An American pizza is different from an Indian pizza—Americans’ understanding of what ingredients make more sense for their culture, climate and vegetation, lifestyle (most of them keep it light weight so that they can have it on the go), and their taste are different.
Their cars are different, for similar reasons.
Their idea of family time on Sunday afternoons is different.
Their movies are made on a different scale. Since I mentioned Pizza and the movies, the Italians film making history is well documented, and their influence on Hollywood. Borrowing ideas and finding inspiration—both are signs of a learning organization, culturally too.
When an American is trying to fill an online form to buy something, to create a new invoice, to assign a new lead in the CRM, or to book an online appointment with a physician—these are human needs for a human’s experience—digital and life experiences.
There is nothing American or Indian or Italian to separate the expectations in our digital experiences.
The error messages, the onboarding steps, the dashboards, and the search user experience are not too dissimilar. Human needs in the digital experiences are not too different across the geographies for similar use cases when they are in similar situations and have similar goals.
So, why do we see most of the content design and content strategy, or even the UX design or service design positions in America? Why their product teams have the basic common sense to design and ship products for the human experience goals. Why is it that we see most of these content roles are open in Mountain View California, or Austin, or NY?
I hear the same stories from many friends in Europe—Austria, Spain, Norway, Italy, France, Finland. Most of them see that their organizations are sleeping like Indian product teams.
There are no climate factors—biodiversity or forests that build Americans’ content common sense.
And it is not about culture—culture is we, the people. Culture becomes important when infrastructure and investments are a criteria such as for designing walkable zones in our cities or for designing cycle-friendly cities. Or when policy and system change are the driving factors.
We are talking about digital products—the JavaScript and a few forms, the backend, AWS, Figma, CRM, emails, Notion or Google Drive, and Linear.
Thousands of product teams are working in crowded nooks and corners of India. Without much content support for their design or product goals?
Without the right meaning or context in their digital experiences.
This is why design is broken because design hiring is broken. Content is broken because content hiring is broken because content habits were never encouraged because the content education is broken (post graduate course in UX and design by IIT Bombay).
(I felt the same vibes when I thought of American English.)
Can a pizza be so local?
