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With one click a website can go global, so it's important to be aware of your cultural biases when designing. The NextStage CRO explains.
Is a knowledge of art, cultural anthropology and neuroscience required for communicating with a given demographic? I asked several experts and have concluded that brand marketers and web designers ignore these disciplines at their peril.
A while back, I presented What your website is really saying at the iMedia Brand Summit in Coronado. Part of the presentation described how cultural biases affect website design. More correctly, how cultural biases that are aptly displayed in a culture's art affect people's reactions to websites, and how this can be either good or bad for a brand depending on both the site and the bias.
I was shocked to receive an email from someone in the audience who took exception to that idea. That person wrote, "Don't forget God, Satan… Can you provide some statistics on this? This may be an okay observation for criticizing art work in Western culture. But it is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my career as a web designer. You are ignoring cultural differences that may arise in visual communication. You are also ignoring basic web usability guidelines and design guidelines."
Honestly, I don't consider myself an expert... on anything, really. What I believe I'm good at is researching, knowing where to find information and not giving up until I find what I'm looking for. I don't consider myself an expert on western culture, art or web design. But I endeavored to answer the email and will share that answer here.
In addition, I also contacted people who I consider more knowledgeable than myself on these subjects and asked their opinions. I could be mistaken and took this opportunity to see just how off base I might be. The results of those conversations I also share here.
Evoking emotions with images
The references to God and Satan have to do with where western artwork typically displays judgment versus compassion. I commented that images placed in certain areas of the visual field provoke western trained minds to respond with certain emotional biases. Did I have statistics on this? Yes, some are in our color iconography research (links are provided below) and in various published bibliographies.
"This may be an okay observation for criticizing art work in Western culture. But it is one of the most ridiculous things I have ever heard in my career as a web designer." I was very confused by this comment and asked WebMD's Robert Blakeley. Mr. Blakeley is a product manager and works in business intelligence for WebMD; his education and training is in art. His artwork has appeared in NYC exhibitions and elsewhere. What were his thoughts on this?
"It should be fairly obvious that the same visual principals apply to fine art as graphic design or web design. While the purposes may be different, the principals are the same. In 'fine' art, we have some 5,000 years of visual experimentation to draw on. For example, take the idea of focus. A visual image has a hierarchy of importance. In Renaissance art, they used perspective and other devices to set up primary areas of focus to 'organize' the painting. The main character was usually at the center or apex of the design and coincided with the perspective vanishing point. Later, Baroque painters managed the challenge of multiple primary and secondary focus points, a balancing of a more complex visual hierarchy. Jackson Pollack and his spaghetti painting took the thing further by having every part of equal importance. Every part is a primary focus (net result, no primary area of focus) so you tend to look at the whole painting at once, as an object. Web pages also need to manage the visual hierarchy or the user loses understanding. And the visual tool box is the same."
Cultural differences in visual communication
The next part of the comment was "You are ignoring cultural differences that may arise in visual communication." I responded with "I completely agree that what I was saying was specific to western cultural traditions. I normally make that quite clear in my presentations and often go on to explain how different cultures place things differently in their visual fields. My apologies if I failed to make this clear in this presentation."
I asked Susan Prager of SusanPrager.com her thoughts on this. Susan is a well known and respected web designer in the NYC area, and she has had a great deal of experience designing websites for different cultural biases with focuses on East Asian and American audiences. One thing she's become greatly aware of is that what makes good design in Asia won't work in the United States and vice versa.
"That's bizarre, saying that different art traditions don't show up in web design. The whole concept of color and what color means… the meaning of different shapes and how that meaning changes when you change where they appear on a web page. This is all part of visual communication. You're dealing with cultures with many thousands of years of art telling them what to look for and how to prepare for it. I can't imagine ignoring art history in the design process. You can't give your visual message meaning without it."
Usability and design
The next objection in the reader's email was: "You are also ignoring basic web usability guidelines and design guidelines."
I responded with "I also hope I made clear that my background is in neither usability nor design. Those are not my fields of study. My background is in how people interact with their environments. To that point, often how people are designed to interact with their environments doesn't lend itself well to current best practices in usability and design."
Here I turned to award winning graphic artist and web designer John Scullin of Skolenimation.
"Visual design and usability shouldn't be confused because they're two fields that weren't meant to overlap. They do so on the web because it's the first interface where people are meant to do more than look and feel; they're supposed to respond while they're on a site. You have to make things understandable (that's the usability part) but you can only make things understandable if you know how they'll respond to what they see (that's the design part). You have kick-ass sites that nobody can use and completely usable sites that are so ugly nobody wants to navigate them. Most web designers tend towards usability and it shows in most sites. You know where to click but you don't want to. Design, and I mean making links and content appealing enough for people to want to look at them and click, that's where you get kick-ass sites where visitors navigate easily and do business on."
Additional resources:
- "Where You Should Stick Your Ad and Why" IMedia Column Bibliography
- Color Research Bibliography and Paper Now Available
- Impact (The Use of Colors and Color Imagery in Direct Response Marketing and eBranding)
- Reading Virtual Minds
Upcoming conferences:
- Society for New Communications Research Annual Research Symposium & Awards Gala 5-8 Dec 07 in Boston
- New Communications Forum 2008 22-25 April 08 in Sonoma Valley
Joseph Carrabis is CRO and founder of NextStage Evolution and NextStage Global and founder of KnowledgeNH and NH Business Development Network. He is senior research fellow and board advisor for the Society for New Communications Research. Read full bio.
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