Cross-cultural experiences can provide a wealth of benefits, especially when it comes to designing and creating web experiences for diverse audiences. When designers limit themselves to a WEIRD perspective (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic), they risk overlooking important cultural nuances and inadvertently excluding large portions of their audience. By expanding their understanding of different cultures and worldviews, designers can create more inclusive web experiences that resonate with users from all backgrounds. This not only increases engagement and satisfaction among users but also opens up new markets and opportunities for businesses. The guide below provides valuable insights and guidance for designers looking to create web experiences that serve highly diverse, global, multi-cultural audiences.

TLDR

The article is divided into two main parts, with the first part focusing on research considerations for creating culturally relevant web experiences. The second part of the article delves into experience design considerations.

If you are looking for a TL;DR version, here it is:

Part 1: Research Considerations

Culturally relevant experiences start with culturally relevant research. Consider the following when designing for global or multi-cultural audiences.

1. Explore common cultural differences: digital usage, digital preferences, mindsets, and behaviors: To create culturally relevant web experiences, it’s important to understand the digital habits and behaviors of the target audience. This may include researching their preferred devices and platforms, browsing and purchasing behaviors, and attitudes towards technology. By understanding these differences, designers can create web experiences that align with the cultural norms and preferences of the target audience.
2. Tap into low-cost research sources: Conducting research can be expensive, but there are many low-cost research sources that can provide valuable insights into the target audience. These may include online surveys, social media monitoring, and web analytics. By tapping into these sources, designers can gather data and insights that inform their design decisions.
3. Recruit local experts: Local experts can provide invaluable insights into the cultural nuances and preferences of the target audience. These may include cultural consultants, translators, and local marketing teams. By working with local experts, designers can ensure that their web experiences are culturally sensitive and relevant to the target audience.
4. Get creative with your research techniques: Traditional research methods may not always be effective for understanding the cultural nuances of the target audience. Designers can get creative with their research techniques by using methods such as ethnographic research, cultural probes, and contextual inquiry. These methods can provide deeper insights into the target audience’s cultural norms, beliefs, and behaviors, which can inform more effective web design decisions.
5. Adjust Customer Personas: Customer personas are fictional representations of the target audience and are used to guide web design decisions. When designing for multi-cultural audiences, it’s important to adjust customer personas to reflect the cultural differences and preferences of the target audience. This may include factors such as age, gender, education level, income, and cultural background. By adjusting customer personas, designers can create web experiences that are more relevant and resonant with the target audience.
6. Challenge Personal Bias: Personal bias can unknowingly influence web design decisions, leading to experiences that are unintentionally exclusionary or insensitive. To create culturally relevant web experiences, designers must challenge their own personal biases and assumptions by conducting research, seeking out diverse perspectives, and being open to feedback. By challenging personal bias, designers can create web experiences that are more inclusive, respectful, and effective for the target audience.

Part 2: Experience Design Considerations

Cross-cultural insights may translate into adjustments to content, branding, and design strategy in your digital experience. Here are common experience design decisions that may need to be addressed on your websites and mobile applications.

1. Color: Different cultures may associate different meanings with colors, so it’s important to choose colors that are culturally appropriate and meaningful. For example, red may be associated with luck and prosperity in China, but it may be associated with danger or warning in other cultures.
2. Typography: Typography can also vary across cultures, so it’s important to choose fonts that are legible and appropriate for the target audience. For example, some cultures may prefer more ornate or decorative fonts, while others may prefer more simple and straightforward typography.
3. Images, Illustrations, and Icons: When choosing images, illustrations, and icons for a multi-cultural website, it’s important to consider whether they are culturally appropriate and sensitive. Certain images or symbols may have different meanings or connotations across different cultures, so it’s important to do research and choose visuals that are inclusive and respectful.
4. Translations: Accurate translations are crucial for creating a successful multi-cultural website. It’s important to work with professional translators who are fluent in the target language and have a deep understanding of the cultural nuances and idioms that may be unique to the culture.
5. Localization: Localization involves adapting the website to the specific culture and language of the target audience. This may include changes to the website’s layout, design, and content to better align with the cultural norms and preferences of the audience. It’s important to work with local experts and conduct research to ensure that the website is culturally appropriate and relevant.

Part 1: Research Considerations

Culturally relevant experiences start with culturally relevant research. Consider the following when designing for global or multi-cultural audiences.

