Introduction:

Design is how we think, how we collaborate and how we see the things around us. Everything produced by humans is designed and every company that exists designs what will suit its culture.

Every organisation can be distinguished by their design culture, it is why we would see a product designed by Apple Inc, and by able to recognise it, it is why we would touch a particular product and be able to tell what kind of product it is.

Culture is a major influence on the design and how we see most things, but in most cases, culture is an omnipresent dimension. The success of every product has a whole lot to do with culture.

Most people are unaware that most products are successful because of the culture, remaking a design that was built or designed for the westerners would never work in the easterners, and that is because of design culture.

Design culture is one of the reasons why many products fail and many succeed. It's the reason why we see lots of loops and crashed startups.

Culture goes beyond UX, beyond Customer experience. Understanding one's culture and design culture is key to having a successful product in whatever city or audience.

What is culture:

Culture is the ideas, customs, and social behaviours of a particular people or society. Culture is far more than religion, food, fashion, language, music, and marriage. Culture is the knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, social habits, music, arts and much more.

The African culture is different from the western culture, the middle eastern culture is different from the eastern culture and so on. This means that the people and everything in that particular ecosystem are different, they think differently, they interact with things differently and also, they use products differently.

All Africans share a series of dominant traits which distinguish African culture from the rest of the world. Take this instance: Place someone who has lived in South Africa, Nigeria, UK, United States and Asia in a particular building, without any of them talking. If you study them well, you will be able to tell the ones that live in the US, UK, Africa and Asia, and even if they don't talk throughout the research or study time, you will still be able to tell where they are from.

That's how culture influences a person and how they think, so it is important that as designers, we should be able to design for culture, thereby achieving success and the goals of that which we are designing for.

What is Designing for culture?

Designing for culture means putting the ecosystem of the people you are building for first, focusing on the customer experience of a geographical location, putting in check how they react to many things and their behavioural traits, to accomplish a unique customer experience that suits their culture (which means, lifestyle, food, music, arts and everything that culture involves).

Also, note that designing for culture is different from Design culture which is an organisational goal where designers build an ecosystem within an organisation to improve the customer experience of the organisation.

How to Design for Culture?

Research:

The most important way to design for culture is research. Research goes beyond sending out questionnaires to get feedback from a little group of persons to understanding how a particular user within a certain age group interact and views different object and things generally.

Researching for culture means understanding the traits of a particular race or the races you are building for with the motive of understanding how they think, how they see things and their interest.

This is usually broad and bigger than understanding a few users as seen in normal research made.

How do i achieve this:

Expand your design scope: This means removing the limitation from the number of people you use for your study.

Understanding the different cultures:

In this case, you are not studying a few people but you are studying an entire race, which will help you narrow your result to suit the environment and a wider audience.

Empathy:

Empathy is one of the most unappreciated processes in a good user experience. Empathy in design culture is making sure you tick all points and making sure you dont break the rules of a particular culture. For example, most cultures have rules and traits that are very sacred to them, excluding that in a design or faulting a rule that is very sacred to them is worse than having a bad customer experience, because people take these things very seriously, especially when it comes to religion, art, music and way of life.

Avoid Culture plagiarism:

I have seen lots of designers making designs that are suited for the wrong audience, just because they dont understand that there is something called “Designing for Culture”. You don’t expect to design a product that was intentionally designed, suited for the western culture for an African audience and expect to get lots of users.

Especially people that go to Behance, dribble and other big design platforms. Replicating a whole case study that was made for another culture i think that's one major issue we are facing in the design space.

With the growth of technology, we have seen lots of startups emerging from the African space and more of them building and replicating successful products in the U.S for Africans. We hear things like this, this startup is the Facebook of Africa, the uber of Africa, the amazon of Africa, and they will go ahead to copy the entire model of the product to release in Africa, without modifying it to suit the African culture.

It's a problem that we need to address and for every startup making way, building or replicating a successful startup in the U.S in the African market, you need to pay more attention to designing for Culture and do lots of research and modifications to suit the African needs.

Cultural Bias:

All humans have biases. This is because it is impossible to separate one's perception from objective reality.

When designing for culture, it is important to remove all forms of bias, especially when it is obvious that the product was built for a particular culture.

In today's world, people dont take cultures likely and worse, cultural bias in a product or within a company or organisation.

When all these are settled and checked properly, the design would be so rich and appreciated and tell several meanings. Relatable designs are often workable design

Let's include designing for culture as part of our process in the design ecosystem.

Making sure we highlight every form or iteration of the design is a proper guide to a perfect and working design.

Let us “Design for culture” today.

Thanks.