Cross-Cultural Design

By Senongo Akpem

The modern web is inherently global-and if we want to design successfully for it, we must be ready to meet the needs, perspectives, and expectations of multifaceted, multicultural audiences.

With utmost timeliness, Senongo Akpem shares a clear and accessible methodology for designing across cultures: from performing socially co

• Language: English
• Publisher: A Book Apart
• Release date: Feb 25, 2020
• ISBN: 9781962491082

Senongo Akpem

Senongo Akpem is a designer, illustrator, and the founder of Pixel Fable, a collection of interactive Afrofuturist stories. For the past fifteen years, he has specialized in collaborating with clients across the world on flexible, impactful digital experiences. He is currently the VP of Creative at Nava. Previously, he was Design Director at Constructive, a social impact design agency, and an art director at Cambridge University Press, where he led a global design team.The child of a Nigerian father and a Dutch-American mother, Senongo grew up in Nigeria, lived in Japan for almost a decade, and now calls New York City home. Living in constantly shifting cultural and physical spaces has given him unique insight into the influence of culture on communication and creativity. Senongo speaks at conferences around the world about cross-cultural design, digital storytelling, and transmedia. He loves any and all science fiction.

Book preview

Foreword

Design is meant to solve problems.

But, time and again, I have taken my money and attention elsewhere after witnessing a brand awkwardly attempt to be relevant on social media, or after experiencing an ignorant in-product gaffe. Without sensitivity and cultural awareness, even the simplest design choice can create experiential dissonance for product users.

Unfortunately, some of the biggest mistakes occur during the process of scaling design solutions from local to global. Mental models, interface functionality, tone of voice, even symbolism can change depending on cultural context—often within the same country. Imagine the diversity of expectations across the world!

That diversity is a given in our ever-evolving, global community. As smartphones continue to reach new markets, the impact of software—with both positive and negative outcomes—will likewise continue to grow. Technology increases productivity, of course, but it can also give people from wildly differing places and backgrounds the opportunity to better understand each other.

We as designers must embrace this opportunity, and that means incorporating more perspectives as often as possible. Cross-Cultural Design does just that—not merely as a call for increased diversity, but as a toolkit of methodologies to help us adapt to the obvious new normal.

Senongo's words have changed the way I ideate and implement solutions for millions of global users at large-scale companies. Cross-Cultural Design will do the same for you by empowering you to bring your work to more folks across the globe, make your product more usable in cultures beyond your own, and transform you into a more thoughtful, skillful practitioner.

—Catt Small

Introduction

The web is rapidly globalizing

. More devices and more access points mean more people—billions, in fact—are coming online, bringing all the behaviors, expressions, and expectations inherent to their cultures.

This huge multicultural audience represents an opportunity for those of us who work on the web. It’s an opportunity to ask questions of them, to observe their lived social experiences, and to choose more effective solutions that fulfill their needs. It’s also an opportunity to critically analyze the impact of culture in interactive design, a process that makes our work stronger and more accessible in the global marketplace.

One of the biggest mistakes I see in design today is the assumption that users all come from WEIRD (Westernized, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed) cultures. That assumption often flows unquestioned through our entire design process. Our high-quality monitors and fast data connections do not always mimic the experiences of our users. We use imagery, typography, and taxonomies familiar to us, without researching their impact in other cultures and languages. Those of us in WEIRD countries treat the web as an extension of our own lived experiences.

If you are reading this book, then you are interested in changing your assumptions about how interfaces and websites act across cultures. This book sets out a framework for navigating and designing the highly diverse web, in a way that breeds respect and curiosity.

You won’t find an examination of diversity as a business catchphrase in these pages. You most certainly will not learn empathy, or basic respect for other humans. You will, however, encounter challenges to design practices that you consider second nature, asking you to rethink, at a deep social level, how your choices impact your multicultural audiences.

Those choices will come in a variety of situations, and what is considered cross-cultural may be more common than you think! You might be working on a digital project with an existing global customer base. Perhaps you’ve already started, and after talking to the client, you realized the project will require more cultural sensitivity than you bargained for. Maybe you are a content strategist or user experience designer, and you are about to begin conducting research with a wide range of users from different cultures. Maybe you have been asked to perform an interface audit on a website for US-based dentists—of whom about twenty-four percent are immigrants, and four percent are not citizens (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/00-01/).

Or maybe—and this is the one I hope for most—you just want to deepen your skill set. Whether your work is in research, content strategy, interface design, or interactive experiences, your projects already reach a multicultural audience. Whatever your motivation, this book will help you address that audience with clarity and purpose.

In Chapter 1, we’ll start by defining our modern digital audiences and their experiences on the web. Then we’ll look at their needs and preferences through the theory of cultural dimensions.

Chapter 2 focuses on the core principles of cross-cultural design, offering a framework for working on culturally adaptable products and experiences. We’ll look at how to contextualize the challenges you face as you design across cultures.

