Crossing the cultural barrier - 4 key takeaways.

  • By
    Sudipt Shah
    January 24, 2019
    February 10, 2023

The UAE is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world. With over 200 nationalities and various cultural differences at play, how do you understand your customers and design a UX strategy to meet their growing expectations?

For those who couldn’t make it to the event last week, you can watch it here. We've also pulled out some of the key points that were covered:

1. Adopting a cross-cultural UX strategy is not a luxury anymore, users want a product that acknowledges their unique cultural characteristics. The UAE is very diverse, with Emiratis, Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians and Filipinos making up 61.45% of the population. The most critical step to creating a digital product is to understand who the intended users are and their cultural habits & behaviours. User research helps business understand their users better.

2. To understand the various cultures, we looked at the Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions and how they vary for the nationalities that form the majority population in the UAE. In the talk, Sudipt gave some great examples of how the UX of a website varies across countries based on their cultural dimensions.

3. In addition to culture, you also need to consider technical know-how, gender and age. These factors affect the usability of the product. Take gender for example, typically men like to ‘tinker’, they are more comfortable taking risks while women, prefer to read instructions and tread carefully.

4. Understand what your users want from an experience by asking them. User testing and research is a good way of reaching out to real users and assessing if the product is well-suited for them from a cultural, gender and age perspective.

And that's all, folks! Sign up to our mailing list to be the first to hear about our future events.


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