The Influence of Designers’ Cultural Differences on the Empathic Accuracy of User Understanding

Abstract

Understanding user experience has become an important part of product design, but doing it well remains challenging. Given the global market and the resulting ubiquity of cross-cultural design, to improve user experience, designers should accurately understand users from different cultures. The extent to which designers can empathize and understand users from different cultures is an under researched topic. This paper combines Empathic Accuracy Rating with a user experience survey to measure the empathic accuracy of 12 designers trying to understand the experience of users from different cultural backgrounds. The results show that cultural differences reduce the accuracy of their user understanding. This effect can be mitigated by providing designers with more details of users’ living context.

Keywords:

• product design
• empathic accuracy
• user experience
• cultural difference

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Education Finland (EDUFI) under the Grant Number TM-18-11007.

Notes on contributors

Jie Li

Jie Li is a PhD candidate at Aalto University. Her research topic is measuring designers’ empathic accuracy in user-centered design.

Katja Hölttä-Otto

Katja Hölttä-Otto is interested in novel methods in user-centered design and creativity. She also does research in complex system architecture.