Summary: Content, products and services across channels can and often do reflect your cultural biases, not those of your audience. UX has always been about aligning with the user, but when it comes to cultural awareness, there’s a big gap. Addressing this with a cross-cultural UX strategy is critical to user adoption, whether designing for inclusion at home or globally.

Happy New Year—Unless It’s NOT

January 1st. Champagne corks pop, confetti falls, and “Happy New Year!” echoes across social media feeds, TV screens and mobile app messages worldwide.

But for billions of people around the globe, the real new year hasn’t arrived yet. Or it already passed. Or it’s quietly rotating through the calendar on an entirely different schedule.

If you’re designing digital products, marketing campaigns, or user experiences for a global audience, is that cheerful “Happy New Year!” message you automated for January 1st? It might inadvertently convey the impression that January 1st is the only New Year on the calendar. Instead, the calendar that’s familiar in your culture might not be relevant in all cultures.

When January 1st Isn’t Universal

This was a shocker for me: I just got introduced to September= New Year in Ethiopia. While much of the world is settling into autumn routines, Ethiopians are celebrating Enkutatash—their New Year. How it’s celebrated: Children dress in new clothes and go door-to-door singing songs. Families exchange bunches of yellow daisies. The entire country marks a fresh beginning as the rainy season ends and the land bursts into bloom.

Why this matters: Ethiopia follows its own calendar, which is approximately 7-8 years behind the Gregorian calendar and consists of 13 months. Right now, as I write this in 2026 by the Gregorian calendar, it’s 2018 in Ethiopia. Knowing the ‘cultural codes’ of the user communities your products and services reach is critical, especially if your content, product or services (including AI tools) reach global audiences.

I was first introduced to the idea of different calendars many years ago doing a call center usability project for a big US bank. The employee phone banker’s knowledge base differentiated between Julian and Gregorian calendars. This became a big joke among the team. We thought it was ridiculous, but we weren’t seeing it from a cross-cultural perspective.

Julian or Gregorian? Who knew?

The Julian calendar is a solar calendar introduced by Julius Caesar in 45 BCE, consisting of 365 days with an extra day added every four years as a leap year. It was used widely in the Roman Empire and has since been largely replaced by the Gregorian calendar, although some religious groups still use it today.

This Is Not an Edge Case

Ethiopia isn’t alone. Across the globe, cultures mark the turning of the year at profoundly different moments:

• In spring, millions celebrate Nowruz (Persian New Year) at the exact moment of the spring equinox—a 3,000-year-old tradition observed from Iran to Central Asia. Meanwhile, Thai New Year (Songkran) transforms entire cities into joyful water fights each April, and various Hindu New Year celebrations like Gudi Padwa bring renewal to communities across South Asia.
• In autumn, the Jewish New Year (Rosh Hashanah) ushers in the High Holy Days with the sound of the shofar. At the same time, some Indian communities celebrate Diwali as their new year, filling the night with millions of flickering lights.
• Between winter and spring, over a billion people celebrate Chinese New Year, when lunar calculations determine a date that dances between late January and mid-February. The 15-day celebration shuts down businesses, moves entire populations, and marks the world’s largest annual human migration. Red envelopes with money (physical and digital) are exchanged between friends and family for good luck.

See: Finding Your Red Envelope UX strategy

And, because the Islamic New Year rotates through every season on a 33-year cycle, it is constantly moving. It’s a reminder that time itself can be culturally constructed in radically different ways.

Why This Matters for Digital UX Design

Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone building digital experiences: these aren’t quaint traditions practised by small, isolated groups. We’re talking about massive user bases:

• Chinese New Year alone affects 1.4+ billion people
• Islamic calendar users: 1.8+ billion
• Hindu calendar followers: 1+ billion
• Plus countless millions observing Persian, Jewish, Thai, Ethiopian, and other calendar systems

When your app sends a “Happy New Year!” push notification on January 1st to a user in Tehran who’s been celebrating Nowruz for 3,000 years, you’re not being inclusive—you’re being inadvertently culturally clueless. When your onboarding flow asks users to “set your 2026 goals” but doesn’t account for users living in 2018, 1446, or 5786 by their cultural calendars, you’ve created friction where there should be welcome.

