This post makes such an important, and under appreciated, point; namely, the way in which product design embeds cultural and linguistic assumptions.
I remember reviewing screens from oe of the mainland delivery apps once upon a time and passing the visuals around my (extremely cosmopolitan) dev team. As it turned out, all of us whose primary language used an alphabet found the screens to visually overwhelming...our analyst (whose primary language was mandarin) did not. We eventually chalked it up to their upbringing processing written language in pictographs and exposure to design trends popular at the time in China, but that was only a conclusion we reached after sitting in a circle chatting over it for a while (it was completely unintuitive to our analyst that anyone would have a hard time looking at the meituan app or whatever it was).
Obviously, that's a very specific example having to do with visual presentation, but I know there's a thousand other things that make it into feature development uninterogated.
Thanks for this cool insight and amazing breakdown of a very topical and still current occurrence! Your story is so interesting to me and my own two-finger-typing life story – just that I only had to jump between the German, Swedish, and English keyboards! Now my eyes are even wider opened to the beauty, meaningfulness, complexity, and difference of the Chinese alphabet. <3 (<- Millenial heart for you!)
This post makes such an important, and under appreciated, point; namely, the way in which product design embeds cultural and linguistic assumptions.
I remember reviewing screens from oe of the mainland delivery apps once upon a time and passing the visuals around my (extremely cosmopolitan) dev team. As it turned out, all of us whose primary language used an alphabet found the screens to visually overwhelming...our analyst (whose primary language was mandarin) did not. We eventually chalked it up to their upbringing processing written language in pictographs and exposure to design trends popular at the time in China, but that was only a conclusion we reached after sitting in a circle chatting over it for a while (it was completely unintuitive to our analyst that anyone would have a hard time looking at the meituan app or whatever it was).
Obviously, that's a very specific example having to do with visual presentation, but I know there's a thousand other things that make it into feature development uninterogated.
Thanks for this cool insight and amazing breakdown of a very topical and still current occurrence! Your story is so interesting to me and my own two-finger-typing life story – just that I only had to jump between the German, Swedish, and English keyboards! Now my eyes are even wider opened to the beauty, meaningfulness, complexity, and difference of the Chinese alphabet. <3 (<- Millenial heart for you!)
Thank you for liking this piece Melanie!
Learned so much, love this essay :)