One of the most pressing challenges is crafting interfaces in ways that remain applicable across varying culture contexts.
Senior UIUX Designer Damilare Kila envisions the solution in shedding the formality built into rigid personas and, rather, adopting an ethnographic approach, one which regards the transformation of culture as something ongoing and fluid and devises digital experiences that will change alongside it.
Classic UX is deeply invested in personas: tidy dossiers of a conceptual user’s objectives, peeves, and behaviours. Helpful in concept, personas tend to become frozen portraits: They rigidify users into types fast losing meaning if and when practices shift culturally.
Damilare believes design based only on personas will become outdated as the instant practices shift culturally. Design, he thinks, cannot be grounded in suppositions—it needs always to be dynamic, responding to the rhythm of change in society.
From Observation to Insight: Turning Ethnography Into Design Fuel
Ethnographic UX converts designing into a conversation with culture. It involves looking at the ways in which people live, talk, and make meaning, and then translating those learnings into interfaces. Damilare borrows from anthropological research practices, like observation in the field, long interviews, and immersion in context, to understand not only what users do but why they do it.
In running a project of designing new business instruments among West African small business owners, he noticed most of these entrepreneurs never utilized these instruments in an individual sense. These instruments were, rather, utilized in group-based practices of decision-making, whereby social validation and trust were given equal consideration alongside financial data.
By designing interfaces consistent with these group-based decision-making practices, like group-based views of saving, he facilitated the development of an interface much deeper in influence than a product of design founded on an individualised “business-owner persona.”
Damilare’s work demonstrates the concept of interfaces not being built as completed products, but more so, as malleable systems. A specific example was designing a work collaboration platform for an international client. Early personas reflected a consistent set of productivity expectations across markets.
Ethnographic research, though, revealed large differences in culture: whereas workers under hierarchical cultures valued formal approval processes and regimented workflows, workers under more level-structured environments valued open work and loosely formed groups.
Rather than asking for a single frozen design, Damilare created adaptive elements that allowed the interface to reorder itself based on usage patterns over time. In hierarchical teams, automated assignment of tasks reinforced accountability; in more equal groups, the same tool underscored the value of flexible task switching. As a result, the platform became a dynamic ecosystem, skilled at adapting to cultural conditions while avoiding alienation of any user group.
Where Data Ends and Culture Begins
Analytics is very valuable; no raw data, though, can define cultural relevance by itself. Ethnography, for Damilare, closes this gap. While analytics can suggest that young users will abandon a feature more rapidly than an older demographic, ethnographic research can articulate why, perhaps revealing that the feature conflicts with understanding of culture around issues of privacy or personal expression.
Combining ethnographic understanding and data, Damilare has at every turn proved that design choices can be influenced not only by the behaviour of the end-user, but by the cultural logic behind their decision-making.
Cultural Foresight: Designing With Tomorrow’s Behaviours in Mind
The core of Damilare’s work is cultural foresight. He argues UX needs to foresee not only existing behavioural tendencies but future developments of these behaviours as well. In a specific project, he was involved in the creation of a virtual learning platform at a time when online education was taking off. Instead of assuming students would use content individually, his work foresaw a rising culture of peer-to-peer, social learning.
By embedding functionality such as group-level, shared annotations and groupnote taking, the design foresaw a future shift in culture that made the platform more resilient and relevant when online learning saw a later spike at a worldwide level.
Designing for Change: Making Technology More Human
Damilare’s work makes a compelling case for why ethnographic UX is necessary, not optional. As products become more and more global, the idea of a frozen persona somehow capturing an active and changing human reality is no longer tenable. Therefore, interfaces will need to advance in tandem with the societies for which they serve, evolving alongside shifts in values, language, and interaction norms.
By integrating cultural intelligence into the very centre of design, Damilare proved technology can retain its humanness and responsiveness even under conditions of rapid transformation. Not only does his approach optimize the end-user experience beyond hard definitions, but he sets a standard for designing interfaces as learnable, adaptive, and culturally resonant dynamic systems.
