Cross-Cultural Design
By Senongo Akpem
Google’s UX Design courses taught me something critically important about both design and myself: That, as an individual, my perspective is limited and influenced by implicit bias.
In these courses, Google stresses the concept of “The Next Billion Users,” which is the understanding that billions of people in this world are not yet internet users, and the prediction that many of them soon will be. For a long list of reasons having to do with a country’s financial wealth, infrastructure, geopolitical circumstances, and so on, many of these next billion users will come from Non-Western countries.
Many designers of our web experiences today - that is, the very people who have been crafting how our digital world functions - come from western societies.
Thus, therein lies the rub. Many of the very people tasked with creating web experiences, good intentions and all, are likely incapabable of properly serving the majority of people on this planet.
Okay, this all sounds very daunting and high-stakes, doesn’t it?
Well, it is. And it’s the topic that Senongo Akpem confronts in his terrific book Cross-Cultural Design. In it, Akpem provides rationale to the harmful assumption that all users come from WEIRD countries (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Developed) and the consequences it has for users from non-WEIRD countries.
Expecting that designs for WEIRD users will naturally serve the needs of non-WEIRD users is problematic because they lack critical components required for diverse audiences. For example, the cultural norms of a non-WEIRD country may differ greatly from those of a WEIRD country, which may have a domino effect on design decisions from color palattes to typography.
Similarly, historical context from non-WEIRD countries will vary widely, which will affect how a a design communicates with users, from the language it uses, to its choice of animations and humor (if any).
More functionally, designers should understand specific demographics are accessing the internet to consume these experiences in the first place. As of 2019, it’s estimated that only 34% have both a home CPU and a tablet, a statistic inseperable from themes of web and wealth. This places an empahsis on mobile-first experiences for billions of users.
Akpem provides practical advice for designers creating web experiences for users unlike them. These include: Acknolwedging and documeting your own bias to begin with; embracing the culture through media, literature, and cultural centers; assessing your CQ (your cultural intelligence) and understanding which CQ archetype you best represent.
One of the most helpful pieces of advice Akpem provides is the concept of Asset-framing over deficit-framing. Asset-framing focuses on the positive aspects of a community over its negative ones. By doing this, a designer will be more likely to serve the needs of diverse communities while combating their own implicit bias based on stereotypes. Put more simply: members of a community are more likely to define themselves by their positive attributes rather than their negative ones, so non-members of that community should do the same.
The concept of asset-framing has been branded to my own memory and education because I failed to do this in my design for Raising Infants, a responsive web app meant to help first-time parents transition into parenthood.
When I began my UX Research for this project, I went in knowing that I wanted to design something for first-time parents, but I wasn’t sure what that design should be. So my research was meant to uncover specific problems I could address in my design.
What the research revealed was that users from lower-income communities, or those who were expecting to be single parents, were primarily concerned about finding support when their baby arrived. This could be financial support, care-taking support, or in the form of necessary goods like diapers, formula, car seats, etc.
I entered the design with good intention; to build an experience that may help users from low-income comunities more easily find the support the sought. But as a designer who does not come from a lower-income community himself, and who has limited experience with single-parent households, my perspective was limited.
So, I approached this design problem with deficit-framing rather than asset-framing. The irony here being that I grew up in a low-income community myself. But even being just decades removed from that environment, I still carried an implicit bias that most likely compromised my design.
Now, how my design may have been compromised in deficit-framing is to be determined. I have not yet conducted a second usability test to determine how it might be lacking. But the results of another usability test matters less to me. What’s most imporant is that I recognize how I fell into the very trap that Akpem warns against in his book. I deficit-framed a community of which I was not apart. This is especially harmful because low-income communities are historically marganizaled. And I need to own this so that I can guard against it in the future.
Akpem’s book has helped me come to terms with this and other themes like it, both as designer and as user. It serves as a considerate reminder that even the best designers, as individuals, are incapable of serving users across diverse cultures. It places an emphasis on acknowledging our own shortcomings as well as the value of assembling diverse design teams.
The book also presents that, while the internet is well-developed as of this writing, it’s still in an awfully early conception. And if the builders and creators of the web can recognize their personal biases as well as their consequences, then we’ll be better equipped to work cross-culturally to design a web that uniquely serves a diverse set of users worldwide.