Our UX research team was working on a new Information Architecture for a restaurant mobile app. I was planning to conduct a card sorting workshop, a common UX research method where users are asked to organize topics into categories that make sense to them.
The thing is, I’m currently located in Istanbul and can conduct a physical workshop only with people who also live here. But the restaurant app concerned was for restaurants in Germany. Could you possibly conduct a card sorting workshop with Turkish people for a German app? Probably not, but I wanted to know more about it. So, together with my team, I decided to dig deeper into some cross-cultural research.
At first, I analyzed several popular brand websites from different countries. In fact, every company website I looked into had a different online presence in different countries. Not just in terms of text and translation, but also in terms of visual elements, typography, color palettes and layouts.
Secondly, I researched the literature and discovered that there have been published quite some studies on the importance of cultural differences in UX/UI design. In this blog article, I describe the key takeaways from my literature analysis.
In general, consumer behavior across different countries and cultures is believed to become even more heterogeneous. (De Mooij, & Hofstede, 2002) The same is true when it comes to the design of digital interfaces and there are some characteristics that require particular attention regarding cultural context. (Cyr & Trevor-Smith, 2004)
Are you wondering which of these design characteristics are UX design and which are UI design? And what’s the difference anyway? Read our article about the difference between UX and UI design (in German).
Each of these factors might have a significant impact on creating user-centric services and products. Who people are and what’s important to them makes a difference in how they perceive information architectures, access information and get motivated to interact with a user interface. It also makes a difference in how we as designers can create value and trust for users with different cultural backgrounds.
After doing this research, I’m now more sure than ever that you cannot do a card sorting workshop with Turkish people for a German mobile app. There is just too much that users could perceive differently. Especially in today’s world full of choices, visual appeal and how information is organized is way too important to ignore cultural differences.
And the card sorting workshop? In the end, I did it online – with German users, of course.
Would you like to know more about UX research and UX design? Drop us a message!
Comments 0