Cultural Curiosity: Change Your Pair of Glasses
Curiosity killed the cat, not the user researcher! Being curious about the users’ attitudes and behaviours is key in user research. These are on the surface, noticeable. The question is: how are these attitudes and behaviours formed? And how can we ensure that we understand the total picture and not only some pieces of it?
When I got back to Enschede, a town in the Eastern part of the Netherlands, after a long time — I hadn’t been there since my childhood — I was positively surprised by a random passerby greeting me. I’m born and raised in Amsterdam, a melting pot of cultures living together. Yes, I’m used to tourists asking me for directions. And yet, just a normal greeting from a passerby was something that I experienced as unusual. Apparently, it is quite common in the less dense areas in the Netherlands. If you ever happen to get there, don’t be surprised when people greet you with a smiling face, a nod or a “hallo”.
I remembered this particular episode after learning about the concept of Sonder. It is defined as:”the realisation that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.” It made me think, not only about this particular memory, but also about countless others. About how strangers I see on the streets are living their lives. Deep inside, I knew that everyone is a main character in their own stories. It never crossed my mind when walking past others on the street or queuing in supermarkets.
Each one of us has a different story and deep down it is partly shaped by the cultural practices we follow. The reason I’m writing about this topic is because cultural diversity is important in understanding behaviours. And what’s more interesting than understanding behaviours for user researchers?
Let’s define culture first. I will take Riccardi’s simple definition of culture: a system of behaviour that helps us act in an accepted or familiar way. It doesn’t have to be that you fit in a stereotype. Hayes & Toarmino also accept the importance of knowing an individual’s heritage and culture. At the same time, they acknowledge rightfully that an individual who is part of a cultural group can live his life fully, partially or not according to the norms of his group. It gets really tricky not to fall into the stereotype bubble, and they warn against it.
In an experiment Teasley and colleagues surveyed a group of American/Non-American students, with both males and females equally represented. They were presented three user interfaces, each one designed for the following subgroups: European adult male, American white female and international audience. One of the questions asked from the participants was to rank the interfaces according to their liking. They found that the prejudice on woman liking curvilinear shapes did not hold among participants, and was even the least liked:
“While issues in cultural and gender diversity are vitally important to the future of human-computer interaction, they cannot be addressed by prejudicing the results with overly-generalized characterizations of user populations and vague, unsupported guesswork about what specific user populations find to be an “appealing perceptual experience.”
The researchers have a point here. It’s by engaging in user research that we can get to understand the users, what they need and want, and translate this into meaningful user experiences.
We also need to ensure that we have an empathic approach:
“People want to see what they want to see and they don’t always see what you see”
This is a nice quote from Riccardi’s TedTalk and summarises the problem: we all have our own set of glasses that we see the world from and cannot understand others who don’t wear the same glasses.
The famous old lady-young lady optical illusion comes to mind. You look at the image, you see a young lady. Your friend looks at the same picture and sees an old lady. You both try to convince the other from what you see. In the end, by describing exactly what you see, you most probably can see both images.
If only life would be that easy. Perceptions about real life issues are usually more complex and not always prone to be solved by having healthy discussions. In case of conflicts, you can have asymmetry that leads to one side experiencing an issue related to the behaviour of another, whereas the other doesn’t even see it as an issue. In the end, everyone has their own set of glasses. And it’s up to you to decide whether you want to try a different pair on for a bit.
Whether you choose to try it on in your personal life, as a user researcher it adds to your empathic skills and your understanding, to look through the users’ pair of glasses and realising that they’re also a main character in their stories. This enables us to see the total picture, and not only a piece of it.
