A Rhetoric-Prototype Methodology to International Web SiteAnalysis


Designing effective e-marketing materials for other cultures is essentially a matter of effective research combined with focused analysis. Marketers and designers need to know what materials to review and how to review them if they wish to develop strategies for creating Web sites that effectively market materials to consumers in different cultures. A combination of the concepts from rhetorical theory and prototype theory can serve as a methodology that facilitates this research and analysis process. The method operates by using rhetorical theory to identify materials for analysis (research) and then employing prototype theory to examine those materials (analysis). Such an approach, moreover, may be used by marketers working for a specific company, or it may be shared with design firms that have been contracted to produce different components of an overall Web site.

Please note that the following explanation focuses on Web-based materials designed for a general cultural audience (e.g., the Americans). A later section of the chapter will explain how this method can be focused to target consumers of specific products (e.g., cars ) and consumers from particular professional classes and regions within a culture. Again, this more focused approach may be used by marketers or shared with design firms working on a project.

Part I: Research (Identifying Materials for Analysis)

The first step of the process involves identifying materials for analysis. At this stage, rhetorical theory is used to focus research activities on four central rhetorical factors embodied in key activities:

Audience

  1. Identify the audience (particular cultural group ) one wishes to target.

    Marketers should not assume marketing visuals that were successful with members of their own culture would work with audiences from other cultures. Marketers should similarly not assume that materials designed for one particular international audience (e.g., Sweden) will work with all of the other cultures within a particular region (e.g., Europe).

Credibility

  1. Restrict research activities to items designed by individuals from the culture to which one wishes to market products.

    Audiences will only pay attention to items they consider credible. Marketers, therefore, need to know an audience's credibility expectations in order to design materials that will be considered credible/worthy of attention by a particular audience. The best and easiest way to learn of an audience's credibility expectations is to examine materials created by a member of that audience for that same audience.

Forum

  1. Determine which culture-specific materials/presentations have met with success, and limit research to those materials.

    Just because an individual is from the same culture as the audience does not mean that the audience will view his or her presentation as acceptable/credible. For this reason, when individuals identify international marketing items for analysis, they need to check the related organization's success with marketing its products to a particular cultural audience. Researchers should then focus their analysis on materials that met with success and discount those that did not. This exclusion becomes a factor of time. When getting a foothold in an international marketplace , time is of the essence. Quality, however, is also necessary, and marketers need to balance the speed with which they can introduce an international marketing campaign with the quality of the marketing materials used. By focusing on previously successful marketing pieces and discounting less successful ones, individuals can reduce the time spent researching while maintaining a standard of quality in their research.

Purpose

  1. Confine the analysis to materials related to the purpose of marketing products to that particular cultural audience. Ideally , one can further limit this selection to online materials designed for marketing purposes.

    Determining what factors contribute to credibility depends on the genre and the medium used to present information. Research on the design of effective marketing Web sites should therefore be restricted to marketing pieces rather than trying to collect a broad range of images from different kinds of materials (genres). Additionally, images that are successful in printed materials might not be as successful in an online forum, for factors such as screen space, monitor resolution, and color schemes can vary greatly between print and online media. For this reason, individuals should try to restrict their research to online marketing materials (provided such materials exist) in order to meet expectations associated with both genre and medium.

As a result of this rhetoric-based selection process, researchers can amass a series of successful marketing designs and images (ideally, online ones) created by the members of a particular culture for audiences in that culture. These sites can then be subjected to a focused visual analysis involving prototype theory. This prototype-based analysis would be used to determine what specific aspects of a site's design (i.e., the characteristics) seem related to a particular culture's credibility expectations.

Part II: Initial Analysis of Visual Elements in Online Displays

A prototype theory analysis involves looking at two different levels of visual design. The first, or the macro, level involves performing a prototype analysis of Web sites identified by the previous rhetorical theory screening process. That is, different cultures will have varying prototypes of what a Web site should look like. These prototypes can then serve as a template for identifying and separating 'identifiable' Web sites from 'good' or 'acceptable' ones. At this macro level, the researcher should look for visual features- or characteristics-that a particular audience associates with the prototype for 'Web site.' In performing such a macro-level analysis, the researcher will look for either the presence or the absence of certain visual features. Such a macro-level analysis could focus on the following characteristics:

  • Menu Bar(s)

  • Buttons

  • Color

  • Hyperlinks

  • Body Text

  • Search Engine

  • Images

  • Characteristics or Aspects that were unexpected (items one did not expect or could not identify)

The presence or absence of these items would be used to establish what factors (characteristics) must be present for an online display to be categorized as an 'identifiable' Web site (vs. a chat room or a Web portal).

