Cross-Cultural Web Design for a Rule Based Marketing Tool

Abstract: While flying today the customers will receive static advertisements on the screens placed in front of every seat. Hence, the advertisements do not differ depending on the flight’s duration or personal interests. Our goal was to develop a marketing tool where the marketing team at different airlines could specify under which circumstances a certain advertisement would be displayed onboard. The design was based on a rule building tool, where every single advertisement is constructed as a rule with different criteria. Furthermore, we were interested in investigating if it was possible to create a crosscultural interface in order to satisfy and meet the requirements for four different regions around the world: Europe, Japan, the Middle East, and the United States. A literature study was conducted to get an understanding of different cultural aspects as well as an investigation of existing rule building tools that are available on the market. Our prototype was iterated through five different phases which included both Low Fidelity and High Fidelity prototyping. Each phase was tested and evaluated before further development. Our last test session included three participants from each of the four regions and was performed with an online service for user interface testing. Our final conclusion was that it is possible to create a cross-cultural marketing tool since none of the regions struggled more with our prototype and all performed the test cases with none or minor problems. The created prototype was a web based interface with a drag and drop approach which were familiar to the vast majority of the test users. Almost all of the test users thought the system was intuitive and easy to use, and they could consider using the system frequently.