Narcissism and Myopia in User Experience

I've begun reading a book on American culture (notes on which will probably be added to my study site in a number of weeks or), which struck me at first, and strikes me still, as an odd thing to do. Most people, Americans especially, consider that they know their own culture and would not need to consult such a reference to learn about it. But what occurred to me is, "do I really?" That is: do I really know my own culture, or do I presume that my individual experiences and perception are universal. Which in turn raises doubts that I, in fact, do have a firm grasp of the culture of my audience - and whether anyone does. This seems to me an important consideration for user experience design.

Having traveled much and lived in many places, I'm well aware that American culture is by no means uniform, and that there are great differences in beliefs and attitudes from place to place - and yet when communicating through a given channel, especially mass-media such as the Internet, I am communicating to a broad audience of individuals with different cultures, whose experience and precipitating values and beliefs - the elements that compose their culture - are different from my own.

And in the UX profession, it is common to criticize clients and project sponsors for making much the same assumption. that the user of any given interface is "like me" in every way, and failing to consider that the user is very much unlike themselves, primarily in terms of their level of knowledge about the company, industry, and products, and needs more information and a simpler process. It strikes me that the UX Architect/Designer/Producer may be guilty of the very same things - having tunnel-vision. We are generally in a somewhat larger tunnel, but nonetheless constrained to our own myopic conceptions of users based on our personal experience of culture.

It's particularly poignant because I am currently living and working in San Antonio, Texas, a community on the border of the nation, with a distinct and unusual culture compared to other places I have been. And while the firm I work for is well attentive to the notion of serving their customers, and does extensive usability testing, it is generally with test subjects who are also within the San Antonio area - and who are members of very much the same culture.

I had much the same reaction to the foundational work in human-computer interaction done by Jared Spool, whose work is enlightening and highly respected, but whose research is based on a very narrow demographic: college students in southeastern Massachusetts. While I generally accept his findings and the recommendations based on them, there's always the nagging question of whether they are quite correct - especially when designing a site with a target market that does not match the demographics of his test subjects.

In the end, I don't know if there is a good answer to that question - for my own work, for Spool's research, or for anyone. I tend to doubt that there is any company or any scholar that has done a broader study, or done usability testing in a sufficiently broad array of geographic locations to form a truly representative sample of test subjects that would accurately represent the whole of the American market. And in that sense, user experience design may be inevitably tainted by some degree of self-reference and narrowness of vision.