1: Explore common cultural differences

Each culture is unique in terms of their mindsets, behaviors, and their access to and usage of digital technologies. Take this into consideration when designing for them.

The Digital Usage

Not everyone has access to modern technologies, is connected to the internet, and owns a smartphone. Across and within geographies there are sharp differences, commonly referred to as the “Digital Divide”. Explore digital usage in your target culture and use this information to determine how you might best reach your audience.

Digital Preferences

Cultures and regions may differ in how they use the internet for communication, research, social, shopping, and financial transactions.

Mindsets & Behaviors

Although targets across regions or cultures may share common characteristics, they may differ drastically in terms of their mindset, personal identity, self-perception, behavior, and social relationships.

Areas to explore when learning about cultural differences include:

• Identity classifications

  Common identity classifications include: race, ethnicity, gender, social class, age, religion, individual identity, algorithmic identity. A business woman in the western world might have a different perception of herself than a business woman in some other regions where gender inequality is more pronounced. And to make this even more complex, there are intersectionalities across all of these categories.

• Historical & political dynamics

  Many countries have systems of oppression and discrimination that can impact mindsets, behaviors, and social relationships.

• Hofstede’s cultural dimensions:

  ****In the 1970s, IBM psychologist, Hofstede, collected and analyzed data from more than 100,000 individuals across 50 countries in the early seventies. Using this data, he identified the following cultural dimensions that could be used to highlight variances across cultures:

  • Power Distance – How much inequality should there be among us?
  • Individualism versus Collectivism – How dependent are we on our extended family?
  • Femininity versus Masculinity – How should a man or a woman feel and behave?
  • Uncertainty Avoidance – How afraid are we of unknown people and ideas?
  • Long- versus Short-term Orientation – Do we focus on the future, present, or the past?
  • Indulgence versus Restraint – May we have fun or is life a serious matter?

2: Tap into low-cost research sources

Direct observation is the quickest way to arm yourself with information about your target audience. But travel can be expensive, time-consuming, and impossible with COVID restrictions. Here are low cost tactics to get solid cultural insights:

• Read literature and poetry from your target culture. Old and new.
• Check local colleges for lectures, performances and events.
• Consume media. Newspapers, radio stations, podcasts, movies, TV.
• Visit cultural centers within your own city if available.
• Visit ethnic neighborhoods where target culture lives.

3: Recruit local experts

Use strategists, designers, and researchers that are a part of your target culture or region. This may make the job of managing your team a little more challenging, but it is well worth additional effort.

Why recruit local experts

1. They have on-the-ground, lived experience in the culture that you are targeting, which allows them to offer insights that you may have never uncovered. Their perspectives can also challenge the team to think more broadly.
2. Using local researchers to facilitate usability studies and tests will increase the effectiveness of those tests. This is because local facilitators have a similar cultural mindset, participants are more comfortable, vocalize concerns more honestly and more readily, and have more natural interactions and conversations. In markets where participants use lots of slang this is especially true.
3. Local experts are often a part of a larger creative community. By tapping into them, you have access to a culturally-relevant set of professionals that might be available to work on your project.

Ideas for finding local experts

• Look for culture-specific design publications on sites like ResearchGate.
• Sign up for regionally focused newsletters about creative and technology-related news.
• Search for relevant designers on portfolio sites like Behance.
• Start your search by asking stakeholders for the names of 2-3 experts (or someone that might know experts) and an introduction.
• Use LinkedIn to find researchers.
• Tap in the local creative community (as described above).

4: Get creative with your research techniques

When working with cultures, differences in language, mindsets, and approaches can create barriers and cause the traditional research process to fall apart. Get creative with your research efforts. Consider the following techniques shared in the book Cross-Cultural Design:

Cultural probes

Ask research participants to complete activities which will provide you with insight into their culture. Provide them with a kit and let them complete the exercises independently. The instructions might ask them to do things like fill out a diary or draw pictures or share photographs.

Bollywood technique

Provide participants with a story prompt. Ask them to use their imagination to fill in the details. This gives them permission to think outside their usual norms.

Walking Havana method

Ask participants with help for creating a movie or some other creative work. Have them walk you through their environments, pointing out potential locations or even scouting folks for the movie. Participants put together their own scripts or creative works. This provides rich insight into the culture itself.

