Culture and e-culture through a semiotic lens: e-banking localization

Intangible trust perceptions have been shown to form an important part of the User Experience (UX) in relation to various B2C (Business-to-Customer) contexts of use. The extant literature appears somewhat immature in relation to intangible trust and UX models from a “non-Western” perspective. Indeed it appears from our recent e-Banking audit using a novel cross-cultural Expert evaluation instrument that too often “Western” Banks (such as Deutsche Bank) rely on perceptions of “Eastern” cultures viewed through a lens that relies on stereotypical images, signs and Western style templates. We compare two contrasting e-Bank site localization design paradigms: namely that of Deutsche Bank and HSBC with respect to two target audiences: namely China and Taiwan. The findings of the e-Culture audit are aligned to the ubiquitous set of cultural dimensions first defined by Geert Hofstede. This alignment appears to show that the “Western” stereotypical paradigm is not in alignment with either Hofstede's Individualism/Collectivism metric nor with normative semiotic signs that reflect vibrant local urban street cultures. We go on to suggest that the use of card-sorting may speculatively be used to better engender localized sites that are aligned to local target.