Human-centered UX Design For Cross-culture Audiences

Sigit Adinugroho, Christine Wang at UXDX Community: Singapore. Video: https://youtu.be/14pCSEzCf2Q

Readable transcript: edited from the recording's captions for readability (fillers and false starts removed, punctuation and section headings added). Wording is the speaker's own. Timestamps are positions in the video. Names marked [?] could not be verified against the audio.

Shopify and the UX team

[00:00:00] Sigit: Today we're going to talk about cultural context in human-centered design. Before we go into the topic, I would like to introduce you to Shopify. Maybe you already know Shopify is a global e-commerce company from Canada. We offer platforms for businesses to set up online stores, but our offering also goes beyond that. We include payments, marketing tools, channels and shipping tools as well. We have employees around the world, in almost every region in the world. So even though our product originates from North America, from primarily English-speaking countries, now we operate in non-English-speaking countries as well, including Asia Pacific, Africa and South America. As with every market, there are differences and nuances, and we think this is an important topic to share today.

[00:01:00] Sigit: Christine and I are part of the Shopify UX team. The UX team comprises 450 people with different disciplines and diverse backgrounds. We are made up mostly of product designers, researchers, content designers, marketing designers, and we also have industrial designers who design our POS hardware. We have taxonomists and also accessibility experts. We are digital by default, meaning that we are hiring in all parts of the world. If you are interested in joining us in the UX team, please take a look at shopify.com/careers. This year we are also hiring 2021 new Shopifolk; that's what we call Shopify employees. So please take a look at our careers page if there's anything that interests you.

[00:01:57] Sigit: Today we're going to cover two topics. The first one is why cultural context matters in the success of human-centered design. And the second point is we're going to share with you the first steps to design for a cultural context.

Why cultural context matters

[00:02:13] Christine: So why does cultural context matter for human-centered design? A lot of times in human-centered design, we encourage people to zoom in to see the individual's needs and behaviors. However, when we design global products, it's also very useful to zoom out to the context, to be able to see the cultural context beyond the individual behavior. By cultural context, we actually mean the physical environment, the social environment, as well as the culture and the society.

[00:02:48] Christine: For example, if we consider the cultural context, even just the very simple sign-in process will need to change. In North America, we usually invite merchants to sign in with their email address. However, if we put the same thing in India: India is actually a mobile-first or even mobile-only country. The mobile tariff is so cheap in India, and the mobile phone is also widely available for people, so they do almost everything on the mobile platform, whereas Wi-Fi and the desktop are not so available for people. Therefore, when we design our sign-in process, we should ask people to give their mobile number instead, and then consider that they will complete the whole process on their mobile phone.

[00:03:50] Christine: Understanding the cultural context will also help us to understand a lot of people's subconscious decisions. For example, when I did a project in Indonesia about people's buying journey for a smartphone, people always told us a lot of reasons for how they chose their perfect phone. But it was also interesting to see that so many buyers would change their mind at the last minute in the retail store. We didn't know the true reason until we actually traveled to the retail store with our participants. We experienced the traffic in Jakarta, Indonesia, which is so bad. So when people travel for two hours in the traffic to the retail shop, and they realize the ideal phone is not available, they usually follow the salespeople's suggestion to change to another well-known brand and a model with a similar price, because they just don't want to go back home empty-handed.

[00:04:59] Christine: When we design innovation, we often talk about this innovation adoption map. We know that it's actually pretty easy for the early adopters to accept innovation, because they are just willing to learn, willing to try. But it's difficult to design for the masses. There's always a gap. So how to bridge the gap? It is to understand the cultural context, because the cultural context is like the earth for the innovation product. If we understand it well, we actually give those innovations a better chance to survive in people's lives.

A four-step framework, and acknowledging cultural differences

[00:05:42] Sigit: Now we are getting into the four-step framework to design with cultural context. This framework is one we are proposing to help teams understand cultural context and how to use the context to help design better. We have four steps, as I mentioned. One is to acknowledge cultural differences: realizing that there are cultural differences in our markets and users. Step two is to learn the cultural differences specific to our project. Step three is to use that context to inspire innovative solutions, or create a better product. And the last step is to prepare for what's next. This is not about one or two projects; we need to make sure that we have a framework for future projects as well.

[00:06:27] Sigit: Step one is acknowledging cultural differences. What does this mean? We start with realizing that people are different. They have different contexts, they have different cultures, they live in different places. They might have similar needs and desires, but there are details in these similarities. So the first thing that we need to do is to always challenge assumptions and avoid generalizations. I always use this mentality: I need to understand where the product is coming from. For example, Shopify is from Canada, so I understand that the product was designed with the context of Canada in the first place. And then when Shopify comes to Asia Pacific, we need to understand where and who the users of Shopify in this region are, and how they are different from the users in Canada. I'm going to walk you through some examples.

