Factors When Designing for Intercultural Visual Communications

Part of the process when designing a visual is identifying who is the expected audience and what is the purpose of the visual communication? Yau talks about this in his “things to consider”: consider what your audience knows and doesn’t and what they need to know to understand the visualization (p. 260). This is paramount as the audience and purpose will drive everything else. And for an intercultural visualization, it is essential. For example, if the audience is global and the purpose is informative, that will most likely dictate a different visual than if the audience is North Americans and the purpose is to persuade them to buy a product. This can sound pretty basic but many people don’t take the audience, or at least the primary audience, and purpose into account when designing.

A problem associated with visualizations in an intercultural context is that the visual creator can’t possibly know all of the in-and-outs of the various cultures. And can’t possibly know how each audience may interpret the visual. However, that does not mean we can’t try to incorporate cultural associations into our visuals.

I think we all have a tendency to think culture = geography. That is not true. Culture isn’t that clear cut. Not only can culture “cross” geographic lines but there can also be various cultures or characteristics of culture within a geographic area. Plus we must also consider which geographic lines are we talking about. For example, we could be thinking of Asia but within Asia there are a number of cultures (and countries) such as Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, etc. However, within each of those there are multiple layers of culture. How we might design for those various cultures goes back to the initial question of who is the audience and what do you want them to do?

But it isn’t just about culture. “Even more important is the fact that many other factors beyond culture are likely to shape the visual communication of professional documents” (Brumberger, 2014, p. 101). What are other factors? Color is the one that usually comes to mind first. Color has always been treated as culturally defined, yet according to Brumberger’s article this may not be true and seen more as a myth that practical research does not support (p. 102). Besides color there are other factors of visual communication. Those factors are viewing patterns and focal points (Brumberger, 2014, p. 103).

We don’t necessarily need to make visuals simplistic to ensure understanding; we just need to follow Yau’s recommendation of “explaining complex concepts within a human context” (p. 257). Yau also recommends avoiding jargon; at my work we call this the “significant other test”. Although not limited to visuals, the idea is to ask “could my significant other understand this?”. That helps ensure there is no jargon or acronyms or unexplained concepts.

One aspect of visual communication that may be forgotten is how the interpretation of the visual(s) affect the user performance. As Brumberger states, the actual user experience is the final piece in the intercultural visual communication puzzle (p. 108). This ties back to my initial comment regarding audience and purpose. If there is an expectation that the user does something with the visual or based on the visual, that needs to be taken into account when designing the visual.

I think Brumberger said it best when they stated designing intercultural visual communication “is more about the process rather than simply adhering to a checklist”. (p. 95)

References

Brumberger, E. (2014). Toward A Framework For Intercultural Visual Communication. International Professional Communication Journal, 91–116. https://doi.org/10.3917/cnx

Yau, N. (2013). Data Points: Visualization That Means Something (pp. 202–275). Book, Wiley.