Jakob in China

From alertbox email:

Greetings from Shanghai

Last week we kicked off this year's conference tour in Hong Kong. We had a very successful event and it was invigorating to meet the many Asian user experience professionals and hear about their projects.

<>

For most of the things we tested, there was NO DIFFERENCE in the usability guidelines between Asia and other parts of the world. This is similar to findings in our studies in Japan and Korea.

For example, take financial journalists in Hong Kong. A hugely important group to consider when designing the investor relations (IR) and public relations (PR) sites for any big multinational corporation, which is why we tested these users to get material for our upcoming seminar on presenting information about a company on its website. Most of what Hong Kong financial journalists need from your website is the same as the financial journalists we have already tested in New York, London, and Copenhagen.

In other words, the differences between the peoples of the world are not as great as they are sometimes made out to be. At least not when it comes to the usability guidelines for Web design.