[00:07:19] Sigit: In my previous project before Shopify, I designed a website for a travel marketplace. This platform allows us to book vacation rentals, apartments, homes in other countries, instead of hotels. This company also originates from North America. So you can see, when I look at all the marketing materials, the pictures all depict the North American audience. You see here big kitchens, big houses, big pools. This is something that they are aspiring to be holidaying in. And there's a strong sense of privacy here: everybody has to have their own room.

[00:08:08] Sigit: But when you come to Asia Pacific, for example, there are a lot of differences. First, the traveling style is different. You see here on the left side a picture of an Indonesian family, and I think in other Southeast Asian countries it's the same. We usually travel in a group of at least seven, maybe more than that. Usually a family would have the auntie, the uncle and then the babysitter traveling together, for example to Japan, and they spend a few nights or maybe a week straight in a single apartment, and they don't mind living or sleeping in the living room.

[00:08:44] Sigit: This originates from the culture of [tirulamba][?]. For example, in Southeast Asia, we go to our parents' homes for festivities like Eid, to our villages, and we just sleep on the floor together. There's no concept of privacy here. Consequently, if you look at Japan as well, not only because the space is so small, but to cater to this mentality, this desire to be together, the apartments usually have a lot of people sleeping in the living room. So we have makeshift beds, maybe overhead beds, sofa beds, as long as we can be together and sit together.

[00:09:30] Sigit: And we also have a Shopify context here. For example, this is our iconography study in Japan. You see the second line, on the top right, is actually an icon for orders, or for products. In Japan, the iconography there doesn't work, because they see it as a [feeling box][?] or [filling water][?] or something. So they wanted to have something more explicit, maybe a person handing over a box, or maybe a truck. And the other context, on the right side here, you see there are different ways to design a calendar. In the Middle East, the weekend is actually on Thursday and Friday, not Saturday and Sunday. So for every calendar that we have designed, we need to make sure we understand the context there.

[00:10:20] Sigit: The last example is pretty interesting for me personally, because I'm from Jakarta. I think Google did a study in India and Indonesia around Google Maps, Street View and navigation. In the US, it's a very car-centric culture, and everything is centered around navigating on big roads, with clear navigation and clear markings. But in cities in India and Indonesia, there is a lot more than big streets. There are a lot of small alleyways, unregulated, and sometimes people just make shift ways between their houses. And this is something that people use to navigate the city and escape traffic jams. If you order a Grab bike or a Gojek or other ride-hailing services, they will ask you if you want to go through the alleyway. But Google in the early days didn't accommodate this routine, so they did a study and they finally fixed the product.

Learning and building the cultural context

[00:11:23] Christine: The next step is how do we learn and build a cultural context? One very simple approach is to have a cultural guide in your project. You can actually treat your local recruiting and research agencies as your cultural guides. For example, when I did research in Indonesia, the agencies and also the local marketing team were just so helpful, and they could provide a lot of insights for me to understand people's responses. So don't forget to involve them, and ask them a lot of questions.

[00:11:57] Christine: The other thing is to see things from others' perspectives. By that I mean, when you do the observation, don't just do the interviews, but make sure you can go into people's life contexts to see things from their perspectives. For example, when I designed a toothbrush for rural people in China, the client actually asked us to design for people with extremely low income in the rural area. I actually did those interviews by taking a car to those people's places, and I felt so surprised at the beginning, because I expected to see people with low income, but almost every one of them had a four-floor house, built by themselves.

[00:12:48] Christine: But once we actually walked into their houses, I realized their value system is very different from people in the city. In a city, what's valuable is actually the space, whereas for people in the rural area, the valuable things are their belongings. For example, with this family, you can actually see that although they have a four-floor house, everything that they have is just in one room. It's their kitchen, their living room, and also the place that they sleep.

[00:13:24] Christine: We can also make sense of design principles by zooming out to understand the physical, the social and the cultural context. For example, I took a snapshot of the digital marketplace from China, and also from Japan, and the place people usually shop online in Canada. And below, I took a picture of where people in Canada, in Japan and in China usually shop. Take a moment and see if you can match those digital spaces with the physical spaces.

[00:14:08] Christine: You probably made a right guess, and you will be surprised there is so much similarity between the digital and the physical space. In China, people enjoy a very cheerful and very happy shopping environment, and they expect it to be a little bit crowded. In Japan, people actually want everything to be put together, so they can shop in a very efficient way, and they are also very eager to know a lot of detailed information. You can also see such features in their streets. Whereas in Canada, when people shop, they actually appreciate the shop experience and the brand experience and the overall atmosphere more. Therefore, instead of going to the marketplace, they usually go to the individual merchant's shop. And when they actually go shopping in the street, they also prefer to go into the individual shop rather than a busy shopping area.

[00:15:11] Christine: Lastly, when we do design, we should consider local laws and regulations. For example, when we design for merchants in China, they often tell us marketing is very difficult. But when we actually understand the cultural context behind it, what they actually mean is that Facebook is banned in China, so they cannot use the Facebook app Shopify provides. In order to still help them, we needed to understand the situation, and then the design team redesigned the Facebook app for the merchants in China by taking off a lot of [applications][?], so they can still do the marketing and control Facebook when they sell abroad.

