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Comment by AnthonyMouse | Hacker News Reader

When it comes to optimizing a sorting algorithm for some hardware, it probably doesn't matter. Now suppose you're making a user interface design choice. It would be good to have someone who knows how users from a different subculture would interpret it.

But things like that often have more to do with culture/geography than race. Someone from Mississippi will have a much different perspective than someone from Massachusetts, even if they're the same race. And a larger difference in perspective than two people who grew up across the street from each other, even if they're different races. But that doesn't show up in the group photo for the brochure.

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Is there evidence that Americans of different ethnicities interpret user interface features differently?

If not, isn’t it concerning that in the year 2024 we casually assume that these sorts of differences exist? Isn’t that an example of DEI thinking accentuating the notion of differences? It seems like a new take on this: https://youtu.be/E8PBrhFN35c?si=90DSnwgHubAvJwr8

Cultural differences exist. For example, colors have different meanings in different cultures:

https://blog.grio.com/2020/06/uxui-design-across-cultures-us...

Ethnicity is then being used as a proxy for culture, even though it's a bad one, because it's a visible one.

It's basically starting from the premise that cultural diversity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. Whereas traditional racism is more like starting from the premise that cultural homogeneity is valuable and then applying Goodhart's Law to the thing most easily measured. It's applying the same fallacy to the opposite premise, which is an error regardless of which premise is correct.

UI colors can be racist?

This is ideological tea-leaf reading.

UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures.

Suppose you don't care anything for all of this political noise and you just want to make money. Do you want to use the same colors on your website in the countries where red implies danger as the ones where red implies prosperity and vitality? If it will be the same for everyone, might knowing how some large subset of the viewers will interpret it change what you choose?

There is no evidence for what you are saying.

red has pretty strong connotations in some east asian cultures.

just like how 13 is taboo, 4 and 7 can be taboo. these things do matter sometimes. respect matters.

Show me software that's bright red due and doesn't use 4 and 7 due to 'culture'.

That's a big goalpost move from the original claim that meanings can be different.

No it isn't. They said UIs are different in different cultures because "red implies prosperity and vitality" so prove it.

Show me some examples and evidence. Anyone can make claims based off of cliches, but when it comes time to back it up with real world examples everyone either goes silent or gets upset and makes the same claim more aggressively.

Chinese historical art has a use of red due to cinnabar being believed to be healthy and that persists in a few areas like red envelopes, but 'red means prosperity in some cultures' doesn't mean their computer interfaces are different. Their stop lights are the same too.

https://soft4europe-france.com/documentation2018/11-40/EN/do...

The actual claim was "UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures."

I don't know about that prosperity thing, but I can give you an example that happens a lot. Some groups use red to mean stopped and green to mean moving, while others use red to mean danger and moving, and green to mean safe and stopped. This isn't directly country-related but I believe there's significant variation based on location.

Oh, wait, while searching to double check that I found an example of exactly what you asked for. CJK stock market displays tend to use red for increases, while the West uses red for decreases.

I searched and I didn't see any examples of that. Oh, wait, I searched again and all I saw was the opposite. Oh, wait, I searched again and still found typical displays.

Here's a couple. I searched for nyse display and china stock market display. There's a lot of examples when you do those searches.

https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-JH281_0708NY_M_...

https://c8.alamy.com/comp/A14FJ5/a-screen-with-the-market-sh...

You can also do a text search for china red green stocks, or japan red green stocks.

Bonus fun fact: If the little display on the taxi in japan is red, that means available, and green means occupied.

The post I replied to talked about websites and they didn't say different colors were used in some circumstances, they literally mean different things.

Why does everyone have the same colors in traffic lights (except for japan's blue lights which comes from language, not cultural significance)

https://www.rd.com/article/heres-japan-blue-traffic-lights/

It's funny that this person speaks multiple languages and actually used different apps but was downvoted anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40271465

> The post I replied to talked about websites and they didn't say different colors were used in some circumstances, they literally mean different things.

I'll quote it again.

"UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures."

And all the examples I gave have red meaning opposite things in user interfaces based on cultural assumptions.

Off/danger. Number up/number down. Occupied/available.

Websites were just one example of UI.

> It's funny that this person speaks multiple languages and actually used different apps but was downvoted anyway.

They said they haven't seen any. That doesn't override actual examples!

How do you know any of that is cultural and not just something due to arbitrary choices made a long time ago that became standards?

If it was cultural then newer designs like computer interfaces would be affected. Also you ignored traffic lights.

> arbitrary choices made a long time ago that became standards

That sounds like a description of culture.

> If it was cultural then newer designs like computer interfaces would be affected.

Does the big TV run by a computer not count as an interface?

Okay, do you have some pictures of chinese stock websites?