Possession personas

Possessions can be a manifestation of a persons identity. Ask participants about their possessions, especially related to the project topic. Ask about any adaptations they have made and why. Ask how they define the person.

5: Adjust Customer Personas

Customer personas are fictional representations of the target audience and are used to guide web design decisions. By adjusting customer personas, designers can create web experiences that are more relevant and resonant with the target audience.

When designing for multi-cultural audiences, it’s important to adjust customer personas to reflect the cultural differences and preferences of the target audience. This may include factors such as age, gender, education level, income, and cultural background. Names, images, and information should reflect the diversity of the customers you serve.

6: Challenge Personal Bias

We all process information in real-time, creating instant, gut-level ideas about targets. Personal bias can unknowingly influence web design decisions, leading to experiences that are unintentionally exclusionary or insensitive.

To create culturally relevant web experiences, designers must challenge their own personal biases and assumptions by conducting research, seeking out diverse perspectives, and being open to feedback. By challenging personal bias, designers can create web experiences that are more inclusive, respectful, and effective for the target audience.

Key takeaway(s):

• Don’t be WEIRD (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic). Ask Yourself. Am I being WEIRD?
• Constantly challenge your assumptions.
• Encourage others to do so also.

Part 2: Experience Design Considerations

Cross-cultural insights may translate into adjustments to content, branding, and design strategy in your digital experience. Here are common experience design decisions that may need to be addressed on your websites and mobile applications.

1: Colors

Study how color psychology and preferences differ across target cultures or regions to avoid negative associations and promote positive connections.

2: Typography & Formatting

Designs may look different due to text expansion factors, visual density factors, and web font availability. Select typography with all cultures and regions in mind. Consider how typography and formatting may need to be adjusted for each situation.

Stereotypography

Fonts can sometimes perpetuate inaccurate and troublesome stereotypes. For instance, using tribal looking fonts for African-African American focused marketing or fonts like Madarin Regular to represent the Asian culture can alienate the very people that you want to attract.

Webfonts

Google Fonts are a great way to add style without compromising website speed, SEO and accessibility, but they have a downside. They are blocked in mainland China. Understand what content blocks exist in the countries that you are designing for and have a fallback font. You may also consider using special region-specific webfonts.

Multiple script systems

Different types of scripts have different shapes, weights, and contrast implications. Spend time upfront considering multiple script types in your designs. Minor tweaks to attributes like line height, font-size, and letter spacing can often avoid visual weirdness down the line.

Visual density

CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) alphabets have more complex characters and shapes than Latin (English, French, Italian, etc.) letter forms. Because of this, they have a higher visual density. You may need to do some extra work to make sure that the fonts are slightly larger and the line heights have more space or breathing room.

Text expansion factors

Text expansion or language swell can and will happen. Some languages require more characters and longer text strings than others. Account for this extra text in designs. Pay special attention to microcopy, calls to action, and menus, which are more prone to failure in the face of expanded text. To estimate swell in different languages, use an expansion-factor table, like the one provided by Salesforce. [1]

Formatting

For each region or language, ask if the following needs to be adjusted:

• Names – Name order, Name Letters and Length
• Locales – Postal codes, Formatting addresses, State / region/ provinces
• Dates – Swap days and months
• Currency – Inauspicious numbers, Currency presentation, Multi-currency / Exchange rates, Tax / Value-Added Tax (VAT)

Directionality

Consider how text directionality might require you to make adjustments to your design. When a user’s reading from left to right (LTR) rather than right to left (RTL), you may want to adjust the placement of images and scannable elements.

3: Images, Illustrations, and Icons

Within a singular culture, icons, images, and illustrations can be challenging to select because people interpret what they mean using their own personal filter and cultural lens. Conduct research to uncover issues and use globally accepted icons to avoid confusion.

Select universally understood icons

Icons have become highly commoditized and it is common for teams to use pre-designed icon kits. The challenge is that those kits don’t always consider cross-cultural needs. To avoid this: (1) Use good ethnographic research to identify and eliminate icons that are culturally confusing or dangerous. (2) consider leveraging the icons published by the United Nations’s Noun Project. It includes 295 humanitarian icons that have become a globally accepted design language for a wide-variety of humanitarian concepts.

