Heather (Hyerin) Im
Works
Publications
Creatives
About
Memeterview: Meme-Based Culture Elicitation Tool for Cross-Cultural User Studies
As Korean companies expand overseas, designers often face challenges in conducting user research with participants from different cultural backgrounds. Traditional methods struggle to capture implicit cultural nuances, leading to incomplete or even misleading insights. To address this gap, I designed Memeterview, a meme-based culture elicitation tool that leverages internet memes to surface hidden emotions, values, and cultural assumptions.
Through interviews and live studies with professional designers and foreign participants, Memeterview demonstrated its potential to overcome cultural barriers, build rapport, and elicit deeper insights that conventional methods often miss. The research highlights memes as a novel medium for cross-cultural user studies and proposes future directions for integrating such creative tools into design practice.
Heather Hyerin Im
Master’s Thesis, 2022