The primary goal of a user interface is to support users who play multiple roles in accordance with their contextual environment and purposes of use (Shen, Woolley, & Prior, 2005). Culture is an essential aspect that influences users’ view on contextual environment. Members of a cultural group share distinct cognitions and identity that characterize different cultural dimensions. Therefore, the fundamental basis of web-user interface design may vary across cultures and nationalities. In fact, recent empirical researches have found that website interfaces of different countries often reflect cultural dimensions (Marcus & Gould, 2000; Sheridan, 2001; Robbins & Stylianou, 2002; Wurtz, 2005; Callahan, 2005). In my study, I first discuss various cross-cultural design aspects, including cultural dimensions and web-user interface design principles, followed by the discussion of internationalized and localized websites. I then conducted a qualitative analysis on two sets of an American and a Korean website in order to compare the cultural attributes and characteristics reflected in them. Results indicate that American websites express individualistic and low context cultural characteristics and Korean sites show collectivistic and high context cultural characteristics. However, Korean websites contain some western cultural traits, such as individualism and low context culture. In addition, Korean websites are more visually-oriented than the American one. Other interesting cultural implications were also detected through the qualitative analyses of the interfaces