Avoid stock photos

Target cultures prefer to see images that reflect their identity and cultural norms. Where possible, avoid western-focused stock photography. Stock photos are difficult to get right normally, but accounting for cultural diversity makes it even more challenging. Most stock photos have WEIRD people in WEIRD situations (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic). It’s best to get your own pictures, but if you have to use stock photos, try a library like Tonl. [5]

Notice cultural markers

Cultural dimensions (like individualism vs. collectivism or uncertainty avoidance) should inform which images might work best. Don’t pick images that go against the audiences cultural norms.

Offer relevant versions

Switch images based on location and regions. Users prefer to see faces, images, and other content that visually reflects their identity. Also, pay attention to variances within a region. For instance, even within countries there can be variations in skin color (lighter hues vs. darker hues) and ethnicity. Be sure to match the variations of the market you are serving.

Beware of historical cues

Do research to understand the history, pivotal events, and cultural movements that have shaped the country. That way, you don’t unintentionally run into challenges. For example, nostalgic photos of America often represent traditional families in quiet neighborhoods with manicured lawns, This may appeal to white, heterosexual, middle-and upper class members of the Baby Boomer generation. The same era, however as a dark, negative connotation for marginalized groups.

4: Translations

Translations are important. In fact, more than 1/3 of all internet users are non-native English speakers. And these visitors stay for twice as long if the site is in their native language. [1] The mistake that many companies make is to treat translations as an afterthought. Or, they skip it all together because of the hassle and expense. Here are some considerations to ensure effective translations for your web experiences:

1. Plan for translations. Ensure that translations are a part of your project plan and budget from the beginning. Consider all costs including: technology costs- development, CMS, plugins, and software. Also, consider the additional time, coordination involved with translating and testing translated content.
2. Don’t forget about the nuances of second language speakers. Often there is a mismatch between languages that the internet users and what people actual speak. They may be reading an alternative language on your site because that is all that you have available. The key is to focus on providing clear language, structured content, and prompts to help users as they navigate the largely English-speaking web.
3. Remember: language does not equate to nationality—millions of Spanish speakers live throughout the Americas, West Africa, and Europe, for example.
4. Consider translating text and other forms of media, like images and video.
5. When possible, use human translation services. Machine translation (like Google Translate) is easy and inexpensive, but it is: (a) not the most exact (b) cannot match brand tone and personality (3) does not consider the total experience.

5: Localization

Create a localization kit to guide your project team and help them understand what areas to focus on. Your localization kit can include:

• A list of languages to be translated. This should include regional specifications as well—the Portuguese spoken in Brazil is different than that in São Tomé and Príncipe.
• Descriptions of your audience, their particular needs, and how to write for them. For example, USA.gov, the official portal for all things American government, offers guidance on the appropriate voice and tone for government websites (FIG 6.12). This kind of style guide would be great to provide as part of your translation toolkit.
• A sitemap listing all pages and content that need to be translated.
• Any existing translation memory, a database that allows translation teams to store and reuse phrases and words that have been previously translated.
• A detailed description of your timeline. Translators will be able to turn around anywhere from 1,500 to 2,500 words a day, so plan accordingly.
• Information on your tech stack, including what your site is built on, and login details for the content management system

6: Internationalization

So far, we have been discussing localization techniques to adapt products to accommodate the language and cultural requirements of a particular region. But, internationalization should also be a consideration. Internationalization involves planning and developing products that can be adapted to multiple languages (i.e. ensuring there is no hard coded text)

Use the Internationalization checker to ensure that your website doesn’t contain cultural-specific attributes: W3C Internationalization Checker.

Final Thoughts

In today’s globalized world, cross-cultural experiences are more important than ever. When it comes to designing web experiences for diverse audiences, it’s critical to move beyond a WEIRD perspective and consider the cultural nuances and preferences of the target audience. By conducting culturally relevant research, adjusting customer personas, and challenging personal biases, designers can create web experiences that are inclusive, effective, and engaging for users from all backgrounds. Not only does this increase user satisfaction and engagement, but it also opens up new markets and opportunities for businesses to expand their reach and impact. By following the guidance provided in this article, designers can create web experiences that reflect and celebrate the rich diversity of our global community.

<aside> ✋🏾 Hi there! My name is Tiffany and I am a UX and Technology leader who helps large enterprises build profitable digital products and high-performing digital teams. From time to time, I share helpful resources that address common challenges on my website at www.MsTiffanyBritt.com.

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