Houston is one of the most linguistically diverse places on Earth. More than a hundred languages are spoken across the city on any given day. Walk through it and the software in everyone’s pocket is, in theory, the same — but for a great many people, it doesn’t quite fit. It works, technically. It just wasn’t built for them.
The usual assumption is that this is a translation problem: take the English app, swap the words for another language, and you’re done. Translation matters, but it’s the smallest part of the gap. The deeper trouble is that software carries the assumptions of the place it was built, and those assumptions hide in corners that have nothing to do with the words on screen.
Consider a name. A great deal of software assumes a name is a first name and a last name, in that order, written in a familiar alphabet. That single assumption quietly breaks for people with one name, with several family names, with names that don’t fit the boxes — and the breakage isn’t cosmetic. It’s the form that won’t submit, the account that can’t be created, the person locked out by a design that never imagined them.
The same hidden assumptions run everywhere. The order of a date. The shape of an address. Which direction the text flows. How a phone number is formed. How money is written, and whether the user even thinks in the currency the app insists on. Each is a small decision made, usually unconsciously, in favor of whoever the builders happened to be — and each is a small wall for everyone else.
This is what people mean, without quite saying it, when an app “feels foreign.” It isn’t the language. It’s the steady accumulation of choices that assumed a different user — a sense, hard to name, that the tool was made for someone standing somewhere else.
Building for a place like Houston means giving up the convenience of those assumptions: letting a name be whatever it is, an address take whatever shape it takes, the person tell you who they are rather than being told. It’s more work, and it shows only in the small corners most people never consciously notice. Those corners are exactly where someone decides, without knowing why, that a piece of software was — or wasn’t — built with them in mind.
We pay attention to those corners on purpose — the small assumptions that decide whether software fits a person or merely tolerates them. More about how we work →