This macro-level analysis helps individuals identify the various characteristics particular international users associate with the prototype for 'Web site.' These characteristics can also serve as the foundation for a checklist used to design Web sites for users from a given culture. Thus, the individual would simply need to include all of the characteristics identified on Web sites designed by the French when designing a Web site for French users.

The presence of a particular characteristic (e.g., hyperlinks) can indicate that it reflects a cultural prototype for a Web site. However, the difference between an identifiable Web site and a 'good' or 'acceptable' one is often a matter of the details related to such characteristics. To use the previous example of birds, both penguins and blue jays have wings, but the shape of the feathers on a blue jay's wing makes it a better example of a wing (and the blue jay a better example of a bird) than that of a penguin. It is a case of recognizing smaller prototypes (e.g., 'wing') within larger prototypes (e.g., ' bird'). Such smaller prototypes become the characteristics used to identify larger composite objects/images of prototypes. Thus, the macro-level analysis of international Web sites cannot stop at just 'characteristic present' or 'not present.' Rather, it must also examine how a particular characteristic is depicted within the overall prototype. For this reason, each characteristic of the Web site prototype must be analyzed in terms of its own characteristics or design features.

Such an in-depth analysis would work as follows : Once the macro-level examination is completed and characteristics have been identified, the researcher must return to each individual characteristic and view it from the perspective of a prototype. That is, once one has identified 'menu bar' as a characteristic of a particular cultural prototype for 'Web site,' one must next determine what characteristics make a menu bar both a recognizable and a good/acceptable visual presentation (or prototype) of a menu bar.

Such a micro-level analysis would involve answering question about the following Web site design features:

Micro-Level Prototype: Menu Bar

Characteristic Questions

  • Is a menu bar present on the site?

  • Where is it located on the site (left, right, top, bottom)?

  • Is more than one menu bar used? If so, how many are used? Where are they placed?

  • Does the menu bar contain images, buttons, or just hyper-linked text?

Micro-Level Prototype: Buttons

Characteristic Questions

  • Are buttons used? If so, on the average, how many buttons are used per Web page?

  • Where are the buttons located on the page?

  • What shape are the buttons? What color are they? Do they incorporate any specific designs (e.g., marbling, images, etc.)?

  • Do the buttons contain text, images, or both?

Micro-Level Prototype: Color

Characteristic Questions

  • Is the background of the site colored or plain (white)? If colored, what colors are used?

  • Are colors alone used for the background, or are tiles or images used?

  • Is the site all one color? If not, what different colors are used, and where are they used?

Micro-Level Prototype: Hyperlinks

Characteristic Questions

  • Are hyperlinks used?

  • If so how often (once per sentence or once per paragraph) are hyperlinks used?

  • Where are hyperlinks located on the page (are hyperlinks part of a menu bar, embedded in the text/content of the site, or both)?

  • How much space appears between hyperlinks?

  • How are the hyperlinks designed (e.g., do they display underlining, do they appear in a different color from the body text, do they change color once used-if so, to what color-is the same color used for all hyperlinks)?

Micro-Level Prototype: Body Text

Characteristic Questions

  • How much text (number of paragraphs and number of sentences per paragraph) appears on a single Web page?

  • What size is the text? What font style is used? Does text size or font style change at certain places? Do these changes occur at regular intervals on the same page? Across different pages on the same site?

  • Do the initial letters in a sentence or does the first letter in a new paragraph appear differently from the other letters in a sentence or a paragraph (e.g., larger in size, colored, use of illuminated image)? Is such formatting consistent within a page and across pages on a site?

  • How is the text formatted (e.g., color, bold, italics, underlined )? Does this format seem to occur at regular intervals or places within the same page or across a site?

Micro-Level Prototype: Search Engine

Characteristic Questions

  • Is a search engine included in the site? If so, where on the site is it located (e.g., top, bottom, or middle of page)?

  • Is the search engine accompanied by any text?

  • Is the search engine presented with different colors or imagery than the rest of the site?

Micro-Level Prototype: Images

Characteristic Questions

  • Do any graphics, pictures, or images appear on the site?

  • How many graphics, pictures, or images appear on the site?

