This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Harshani Chathurika
Five best practices that can help design systems cater to a global audience
The modern world is interconnected and globalized. As a result, people bring a diversity of perceptions and expectations from different cultures. Therefore, if your application targets a global audience, you must understand these differences and get inspired by them.
However, knowing each and every culture on a deep level simply isn’t practical. Therefore, you need to get familiar with differences that apply to a wide range of audiences. We can categorize them into the following:
- Cultural characteristics;
- Language characteristics;
- Color-related preferences;
- Images and information layout;
- Numbers and date formats.
Let’s be
1. Cultural characteristics
When we move from one culture to another, there are two main things we need to figure out:
- Who are the users and — subsequently — what are their cultural environments?
- What kind of product and/or services do they expect?
Cultural flavor
Let’s take Europe, for example. Typically, a lot of people tend to prefer simple colors and designs. You can find communities having only a few variations of colors painted in their houses. In contrast, Asians tend to prefer more color and variation.
Therefore, many applications that have gone global either:
- Follows a simple design that addresses a wide range of audiences;
- Use different design templates tailored to the location, or;
- Allow users to customizing the layout and colors.
Seasonal and festival characteristics
European culture is based on dutch and catholic backgrounds, and most of them celebrate Christmas. Therefore, you can find most consumer applications are customized during Christmas to reflect the celebrations.
Of course, this isn’t limited to just Christmas. Below are a couple of examples of websites that have adjusted their design during the ‘Black Friday’ sale period that coincides with Thanksgiving at the end of November:
As you can see, global applications like Shein and Aliexpress display those events in the banner section and change the application color accordingly.
2. Language characteristics
Language is the first point of interaction between a product and the rest of the world. Therefore, when your product is available for multiple countries, you need to expand the language support. Sometimes you may need to support various languages used in a single country (for example, India has more than 120 languages).
Besides, it’s not just translating word by word. Different cultures may interpret the words differently depending on the context. So, while software such as Google Translate can get us so far, we often require expertise from a language expert or a native speaker when providing new language support.
Text direction
Another critical aspect of an application is the text direction. Although many countries read and write horizontally and from left to right (LTR), there are several exceptions. For example, there are countries in the middle east where people read and write from right to left (RTL). Furthermore, Japanese and Korean prefer vertically from top to bottom.
3. Color related preferences
Each culture has its own set of unique colors. These colors are mainly based on mythological, historical, religious, political, and linguistic connotations.
The below image is from the Information is Beautiful website, which indicates some cultural variances and commonalities when expressing color and its significance.
For example, if we take the color black, all countries have a different psychological meaning from the culture.
- Western Culture: Black is death and mourning. It represents power, royalty, wealth, finality, and midnight gloom.
- Middle East Culture: The color black was associated with “rebirth” and “resurrection,” The suffocating gloom of germination is symbolized by the blackness of the ground and rainclouds.
- Eastern Culture: In China, black is associated with masculinity, and it is the choice for boys. It also symbolizes riches, health, knowledge, and success. Black is most strongly connected with darkness, evil, and mystery in Sri Lanka and other Asian countries.
Therefore, to pick the correct colors for your application, you need to know where the users are coming from, what they believe in, care about, and what is most important to them.
4. Images and information layout
Images and layout are a significant part of UI design. For example, when creating a product for a particular culture, you need to ensure that the visuals you choose depict people in that culture appropriately.
For example, the USA and European countries’ websites use minimalistic content layouts and communicate primarily with visuals. In contrast, Chinese users typically need more details in the UI.
In addition to that, UI designs for the USA, Europe, and most countries go from left to right. But in Arabic countries, the entire layout shifts from right to left, along with the images.
5. Numbers and date formats
When your design is global, you need to consider the format of the date, time, currency, and phone number.
- The European style of the date format is December 1, 2021 ( 12/01/21) — (MM/DD/YYYY).
- In the USA, the style is 1st of December 2021 ( 01/12/21) -(DD/MM/YYYY).
- In Japan 2021年12月1日 in Japanese, 01 December 2021 in English (YYYY/MM/DD).
Since you need to adopt the date and time for different formats, it’s best to store them in UTC format and convert them as required.
Conclusion
Opening your business to a global audience is fantastic for growth, but you should first think about how your design will affect that audience based on their location.
Even within the same country, cultures range from one region to another. Therefore, make the most of the resources at your disposal to create a great user experience and establish the basis for future growth.
And there we have it. I hope you have found this helpful. Thank you for reading.
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5 Best Practices When Designing For Cross-Culture Audiences was originally published in Bits and Pieces on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.
This content originally appeared on Bits and Pieces - Medium and was authored by Harshani Chathurika
Harshani Chathurika | Sciencx (2022-01-06T12:38:40+00:00) 5 Best Practices When Designing For Cross-Culture Audiences. Retrieved from https://www.scien.cx/2022/01/06/5-best-practices-when-designing-for-cross-culture-audiences/
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