Looking at my website, which is in English, I thought the audience would be from English speaking countries. However, many of the audience also come from non-English speaking countries such as China, Russia, The Netherlands and Indonesia. Growing up with English as my third language, being a trilingual myself is a challenge. It’s no doubt that I sometimes mix the words between those three language. However, from that simple language perspective, it gives me some insight for designing cross-cultural interfaces.

As I have visited 30 countries, I witness many Brands actually localized their design, for example I consider Uniqlo as a nice everyday wear, and its website actually gives local user experience, as can be seen below.

From these examples, we can see the Cross Cultural Interfaces between Western and Eastern Market. For example, both Uniqlo Japan and China use a bit “busy” layout, provides lots of information and promotion as they attract the audience. While the British Uniqlo Website is more clean and minimalist.

I consider this statement is pretty true, based on the Chinese UX Article

People like ‘busy’ 热闹. They like to see many people and many products for sale when they are shopping. But to a western eye, it can be overwhelming, with too many products and promotions.

What should UI/UX designers consider to design Cross Cultural Interface?

1. Allocate a real quality time for designing the global navigation.

Global Navigation position is very important, the same brand will localize their UI/UX design especially in global navigation, to ensure it will deliver a great user experience. Based on Jianming Dong’s research on Human-computer interface design for the Chinese population, there is a significant culture awareness for user interface between East and West. The study finds how to layout global navigation in order to achieve results such as fastest performance time, lowest error state and greatest satisfaction. The Eastern market prefer vertical layout for the Global Navigation. However, the Western market or such Chinese using English Interface, prefer horizontal interface to vertical interface.

2. Translation

Language is very important in Cross Cultural Interfaces. It’s not only the space that we need to consider as some language will be written longer in translation, but also the orientation of itself. English or any Western Language is read and written from left to right. But Japanese, Chinese and Korean, are written and read from top to bottom in a formal context. In Hebrew, the language is written and read from right to left.

3. Follow the local brand’s guidelines, but design it globally

Every brand has its on guidelines in UI design, which is highly recommended to follow. If you want your design to speak internationally, it is very important to keep it consistent but giving a small tweak to localise within the country itself, can make a big difference.

4. Using basic emotions in imagery never go wrong

Human basic emotions and facial expressions like happiness, elegant, fear, anger; are universal, they are understood by everyone, regardless of their cultural background.

In conclusion, we do live in a global society. This is very important for UI/UX because we always have a challenge of understanding not only out own culture, but other cultures clearly. Based on the Global UX Book, UI/UX Design has to consider not only the characteristics of users, but also the technical or business environment and the nature of the tasks / interaction. Thinking globally doesn’t mean giving up your identity / culture.

When you start designing outside your own cultural foundation, or simply cross cultural interfaces, you will create a deep-seated emotional connection with people.

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Disclaimer: These are my personal views and opinions and not associated with my employer or any other reference on this post. I am also not endorsing any company or service mentioned on this post.