Boxes And Arrows : The Design Behind the Design

It seems that with such diversity across the globe, the range of experiences—and the lessons learned—would be just as diverse. I’m not sure if one article would be enough to cover any more than two or three ideas. Perhaps a series of 3-4 articles from various authors can give us a survey of aspects of multiculturalism realted to IA and IxD. People world-wide read and contribute to B&A so there’s bound to be a good pool to draw from.

Perhaps a good communal starting point would be to collect anecdotes. Could B&A host a survey based around an open-ended question like “In usability projects you have worked on, where have cultural factors been significant?” A first article could then be a collation of those stories. That might inform subsequent articles that discuss the examples and propose lessons-to-be-learnt.

—Matt.

Well, of course such a article will not be able to give a full “cookbook” how to deal with multinational projects. The intention was to make people aware of these issues that add complexity to these development projects.
And there is another aspect of it – if you design a site or an app for a multicultural audience there are many trapdoors as well – from different meaning of colors up to missing character coding.
A series of several articles would be great – I would be happy to contribute.

Alexander, you should find Cultural Dimensions by Geerte Hofstede useful: http://www.theuxbookmark.com/2009/03/psychology/cultural-…