Clearly Cultural

[Slide Deck] Making Sense of Cross-Cultural Design for the US and East Asian Websites/Apps

Photo by Juliana Kozoski on Unsplash

Working as a designer in one of the largest tech companies in China, you’ll often find me say,
“Oh, western users are different.”
“In US they prefer clean and simple UI.”

But, let’s pause for a moment and ask ourselves, “What do we actually mean by these claims?”.

One of the major reasons why products fail is due to our misunderstandings of the end users’ culture and behavior. Being in China, and designing for users who live primarily outside of China is a challenging task. To overcome this, we as designers must acknowledge the nuances of cultural differences, users’ mental models, and their environment.

In this 1-hour semi-workshop style presentation we’ll discuss and rationalize how culture impacts the web/mobile designs for the US and East Asian websites/apps. Some findings are correlations and do not mean causality.

I won’t add a lot of information, however, if you need more insights on any of the slides, just comment & ask.

Also on Slideshare: https://www.slideshare.net/pratyushpandab1/culture-and-design

1. We as designers already know that Culture affects Design. But to what extent? And, how does culture affect design? We do not have any systematic understanding of this domain. Hence, today, we’ll embark on this journey to discover and make sense of the role culture plays in design.

2. But first, let’s play a game — Spot the Difference!

3. Take a few minutes and write down as many (design) differences you can find from the screens on the left vs the ones on the right. e.g. Colorfulness, Information Density, etc.

4. As designers, we already know about design! So let’s understand the meaning of ‘Culture’.

5. What is culture?

6. Now you have the basic understanding of both Culture and Design.