Cultural differences across governmental website design

In this paper, we study the relevance of Hall and Hofstede's works to the web design beyond traditional domain areas like e-commerce, and advertising. Existing theories explain how design may be affected by cultural differences, and we explore how those differences can be seen in the government website design across Brazil, Russia, India, China, and US. We describe our findings confirming that differences exist, more so between China and US than the rest, and point out where cultural theories fail to explain the results, in particular for Brazil, Russia and India and finally, focus more on the differences between China and US.