Developers use a variety of methods to evaluate user’s reactions to the website. Research in neuroscience and natural vision processing resulted in the development of automated methods which simulate human attention and are able to provide similar results to eye-tracking. However robust evidence is still missing.
This study contributes and expands on this debate. Eye-tracking studies on cultural differences confirmed that users from different cultures have different expectations and preferences. This study answers the question whether cultural differences in web design could be revealed also by automated attention analysis. Websites of the largest beer producers from different countries with different cultural background were analyzed through automated attention analysis tool to determine whether there is a difference in the number of potential areas of interest and their size. The study confirms that automated tools can depict cultural differences and thus provide fast and inexpensive results for initial assessment of website interfaces.