Culture plays significant role in human's cognition and perception, and therefore affects all fields of his activity. What implies from that, also it plays big role in design. The cultural aspects influence the end-users of our products. But it also has effect on the staff working in the company.
By term 'culture' we should not understand just nationality or region of origin. We can talk about culture meaning specific types of behaviour, ways of thinking and experiencing the world around us. People having common interests, doing similar jobs, can be regarded as a group having certain culture. Personally, being an exchange student and meeting people from different countries, I think I can say from my own experience, that the country of origin is not necessarily the most cruicial factor based on which we can say that particular group of people behaves and thinks different from some other group. I think that more important factor is what these people do in their lives, what are their goals, attitudes, interests, and so on..
Because UCD and IxD focus on the user, it is particularly important to take into account the cultural context. We should be aware of this factor while conducting for example a contextual interview, not to miss out something relevant, what may seem irrelevant to us. I think being conscious of existence of cultural constraints would help us a lot in designing a product that will be really usable for the user, which includes the product being intuitive and unambigious. Also this is especially significant in designing websites that should attract as many people as possible (within some certain target group).
By term 'culture' we should not understand just nationality or region of origin. We can talk about culture meaning specific types of behaviour, ways of thinking and experiencing the world around us. People having common interests, doing similar jobs, can be regarded as a group having certain culture. Personally, being an exchange student and meeting people from different countries, I think I can say from my own experience, that the country of origin is not necessarily the most cruicial factor based on which we can say that particular group of people behaves and thinks different from some other group. I think that more important factor is what these people do in their lives, what are their goals, attitudes, interests, and so on..
Because UCD and IxD focus on the user, it is particularly important to take into account the cultural context. We should be aware of this factor while conducting for example a contextual interview, not to miss out something relevant, what may seem irrelevant to us. I think being conscious of existence of cultural constraints would help us a lot in designing a product that will be really usable for the user, which includes the product being intuitive and unambigious. Also this is especially significant in designing websites that should attract as many people as possible (within some certain target group).
Hi Monika, interesting outlook on culture. I like the part that it our culture affects they way we perceive the world.
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