ABSTRACT
Our findings show there is a strong influence of globalization on the cultural markers, mainly through the use of common software platforms. In spite of that, we found still many important culture-specific differences in both groups that are related to: spatial organization of information (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006), shapes, direction of reading, motion, color, color combinations, semantic organization of content, use of icons and metaphors, user's preferences for different types of media, preference for culture-specific content and for cartoon imagery, trustworthiness of the content, navigation tools, and visible and interaction grammar of menus and commands. Almost half (22) of our hypotheses were fully supported by the results from individual questions, 17 were partly supported (e.g., the result came second with a small difference in percentage after the first answer), 14 hypotheses were not supported, although useful information could be extracted, and 2 hypotheses were impossible to verify due to lack of data. In the following subsections, we provide a summary of the hypotheses that were supported by the data, those that were not, as well as other interesting insights and comments. The summary is divided by the main themes of our research.
