Digitisation and the increased internationalization of communication, education and research require digital platforms where researchers can meet online to exchange knowledge. Digital platform designers need to consider the culturally diverse needs and preferences of the individuals and groups of users who access the information, services and products. The research objective is to investigate the differences and similarities between the digital collaboration platform preferences of novice researchers (students) from two countries, one in the Global North (Sweden) and one in the Global South (South Africa). The research design involved a systematic literature review (SLR), a survey and presentations on users’ experience of the website. From the SLR analysis, content and usability criteria for evaluating a digital research collaboration platform were extracted and evaluated independently by four researchers to select the relevant literature-based criteria (LBC) . Two groups of second year Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) students (one in Sweden and one in South Africa) were presented with a digital platform for research collaboration among researchers in South Africa and requested to complete a questionnaire (based on the LBC criteria) to indicate the importance of the content and functionality features on a research collaboration website. In this paper, we report on the data captured through the survey and the student presentations. Our findings indicate significant differences between the digital research collaboration platform preferences of students in Sweden compared to students in South Africa and provide some insights into what those could be. Besides the refined guidelines, the research collaboration also produced North-South knowledge exchange in Human-Computer Interaction design.