How to Create a Globally Appealing User Experience

The rise of personal drones is another great example of a major compliance challenge. This year, in the United States alone, legislatures across 45 states have considered more than 150 bills—each of which proposed different rules and regulations regarding drone-related concerns ranging from hunting to voyeurism. When it comes to global restrictions, the list of do’s and don’ts is even more complex.

Social etiquette is another major factor that comes into play when designing products for an international audience. For example, there’s an American doorbell company called Ring that lets you see who’s ringing your doorbell and verbally communicate with that person from your smartphone. It’s almost like having an intercom system on your phone. Users can tell their relatives to “Come on in” or tell Girl Scouts selling cookies, “No, thanks. I’m on a diet.”

From an American’s perspective, this seems like an intriguing product. For a global audience, however, even for something as simple as door-answering etiquette, there are a lot of cultural norms to consider. Such nuances could make a product like Ring irrelevant in many parts of the world. In my Hispanic culture, for example, we rarely use doorbells. If you’re visiting family or close friends, it’s customary to knock and walk right in. In some cultures, people prefer to knock, while in others, they clap their hands.

Another factor to consider when creating global products is size. In the US, we live by the motto “Bigger is better.” In other countries, however, people place a premium on small things. For example, American medical-device companies have recently been losing market share to Asian companies that make products that are similar, but smaller. Sometimes small products are desirable because of population density and a lack of space, but in other cases, they’re just what’s considered normal. And it’s not just the size of a product that could make success overseas a challenge, it could also be the size of the store selling the goods. Best Buy, for example, botched its international expansion. Big-box stores in general are struggling to succeed across the globe.

How to Assess the Cultural Suitability of Your User Experience

Creating globally appealing products is no easy task. There are countless factors to consider in attempting to create a globally appealing product. Here are three tips to get you started designing for an international audience:

1. Compare apples to apples.

When assessing cultural preferences, make sure you’re employing the same methods of capturing test data and studying the same data points across every demographic. If you’re not comparing apples to apples, you won’t be able to identify regional preferences accurately. To properly measure ease of use, perceived efficiency, and overall satisfaction, conduct a universal survey across all cultures.

2. Collect the same metrics.

Use self-reported satisfaction surveys and social listening—and even consider evaluating your product using the system usability scale (SUS), which lets you grade overall usability across cultures. You need to capture what people are thinking, feeling, and doing, and the SUS is a scalable way of uncovering these sentiments in small segments. You’re essentially building a customer map—laying out the discrete micro-interactions that happen at every level and identifying how customers feel about them.

3. Apply your findings properly.

As human beings, we do share a lot of common needs and struggles. However, when it comes to creating a cross-cultural user experience, understanding the things people around the world don’t have in common is what really matters. Once you’ve conducted user research across your target demographics and collected user feedback, you can use the knowledge and the insights you’ve gleaned from your research to build a product that satisfies as many people as possible.