I wasn't at all. I had to read the next paragraphs to figure out that the Porsche was intended to be the "better design".

I suspect that this might be due to me being European though. Classical American car designs, like that Cadillac, are very rare here and (possibly as a result of that,) considered quite classy. For one, I'd rather have the Cadillac parked on my driveway than the Porsche.

Please don't make us "Europeans" look bad. The part of Europe I come from those kind of American cars are only considered "classy" by white thrash. Or people own them "ironically".

Then again, it's also been a few decades since owning a Porsche was a sign of good taste...

France here, and the Porsche seems to be a sort of toy, something like a Renault twingo[1], and don't ask me which one I prefer. :)

On the other side, the Cadillac has nice berline curve and make me think of our Citroen C6[2].

So, as we can see, design cars are culture local. Can we say the same thing for UI design ? Maybe the ideal design for an american differs that the ideal design for an european or an asiatic person ?

I have always thought that only the job, the grade, and the period-to-computers-exposure change the way users interact with their machines. Obviously the problem is bigger.

I am convinced that this essay touch right in the hearth something fundamental about cultural differences and their influences in design choices. In the same way that the GP languages for real people are not Lisp and Smalltalk but Java/C#, Python and Ruby. If Lisp is a widely used language, so are Ocaml and Erlang, but the let's face it: they're not.

So in conclusion, I think I will definitely not design the same UI for an US pg than for an EU pg, it need being study in details but there is differences in the mind and in the tastes, so that one have to adapt to the UI of the others.

Any idea/link about that ?

[1] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/83/Ren...

[2] http://images.caradisiac.com/logos/6/2/4/9/136249/S5-Citroen...

I am also not a car person, 'the beetle' looks to me as a 'playboy' horse, while the other car looks more luxurious and more expensive.

"and immediately I was able to see that the Porsche"

That also happens with, say, movies. A really good movie about something that you normally wouldn't care about (in my case, say Sports) will be enjoyable by people who typically aren't interested in the subject many times.