Introducing Beyond Context
In recent years, the way we build products and services has changed: small teams can build something new that rapidly grows to a global user base. If someone sees value in what you make — and providing they have the skills and access to the Internet — they can sign up to your platform or purchase your product right away. Before you know it, you can have customers anywhere and everywhere, from Tokyo, to Nairobi, to Berlin.
Most of us in the digital industry are now aware that design research helps teams build better and make smarter decisions. Research helps us create better experiences and spot new opportunities for innovation. Increasingly, user researchers work embedded directly in teams rather than contracted from large agencies. And we’ve learnt the value of doing lean research — frequent, constant and modest in scope — instead of commissioning lengthy studies disassociated from the teams who will act on the findings.
Even though we know all this, many teams aren’t regularly studying their complete user base, especially beyond the “home” country where the product or service began its life. Often when we start working on something new, it’s easiest to focus on the users we know most about — the ones closest to home.
As a product grows, there’s an increasing gap in what we know about those “at home” and those “abroad”. It’s often too much hassle to arrange research across multiple time zones, it’s expensive to send researchers so far afield, and it’s hard to find good researchers based in unfamiliar countries. But perhaps the most insidious is a latent assumption that understanding your international users doesn’t matter that much. We tend to assume that frequent research with users at home can stand in for the rest and that anything outside that is an “edge case”. It’s a global village after all, aren’t we all more similar than we are different?
Living away from our home countries but still working with colleagues there, Steph and I found ourselves drawn to connecting the dots between teams and their international users. We can see from our own experiences that getting a deeper understanding of all your users’ needs is critical to developing globally relevant products and services.
It’s about more than just adding new languages to your app — it’s about gaining insight into local contexts in order to understand different mental models, expectations and constraints. Initially, we need to break away from thinking all our users are much the same wherever they are, but then, it’s about recognising similarities, cross-influences, micro-differences vs macro ones. Most of all, we need to stop allowing ourselves to split users into “us”, the ones we know, vs. “them”, the ones who are much harder to reach. To make great products and services that can continue to grow, we have to find ways to adequately shore up what we know about our real users’ needs and contexts.
Looking around for advice on the web, Steph and I couldn’t find much. There’s plenty to read if you’re looking for advice on user research techniques and strategies. Often it’s from the perspective of the type of organisation you’re working for, whether that’s an agency, an enterprise or a start-up. Some people write about their experiences designing for particular types of people, like kids or healthcare professionals. Others focus on designing for the different devices and connected objects we’re using. It feels like there isn’t really anywhere online where we talk specifically about the impact of culture, language and place on our users’ experience of what we’re building.
So we’re having a go at making that, a place to talk about places and their impact on people. To share stories about what it’s like when you get out of your context and sometimes step right out of your depth. We’ll also be using this publication as our space to collect practical tips on the logistics of researching internationally and to talk to other people who work on products with users around the world. We can see ourselves writing about everything from making the most of your travel budget to actually doing something about all this great stuff you’re learning. Lastly, we’re fascinated to explore the use cases and design patterns that are evolving in different countries and cultures. More people are writing about this and we hope to collect some of that insight in one place.
And we’d like to hear from you too — we know you’re out there. If you do or have done research away from home, get in touch and tell us your story.
