The mind is a powerful tool
This week, my daily reading returned to one of my favorite pieces: D.A. Norman's The design of everyday things, which continually preaches the idea of how it is an object's fault if we don't know how to use it - not the other way around. Chapter 12 uses the example of a lego police motorcycle to emphasize this concept done well; despite never seeing this motorcycle in my life, I already know intuitively how to put it together -- as did the vast majority of people given the same problem. While there is an instruction manual, it's not needed here, and someone who can't read that manual still knows how to put it together. This is how inclusive design should work, incorporating redundancy and more than one way to solve a problem into our designs without it coming off as obvious or condescending. Just because something should be easy/obvious doesn't mean it has to be boring or feel like it's talking down to you. By taking advantage of logical, semantic, and cultural models in the users brain (as well as physical constraints on the website), we can create effective and elegant UI's usable by almost everyone.
The double-edged sword of cultural constraints
It is worth noting that cultural contraints should hold a special place in our designs due to how they behave so differently from other contsraints. While they can be far and away the most powerful constraints or signifiers for a target audience, they also have the incredible power to lead someone far from the beaten path if the customs and mental models of their culture strongly differ from your own. Norman emphasizes this with the same example of the lego motorcycle: if someone comes from somewhere where the colorings of the lights on the bike were different, it would be much harder to intuitively put it together the Americanized way. Whenever we are taking advantage of a cultural constraint to communicate to our user, we need to always be asking ourselves if only people who will understand the meaning will be using our website. If not, we need to insure that there are redundancies implemented for others so nobody is left out.
Credit
Norman, D. A. (2013). The design of everyday things. MIT Press.