  • Where on the site do these graphics, pictures, or images appear?

  • How large (page space) are these images?

  • How clear (resolution) are these images?

  • How colorful are these images?

  • Which appear to be used more, abstract images or realistic ones?

  • Which are used more, actual pictures of items or artistic representations/recreations of items?

  • Do humans appear in any images? If so, how are they depicted (e.g., gender, dress, race, activity)?

  • Are logos and brands used? If so, how often, and where do they appear on a page? Do any of these logos or brands appear to be relatively universal (e.g., the Nike 'swoosh')?

Micro-Level Prototype: Characteristics or Aspects that were Unexpected

Characteristic Questions

  • Did the site present any kind of visual items you did not expect or could not identify? If so, where did these items occur? What function did these items appear to perform (e.g., hyperlink, menu item, graphic, etc.)?

Again, the information amassed through this micro-level analysis would then be put in the form of a design features checklist one would use when creating sites for persons from that same culture. The purpose of such a checklist would be to address all of the characteristics a particular group associates with the prototype for 'credible/acceptable/good Web site.' Such a checklist might look like the following:

Hyperlinks

Menu Bar

Images

q Underlined

q Buttons (Rectangular with Text)

q Limit to four or fewer

q Blue

q Use three or fewer

q Locate in page's top right corner

 

q Only one menu bar

q Abstraction (no realistic images)

 

q Position on left side of page

q Use pastel colors

In this way, the combined macro- and micro-level analyses produce an extensive checklist individuals can use as a guide for designing sites for particular cultural audiences.

Part III: Confirming Prototype Characteristics

A checklist based upon the analysis of a single Web site could be quite problematic . That is, how does one know that the Web site he or she analyzed was a 'good' prototype for a Web site according to the expectations of the related culture? For this reason, a second round of prototype-based analysis must take place. Whereas the first round of analysis identified characteristics, this second analysis involves testing or confirming those findings/characteristics to see how accurate and important they are.

At this point in the process, the researcher would review the other successful marketing Web sites identified in the rhetorical theory part of this mechanism. He or she would go to each of these sites and would check to see if all of the macro-level characteristics in his or her checklist (e.g., Hyperlinks, Menu Bars, etc.) are present on that site. If so, the researcher would note such confirmation and would have stronger evidence that the macro-level characteristics he or she identified do relate to a particular cultural prototype for a 'good Web site.' If not, then he or she would need first to note any 'extra' or 'missing' characteristics. Then, the individual would need to pay particular attention when reviewing the other Web sites to see if such 'extras' or 'omissions' occur there as well. The notion is that the more often such design features appear in credible Web sites, the greater the chances that they are characteristics related to the prototype of 'credible Web site' and should thus be used in designing Web sites for individuals from the related culture.

In performing such an analysis, the researcher should also make sure to perform similar types of characteristic comparisons at the micro level. Say, for example, the initial site one analyzes has a left menu bar. If the second Web site one analyzes has a left menu bar, is that menu bar configured or designed in a similar way? If so, the researcher has increased confirmation of a characteristic related to a 'good' Web site prototype. If not, further analysis must be done to determine if that particular design factor is or is not related to a 'good' prototype. By repeating this macro- and micro-level analysis on multiple sites, individuals can modify the checklist they designed. The more sites one analyses, the stronger the confirmation of macro- and micro-level characteristics associated with 'good' Web site design. Through such a 'review and revise ' process, one can develop a more effective checklist.

In some cases, this prototype-based analysis should also be applied to individual images within Web sites. If one notes that a particular image or kind of image (e.g., a picture of a woman ) appears in the initial Web site, one should make note of it and remember to check if similar images appear in other sites analyzed. One should also note the characteristics/ design features used to present that image in all sites analyzed. The idea is to determine if certain kinds of images are related to overall Web site credibility, and if so, what characteristics are related to 'acceptable' renderings of such images. If a particular kind of image does seem to be a characteristic of the cultural prototype for a credible Web site, then one must use the same two-part analysis process to establish and modify a design checklist for such images. (Such an approach can also be employed if one wishes to use a particular kind of image with a certain cultural audience. In this case, a two-part prototype analysis that focuses on the specific kind of image can lead to a checklist for creating an acceptable version of that image for individuals from a particular culture.)




Contemporary Research in E-marketing (Vol. 1)
Agility and Discipline Made Easy: Practices from OpenUP and RUP
ISBN: B004V9MS42
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 164

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net