: A Study of Visual Metaphors on Arab E-Commerce Websites. In: Sugumaran, V., Yoon, V., Shaw, M. (eds) E-Life: Web-Enabled Convergence of Commerce, Work, and Social Life. WEB 2015. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 258. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45408-5_17
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-45408-5_17
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