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Board game and website design for our multicultural team

Culture Quilt is a deck of visually stimulating cards that spark conversations and prompt players to share their cultural associations that helps them keep cultural factors in mind when working in a multicultural team.

Our colorful boardgame with pastel colors and tile-like designs

Goal

Having strong cultural intelligence can foster an environment of empathy and understanding, leading to more effective collaboration. That's why we aimed to address the diversity within the team by enhancing cultural intelligence and improving collaborative dynamics and effectiveness in working together.

Challenge

Diverse teams can be a blessing but can make things more difficult at the same time. As a multicultural company, this was something we had dealt with too. We decided to find ways to make diverse teams better at understanding each other and working well with clients from different backgrounds.

Outcome

Using the Triple Diamond Framework, we came up with the idea of "Culture Quilt," a card game for cultural exchange. We created both physical and virtual versions along with a vibrant, brutalist-style website. The final product seeks to promote inclusivity, understanding, and effective communication within diverse teams.

45
Unique cards
5
Interviews internally
3
Final concepts
1 /
Introduction

How we started

Since we are a multicultural team, we decided to explore a topic that affects us all as coworkers, which is Cultural Intelligence.

We identified that, as a company, we need to improve our understanding and empathy towards the people we work with, to better our way of working together.

The process illustrated in a triple diamond sprints map
2 /
Discovery sprint

Understand and define

The goal of this initial phase was to discover the cultural intelligence topic in general, understand it and define a problem statement to solve.

For this, we relied on different information gathering methods, like Desk Research, Interviews with experts in the field, Interviews with the target audience and competitor analysis.

Expected outcome:

  • To get clear problem statements
  • To get a list of user needs
  • To get insights into the target audience’s behaviours and preferences

Techniques

  • Desk Research
  • Interviews with experts
  • Interviews with target audience
  • Competitor analysis
A whiteboard showing the results of internal interviews

We mapped the issues found

As we got further into the research, we found different problem spaces that affect the different cultures that form, nowadays, also UX Studio.

We explored topics related to cultural biases when someone from another country joins the company, when coworkers from other countries visit, in our case, Hungary, when working with international clients, and more. After thorough analysis and prioritisation we found the central problem to solve.

We stated our “How Might We” question

"How might we develop and cultivate cultural intelligence competencies within the workspace to promote inclusivity, understanding, and effective communication across diverse teams?"
3 /
Design sprint

Ideate, decide, prototype and validate

Once we had the problem to solve, a team of designers started to ideate on completely different solutions. We knew we wanted to create any kind of product that would help diverse teams improve their cultural intelligence. The question was how.

In this sprint we came up with 3 different proposals, showing different directions:

Explorations of a virtual platform, an in-house communication platform and a co-drawing game

Results

For the validation stage, after creating these ideas, we presented them to a fictional stakeholder within our company. This was a crucial step to make the necessary decisions based on the feedback we would get.

We needed to know if any of these directions were viable, and if not, how might we change directions to come up with something that actually worked.

4 /
Iteration

Re-Ideate, decide, prototype and validate

  1. We took the third idea presented above to create something new.
  2. We kept the gamification aspect to engage people to participate in learning about cultural intelligence, and ditched the screens and the cultural fun facts, to come up with a card game.
  3. We ideated again on how we could create a card game that can be played in the office, among coworkers, to cultivate understanding and improving team work.

This time again, we came up with 3 ideas and we also ran quick tests on each to get early feedback from potential users of the game.

Exploration of card game concepts
5 /
Outcome

The winning idea: Culture Quilt

It is for diverse teams who wish to collaborate more and have a common ground with their teammates. In CultureQuilt:

  1. Users can access different introspective questions that encourage cultural exchange among teammates.
  2. Every card that is answered, is placed somewhere with its unique design which will eventually form a vibrant quilt.
  3. Each time when played, the participating team will create a new pattern.

The final product

We created the final design of the cards, both physical and virtual, and also a website to promote the product.

For this, we created a colorful and fun aesthetic based on UX Studio’s identity.

By taking simple shapes and turning them into compositions, and adding vibrant colors with a brutalist style, see below the final product.

On the website users can also have a sneak peak of  the game itself. And those who are interested can sign up for early access to the physical or virtual deck format.

A screenshot of Culture Quilt's colorful website advertising the boardgame
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Client
UX Studio
Industry
Human Resources
Service
UI/UX Design
Team Setup
3 Designers
+ 1 Researcher
Timeline
1 month