In Chapter 3, we’ll explore the role of the cross-cultural practitioner. We’ll define the skills, actions, and ways of thinking that will make your projects and teams more successful as you take on this work.

In Chapter 4, we will look at techniques for conducting user experience research with global audiences—and how that research can help us create effective user personas that reduce unconscious biases.

Chapter 5 demonstrates how the core parts of design systems can become more culturally responsive and multifaceted, and offers practical steps for creating culturally effective designartifacts.

In Chapter 6, we address internationalization and localization—the processes of adapting your content, design strategy, and interfaces to accommodate additional languages, nationalities, and cultures.

Throughout, I use stories to examine interesting truths and quirks of culture as we examine those key concepts. Plan to read and analyze them critically. Treat these chapters as a manual, one that analyzes different parts of the cross-cultural design process and explains key ideas, concepts, and techniques you will need to tell your own stories.

By the time you reach the end, I want you to feel empowered to approach cross-cultural design projects in a new way. Even if it’s out of your comfort zone, I hope you gain a new perspective on what it means to be a designer in a globalized world and your role in making the web a richer experience for us all, regardless of language, culture, or identity.

In 2016, I began

working on a site redesign with the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), an organization that helps craft climate-change regulations in the EU, China, India, and North America. They approached our agency with a few key project goals; one was to make their global reach easier to understand, so we created a Where We Work page to display all their key regional actions on a map (Fig 1.1).

Website showing a list of countries and a map with China highlighted.

Fig 1.1:

The Where We Work page of the Regulatory Assistance Project website highlights the areas where the organization works on the map (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/01-01/).

I found a northern-hemisphere map on Wikipedia and edited the SVG so it would spin to display different countries when their name was selected in the sidebar. I thought it was a really cool idea, and the client was on board too. Win-win.

But just before launch, we got a stern email from the client telling us the maps were wrong. Wrong? How can they be wrong? I thought. Wikipedia is always right! But in my rush to get the vector file ready for development, I neglected to note that the map:

didn’t include any countries formed after 2011, like South Sudan, and

didn’t identify disputed territories, like Kashmir, the Golan Heights, or Crimea.

In fact, there are many parts of the world that don’t fit into nice neat lines, including the borders of China, India, and Pakistan—right where RAP does a huge amount of work. Oops. We quickly made the corrections (Fig 1.2).

Displaying only one view of those disputes meant that we were not participating in the dynamic, socially enacted process of culture—what Huatong Sun, an associate professor of digital media and global design at the University of Washington Tacoma, called emergent, becoming, practiced, temporal, and thus contested (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/01-02/). Human societies are always in flux: we endlessly remake our identities, our languages, and our methods of communication. We constantly negotiate our interactions, intentions, and meaning through language, technology, art, and the environment—and the web is part and parcel of all that.

Cross-cultural design is a complex topic. Cultural misunderstandings can lead to discomfort, embarrassment, and offense, hurting users and ruining brands. We don’t want to make choices that fail with a multicultural audience, so we often avoid thinking about it.

Map of Asia showing India and China with the Aksai Chin region between them highlighted.

Fig 1.2:

We updated the maps to show disputed regions in each country. For example, both India and China claim a region in the Himalayas, which can be seen when both countries are highlighted.

But every project is an opportunity to design for and with people from every niche, and to build loyal users who keep coming back to your content. A design methodology that is culturally responsive and attuned to what global audiences need and want is one that will win in the long term. Later on, we will look at facets of culture and how they can inform design decisions, but first, let’s start by defining modern digital audiences and their cultural experiences online.

Modern Global Audiences

Who makes up the web these days? What do they look for in the digital things they use? What role does the web play in their lives, especially when they span languages, time zones, and political systems? If we can answer these questions, we can see the web as a set of widely differing life experiences, a mix of cultures and technologies, instead of the monolithic user we so often default to.

Devices for all

A great place to start understanding those varied experiences is by looking at mobile phones, a common way people access the internet. The Pew Research Center (http://bkaprt.com/ccd/01-03/) conducted an extensive survey of device usage patterns in eleven countries and found the following:

Phone ownership. Majorities in every country surveyed own their own mobile phone. Overall, about seven percent of adults share their phone, though that ranges from one percent of adults in Vietnam to seventeen percent of adults in Venezuela.

Smartphone usage. In the surveyed countries, younger people use smartphones at a much higher rate than those older than fifty, except in Lebanon and Jordan.

Dual device usage. Having a home computer and a tablet is uncommon for most internet users. Only thirty-four percent of those surveyed have access to either of these. In Jordan, half of smartphone owners report having no home computer or tablet; in Venezuela, only eighteen percent said the same.

This data on phone usage and ownership begins to show just how important it is to be connected for people in cultures across the globe. Mobile devices give people access to news and information, to each other, and to the world at large.

Access for all

The number of global internet users creeps upward every