Culture Centered UX Design
“design thinking draws upon logic, imagination, intuition, and systemic reasoning, to explore possibilities of what could be, and to create desired outcomes that benefit the end user (the customer). A design mindset is not problem-focused, it’s solution focused, and action oriented. It involves both analysis and imagination. When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation the success rate for innovation dramatically improves.” -Linda Naiman
Although internet is making us to live borderless, we can’t deny the difference between cultures and history in each country and nation. As a matter of fact, the popularity of cross cultural product design -that’s the result of user centric design- is threatening cultures. Instagram and Twitter are two of great examples. If we can’t see a flag in someone’s biography, and they write and speak in English, it’s too hard to guess where they live or where they come from. The main question is: Is this really important?
What is user centered design and why it’s so effective?
“User-centered design (UCD) is an iterative design process in which designers focus on the users and their needs in each phase of the design process. In UCD, design teams involve users throughout the design process via a variety of research and design techniques, to create highly usable and accessible products for them.” -IDF
We don’t use smartphones and digital products just for fun anymore. They are helping us to live more efficient and save us a lot of time. So accessibility is the first and foremost key to design products. Satisfying user needs and ability to use products effortlessly is changed the way how we design products, But, when we design cross-cultural products, like any social media, do we reconsider differences between people in nations?
Benefits of cross cultural design
- Saving lots of money
- Less time consumption.
- Easier UX research.
- Convenient developement
- And a lot more.
Now let’s talk about culture.
What is culture?
“Culture encompasses religion, food, what we wear, how we wear it, our language, marriage, music, what we believe is right or wrong, how we sit at the table, how we greet visitors, how we behave with loved ones, and a million other things” -Cristina De Rossi
One thing we can learn from this definition is indigenous people do things in different ways, cloth we wear, the way we pronounce words, our believes and much more is based on our culture.
In digital products, we use and understand them differently, but in our design process we don’t consider this fact, we are more focused on the ‘user’ concept and needs. This is the reason why I thing we should try to use culture centered design more.
Culture centered design
“Culture Centred Design (CCD) is an approach that ensures designed outcomes are led, framed and informed by indigenous people, knowledge and ways of being.” IDIA
This approach helps us to focus on the culture, as a part of user. In this way our design process is more based on indigenous people and different nations. Limitations of culture centered design:
- Conflictions between cultures.
- Time consumption in user research is huge.
- Development will take lots of time right now.
The conclusion
Although culture is a big part of human societies and users, limitation of time and our resources made the culture centered design challenging and we can’t use that in every product, but that’s something we should keep in our mind.