> Also you ignored traffic lights.

What about them? Yes Japan uses the same color scheme as the US for traffic lights. Because the idea spread that way. I don't see how that's relevant to either of my examples that talked about Japan?

...you're not suggesting that one situation where colors match invalidates situations where colors are different, right?

That sounds like a description of culture.

So either colors were chosen because they have a deep cultural meaning or they were chosen arbitrarily?

Those are the options, yes. Or a mixture.

Older choices affect newer choices, and consistent choices become culture.

Once upon a time, stock chart makers made an arbitrary choice influenced by older choices that had become culture. Those older choices being a general association with fortune, and a specific association with loss of money. (With intermediate steps, I think, but I'm being brief.) And those associations were different for different groups. Now the chart colors are part of culture too.

A choice being arbitrary doesn't mean it was random. You can trace the influence here.

But even if it had been random, it's culture now. Money in red has implications, and the implications vary.

So now ui choices in different countries is because of deep cultural meaning, but they could be arbitrary, but that doesn't mean it's random and now the arbitrary choice is now the culture? Seems like circular logic to rationalize arbitrary choices made anonymously.

You have to analyze it on a case by case basis. It only sounds silly if you try to generalize everything into a single rule.

Different choices have different levels of cultural depth. Often the depth is zero. But it varies.

And culture is created by arbitrary decisions coalescing into guidelines. If it's not coalescing, then it's not culture. You have to look at the big picture to tell if something is culture or not.

The big picture is that people stop when the traffic light turns red.

...so you are suggesting that one situation where colors match invalidates situations where colors are different.

You're implying that if red's meaning in one situation is the same, then red's other meanings in other situations must be the same.

Okay I guess. I don't know why you would think that, but I don't have much hope of convincing you otherwise.

If it's all chosen because colors are deeply cultural then they would be the same. If important stuff is all different and arbitrary then it's not cultural.

> all chosen because colors are deeply cultural

> all different and arbitrary

Those are the extremes of the spectrum.

Color choices are not at either extreme.

Most color choices are arbitrary, some of them are shallowly cultural, and some of them are deeply cultural.

HN having an orange banner at the top isn't significantly cultural. Traffic lights are worldwide culture. Black or green for positive money and red for negative money are US culture. Red for positive money and black or green for negative money are Chinese culture. These choices tie into older associations, which affects the depth. But even if they were shallow they'd still be culture.

Do you have a source for any of this?

You want me to pick one out of google? They all say the same thing https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/paradox-red-green-festive-per... https://www.bbc.com/news/av/business-33464903

Here's a link full of its own links https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/6982/excep...

Or we can look at how old the western association with red as negative money is: https://grammarist.com/idiom/in-the-red-and-in-the-black/

If you wanted specific links you should have said so 4 days ago after I wrote "You can also do a text search for china red green stocks, or japan red green stocks."

If you want a citation for HN's orange not being deeply cultural, then you got me, I didn't actually check. But let's see... "The orange logo was chosen because it was the opposite of VC websites which were typically forest green or navy blue" yeah that's not deep culture.

> UI colors can have different meanings in different cultures.

Really? Can you provide actual examples?

JFYI, I speak Russian, Ukrainian, German, and Mandarin Chinese. I've used native-written apps in all these languages, and I have not seen any significant variations in the UI color selections.

I guess Mandarin Chinese is probably the best example because the red color is seen as more "festive", so it's more common in various app icons.

If you use black for “bad” or destructive operations and white for “good” or creative operations, you’re perpetuating literal anti-blackness.

You aren’t fooling anyone.

japanese ui is often more dense and information rich. there are left to right and right to left cultures. tonnes of difference between cultures and understand of the world.

Does hiring someone whose native script is “right-to-left” make a difference to the product though?

On the one hand, there are people who deeply understand the technical intricacies of Unicode BiDi yet can’t actually read Arabic or Hebrew

On the other hand, if the business doesn’t view Arabic markets (or Israel) as viable to pursue, it doesn’t matter how much you are aware of those languages, it is irrelevant to the product

And what about backend developer roles, where UI concerns like BiDi are largely a non-issue?

The canonical example is hand gestures and their use in UI elements such as mouse cursors.

More broadly speaking, exposure to different languages can often make you aware of issues that are not familiar to someone who only knows English, such as e.g.: existence of grammatical gender; pluralization that has to deal with more cases than just one/many (e.g. different forms for 2/3/...); the fact that placeholders in a format string may need to be reordered in different locales; drastically different length of text in different languages; the fact that notions such as upper/lowercase are not universal; sequences of letters that are treated as single characters in some languages; etc. Now of course all this applies to non-native speakers as well, but for more "exotic" languages out there it's usually their native speakers who provide such experience.

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