Cultive – Cultivating Inclusion Across Cultures

Three questions to the project team

What was the particular challenge of the project from a UX point of view?
Cultive isn’t a translation app, so the main challenge was conveying emotional tone, cultural nuance, and relational context through UX. The Live Voice feature was especially difficult because meaning shifts with tone and relationships. We used culturally grounded characters who speak naturally to show how the same expression can be interpreted differently across cultures.

The Discover feature posed another challenge. Many social cues that locals recognize instantly are unfamiliar to newcomers, so we presented realistic utterances and explained the underlying intent and nuance in a simple, guided way. Helping users understand these hidden cultural signals without adding cognitive load was one of the toughest tasks.

What was your personal highlight in the development process? Was there an aha!-moment, was there a low point?
One of the most meaningful moments came when an early assumption—that high-context, indirect expressions common in East Asian cultures feel unfamiliar to people from other regions—was clearly confirmed during user interviews.

A participant shared that “the same joke carries a completely different emotion in Korean,” and this made me realize that the issue I had identified wasn’t abstract at all but a real communication challenge.

This insight shaped the feature direction. Implementing cultural nuance was difficult, but watching users notice and relate to those subtle differences made me feel that the goal of turning cultural context into an understandable and usable UX was being achieved.

Where do you see yourself and the project in the next five years?
In the next five years, I hope to expand Cultive so it can support communication across more cultural situations. While it currently focuses on nuance between Korean and English speakers, I plan to broaden its reach through continued testing and collaboration, helping people in different contexts navigate cross-cultural interactions with more ease.

Personally, I want to deepen my work in UX focused on cultural sensitivity and emotional understanding. I believe design can help people from varied backgrounds connect more clearly and handle complex moments with confidence. Cultive is the beginning of that direction, and I hope to keep improving it with real user insights as both the project and I grow.