Before design, I lived in Indonesia doing cross-cultural and NGO work. My degree, a Bachelor of Intercultural Ministries, was a four-year program in linguistics, phonetics, cultural research methodology, and cross-cultural communication. The work demanded that I learn how to read an entirely foreign context: the social structures, the values, the unspoken rules, the language. I couldn't assume anything. I had to observe, ask, hypothesize, and revise. That's the same process I use in UX research.
The work itself was concrete. I lived in a remote field location and spent my days learning an unwritten language and the culture around it. That meant designing my own research approaches, documenting what I observed, mapping the social and communication norms of the community, and building relationships through daily, patient, in-person engagement. The long-term goal of the larger team was literacy development and access to education, aid, and medical care for an underserved population. My role was the groundwork: enough fluency and cultural understanding for any of that to be possible.
There are two valuable lessons, summed up in a few phrases I learned while living overseas. I use these every time I sit down with a user or pick up a new brief. I am not afraid of different, and I am always sure there is a way to figure whatever it is, out.
"Everything is figure-out-able."
There is always a path through. I don't stop at hard, I iterate until I find it.
"Different isn't wrong. Different is just different."
Years of cross-cultural work trained me to suspend judgment and get curious first. Every research session benefits from that reflex.
"When I'm doing UX research, I'm doing the same thing I did in Indonesia, entering a context I don't fully understand yet, suspending my assumptions, and figuring out how this world actually works for the people living in it."