Ideating with cultural context

[00:15:58] Christine: Step three is ideate: how do we use the cultural context to inspire innovative solutions? How do we generate insights and trigger innovative actions? If you see this chart on the left, sometimes when we hear people talk about their needs, a lot of the time we'll just directly provide solutions based on what they said. But in order to generate insights and trigger innovation, we actually should go through a synthesis process, to elevate observations to become insights, to inspire design opportunities.

[00:16:39] Christine: For example, one time I redesigned an app to help a client provide a service offering food suggestions and restaurant suggestions to improve top executives' health. The original app, for some reason, didn't work, because the top managers weren't really willing to subscribe to the service, and even when they did, very few of them would continue to use it. We didn't know the reason until we did the study and the synthesis. The insight actually changed our perspective. We realized the people who actually manage the top managers' food are not themselves, but their secretaries. So our audience assumption was wrong. After we changed the main audience to their secretaries, the adoption rate and also the satisfaction for the app greatly increased.

[00:17:48] Christine: If you don't get the opportunity to do a lot of behavioral observation, you can always co-create with people by inviting them into the iteration process. For example, when I designed an environmentally friendly new type of [field][?], new types of home appliances for rural people in China, we didn't get the chance to do a lot of prior behavioral studies. However, we built a lot of one-to-one paper models, and then brought those models to people's homes. So they were able to help us understand where to put those models and how to change them. Therefore we were still able to iterate our design and make sure those appliances could fit in their homes in the future.

Future-proofing the strategy

[00:18:46] Sigit: Thank you, Christine. The last step is to ask what's next. After one or two projects, how can we future-proof the strategy? Understanding cultural context goes beyond one or two projects, so here are some tips to build a long-term strategy. The first tip is to let local regional teams lead the way. For example, at Shopify we have this operating model of a trifecta for every market and every project. What that means is that we have a full set of engineering, UX and product resources, supported by discipline experts like content, research and UX development. For example, in Asia Pacific we have a full set of this as well, located in this region, and they are from here as well, so they have spent a lot of years understanding this market, like Christine and I. This makes sure that we have a local lens on every project that we are set to work on.

[00:19:50] Sigit: The next thing is to develop skills to unlearn and relearn. Make a cultured head. Build a habit of thinking about different cultural nuances, not only for one project or two projects. We need to make a habit of sharing, understanding and synthesizing all the insights that we have. For example, at Shopify we are used to posting weekly UX insights throughout our team, not only within the project team but outside.

[00:20:22] Sigit: And this is my favorite tip, from [sonoma][?], my favorite author: surround yourself with digital pieces of the culture you are designing for, or not even digital. You are what you consume. Consume books or other media that are more broad-ranging, not only related to design or UX, and try diverse authors, not only people from North America but also from other regions. And when we can, after the pandemic, we can travel. There's an interesting story here. When I was traveling across Vietnam, on a 20-hour train ride in a really simple bunk bed in a [three silver][?] train, I got to spend 20 hours with the locals, and that was the only entertainment I had, with no internet. So I got to know their experience and culture firsthand from that.

[00:21:14] Sigit: Build a constant connection to your users. What this means is that we need to build a line of communication with the users. We have a Bridge the Gap program at Shopify, for example, that embodies this very accurately. This is a program that all sorts of employees can participate in, to talk to or get firsthand information or situations from the merchants, our users. What we can do is book a time to shadow our support advisors or our support team, so that we can listen to real-time problem solving, and if we're lucky, we can even get to reply to real emails.

[00:22:02] Sigit: Lastly, document your learning and share it with the team. Make a habit of documenting everything. In your studies, even though there's a UXR report, a UX research report, make a habit of documenting impromptu or ad hoc insights into something that's more consumable by the team members. For example, this is a playbook that our team created for my previous project, about designing for Japan, so that every designer, every engineer, every product manager can learn how to design for the Japan context.

[00:22:42] Sigit: That's all. I hope you find it useful. Just to recap: we want to make sure that we get the benefit of understanding cultural context. It matters because it defines how a product is perceived and used. It sets user behaviors. It will benefit you, and also the company and the product, long term, by being relevant to the market. And remember this framework. It's not a hundred percent that you have to follow this framework; you can have your own. But basically the idea is to realize there are differences in context and markets, and then learn from it, use that context to build your product, and then future-proof that product, future-proof that strategy.

[00:23:32] Christine: Thank you. We share a bunch of resources here from Shopify, including our UX blog, our career opportunities and our [new cellular setup][?]. We are very excited to get to know you. Our community is a very highly collaborative community and very fun to work with, so we expect to have you meet us. And of course we share our LinkedIn profiles here. Feel free to reach out to discuss life at Shopify, or to discuss cultural context in human-centered design. Thank you, thank you everyone.