Over the years, I’ve traveled through 30 countries and lived in eight. I speak three languages and have designed in five countries. My myriad of experiences include:
How to Design a Multicultural User Experience
1. Acknowledge Your Biases
Cultural exchanges are rewarding on an interpersonal level. But everyone comes with their own biases when designing, particularly at an international level. Your bias comes from environmental upbringings, cultural behaviors, thoughts, and previous experiences . Recognize it.
2. Become a Blank Slate
“I am the wisest man alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing.” – Plato
3. Identify Patterns
While every culture is different, there is a lot they have in common. Patterns exists everywhere. Observe how others communicate, value, interpret, and receive information. Identify the patterns and use them to design for a culture.
Common Patterns
Minimalism and whitespace is valued in western cultures like Sweden and the US where information in its desirable form needs to be easily readable and processed. Eastern cultures like Japan value finding information promptly, resulting in websites that by western cultures are considered dense and unappealing. Interestingly, what’s appealing to the west is rather inefficient to the east. David, a Japan based software engineer, explains the linguistic, cultural and technical factors influencing Japanese website trends.
4. Speculate
Now that there are some common and differing patterns that have been identified across cultures, it’s important to observe websites, break them down and ask questions. Even the location and the visibility of something so minute, yet important like a search button might differ across cultures, but follow trends within similar cultures.
5. Remember Design Ethics
It’s not uncommon to see Blackletter typefaces used in the US in newspaper journals or beer bottles . But Blackletter typefaces were heavily used in Nazi Germany, became strongly associated with Nazism and today are associated with Neo-Nazism. I vividly recall my typography teacher in Austria saying, it’d be rare to see them there today; it’s believed these typefaces now carry an unshakeable meaning, much like the swastika, that does not belong in the future and should stay in the past.
6. Communicate Creatively
You don’t always have to use words to communicate and sometimes you simply won’t be able to. If you can not use words to communicate something, use gestures, visuals etc to bridge the gap between languages with your users or colleagues. You might even try communicating in two languages at a time if you understand a language, but can’t easily speak it. This was a common practice I resorted to working with German and Turkish speaking colleagues and Swedish speaking users, all who understood English.