CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION ACROSS THE WORLD WIDE WEB:

APPLYING PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION DESIGN TO

WEB SITE ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL

BUSINESS WEB PRESENCES

by

Garrett R. Winn

A thesis submitted to the faculty of

Brigham Young University

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of English

Department of English

Brigham Young University

April 2002

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

GRADUATE COMMITTEE APPROVAL

of a thesis submitted by

Garrett R. Winn

This thesis has been read by each member of the following graduate committee

and by majority vote has been found to be satisfactory.

_________________________________

Date

_________________________________

Date

_________________________________

Date

_________________________________

William Eggington, Chair

_________________________________

Beverly Zimmerman

_________________________________

Gideon Burton

BRIGHAM YOUNG UNIVERSITY

As chair of the candidate’s graduate committee, I have read the thesis of Garrett R. Winn in its final form and have found that (1) its format, citations, and bibliographical style are consistent and acceptable and fulfill university and department style requirements; (2) its illustrative materials including figures, tables, and charts are in place; and (3) the final manuscript is satisfactory to the graduate committee and is ready for submission to the university library.

_________________________________

Date

Accepted for the Department

Accepted for the College

_________________________________

William Eggington

Chair, Graduate Committee

_________________________________

Lance Larsen

Graduate Coordinator

_________________________________

Van C. Gessel

Dean, College of Humanities

ABSTRACT

CROSS-CULTURAL COMMUNICATION ACROSS THE WORLD WIDE WEB:

APPLYING PRINCIPLES OF INFORMATION DESIGN TO

WEB SITE ANALYSIS OF INTERNATIONAL

BUSINESS WEB PRESENCES

Garrett R. Winn

Department of English

Master of English

Edward Tufte asserts in Envisioning Information that principles of design are “universal ‘like mathematics’ and not tied to unique features of a particular language or culture”. This thesis is an attempt to create a set of web design heuristics that help to bridge cultural gaps by emphasizing universal design principles that focus on the content. I take Tufte's five principles of information design and proceed to apply these rather broad principles to web sites. These principles of design are Micro/Macro – portrayal of lots of information in a small, condensed manner; Layering and Separation – presentation of information that allows page parts to interact; Small Multiples – repetition or juxtaposition of images to allow for comparison; Color – application of color with restraint to label, measure, represent reality, or enliven; and Integration of Text and Graphics – employment of text and graphics to work together to add meaning and readability.

The main goal of this thesis is to share with fellow academia what I learned while attempting to create this set of heuristics and then use those heuristics to analyze web site designs from a few different cultures. I wanted to enlighten contractive rhetoric analysis and to begin to provide the necessary tools in performing that analysis and understanding those communications, as well as bring it and information design closer together in the designer's view. In the end, I hoped to better understand multi-cultural design issues and to determine how Tufte's principles can be applied to web sites while adding data about this important medium to Tufte's work. While this definitely occurred, I came to develop a different set of purposes than I had originally planned.

I came to see the World Wide Web as its own unique, newly formed culture where the presentation of information is essential regardless of the language used or understood by the user (computer translation services help to overcome this barrier). My purpose was to create a fairly broad set of heuristics based on universal, multi-cultural principles to guide a designer toward more cross-cultural designs that focus on content rather than fluff.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank the English Department for their supreme patience and trust that I would actually finish this. I also want to thank Professor Bill Eggington for his dedication and hard work. If I would have listened to him better, I would have realized sooner that 340 pages is a bit too much for a thesis. Of course, I could also never have accomplished this work without the help and encouragement of the rest of my committee: Professors Beverly Zimmerman and Gideon Burton.

Finally, I want to congratulate my wife, Heidi, for making it through a tough 5 years without killing me or tossing the computer in the garbage can. She is my inspiration and my example, and I would have given up a long time ago if she haven’t constantly been reminding me of this unfinished business.