Column: UX Across Cultures

In recent years, social ecommerce has rapidly emerged across the world by leveraging social interactions to drive online sales. Examples include influencer-driven shopping on Instagram in the US, Line Shopping’s chat-based social ecommerce in Japan and Thailand, and Pinduoduo’s group-buying model in China.

What I’ve found most interesting is the group-buying model in ecommerce, which originated in the West, but has become extremely successful in the East, especially with platforms such as Pinduoduo. I’ve explored how cultural factors influence this space and why they result in such different outcomes in the ecommerce industry. In this column, I’ll examine how Pinduoduo leverages social elements to design user experiences that influence consumers’ decision-making. Read More

Artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated nearly every aspect of our digital lives, from personalized recommendations on ecommerce platforms to complex systems for healthcare and finance. While AI might seem universal, cultural perspectives have great influence on its adoption. Western cultures often regard AI as a tool to enhance productivity, despite accompanying fears of job replacements and ethical concerns. In contrast, many Eastern cultures view AI as an extension of human collaboration rather than competition. These cultural perceptions shape not only how people integrate AI into their daily lives and how much they trust AI, but also how humans design AI.

This column explores how different cultures perceive AI, its limitations in understanding cultural nuances, and how design can enable AI to better reflect this diversity. Read More

When Meta launched Threads in July 2023, it positioned the product as a global competitor to X, formerly Twitter, a text-based social platform with a consistent user interface across all markets. Yet Taiwan quickly became one of Threads’ strongest markets, accounting for an estimated 18 to 26 percent of its global Web traffic, despite having a population of only 23 million. Users adopted the same product for very different reasons across markets.

In the United States, Threads struggled to differentiate itself from X, many perceiving it as a very similar product with a familiar user interface, but few distinct features or clear advantages. In Taiwan, however, Threads filled a gap with a capability that the country’s digital landscape had long lacked.

This raises an important question for UX designers: since Meta had designed the same product for everyone, why did it produce such different user experiences around the world? This column examines how the same UX design affordances, including a chronological-feeling feed, conversation design, reply visibility, and moderation, led to different user outcomes across markets, and what this reveals about designing global products. Read More