Beyond “Happy Holidays”: The Localization Challenge

This goes far deeper than swapping out holiday greetings. Consider:

• Date pickers that assume everyone uses MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY formats, ignoring the dozen other ways humans record time.
• Calendar widgets that start the week on Sunday (or Monday) without recognizing that Saturday, Friday, or other days begin the week in various cultures.
• Scheduling tools that don’t account for different weekend days (Friday-Saturday in much of the Middle East, Sunday only in parts of Asia). Or running financial or Monitoring and Evaluation of grant reporting based on your calendar, not the different timing of the education-centric calendar of the school year.
• Content calendars that plan campaigns around Western holidays while missing the biggest shopping events in other markets (hello, China’s Singles’ Day is way more important than US/UK Black Friday)
• AI that gets formality wrong: A customer service bot uses casual language and first names with all users. American users love it. Japanese users find it disrespectful. German users are confused by the false familiarity. The same prompt produces friction for 70% of the user base.
• AI that gets assumptions wrong: A scheduling assistant assumes everyone’s weekend is Saturday-Sunday. It suggests “weekend meetings” on Thursday-Friday for users in Saudi Arabia, or tries to book Sunday meetings for Israeli users on Shabbat.

Check out this great parody of Google’s early version of agentic AI voice bot (pulled and scraped after a failed launch), getting India’s in-the-moment culture all wrong.

Let’s Not Forget The Business Case for Cross-Cultural UX

Cultural blindness in UX isn’t just an ethical issue—it’s a competitive disadvantage. When Airbnb expanded into China, they didn’t just translate their interface; they rebuilt core features to align with Chinese New Year travel patterns. When e-commerce platforms ignore Ramadan shopping behaviors or Diwali gifting traditions, they leave money on the table.

Users notice when products feel like they were “made for someone else and translated for me.” And increasingly, they have local alternatives that get it right from the start.

For me, the exciting part: designing for cultural diversity isn’t about compromise or complexity…it’s about building more flexible, thoughtful, and ultimately better products.

This means:

• Thinking in systems that can adapt rather than assuming defaults
• Researching actual user contexts instead of projecting your own
• Building optionality into date systems, calendars, and time-based features
• Questioning assumptions about what seems “universal”
• Creating delight by recognizing and honoring what matters to your users
• Aligning with cultural rhythms by understanding cultural mental models, personas and journeys

Go Deeper: 

If you’re a UX designer, product manager, or developer who wants to create experiences that truly work for global audiences, cultural calendar awareness is just the beginning. Accurate cross-cultural localization touches everything from color symbolism to reading patterns, from gesture meanings to privacy expectations, from humor styles to trust signals.

Join my new Maven Cross-Cultural Design intensive, which dives deep into designing products that feel native—not translated—to users around the world.

This course is for you if you’re:

• UX/UI Designers who want to move beyond surface-level internationalization into deep cultural design fluency
• Product Managers building for global markets or diverse user bases need to make informed decisions about localization priorities
• Developers who implement the systems that make localization possible and want to understand the “why” behind the requirements
• Content Strategists crafting messaging that resonates across cultural contexts without losing authenticity
• Inclusive Design advocates who recognize that accessibility isn’t just about ability but about designing for the full spectrum of human cultural diversity
• Startup Founders planning global expansion and wanting to build cultural intelligence into your product from day one
• Design Researchers seeking frameworks for uncovering cultural assumptions in user research and testing
• Anyone who believes that good design means designing for the world as it actually is—gloriously diverse, culturally complex, and far more interesting than any single perspective can capture

What you’ll learn:

• Calendar systems and temporal design patterns across cultures
• Color, symbolism, and visual language that crosses borders
• Designing for different reading directions and information hierarchies
• Cultural dimensions of trust, privacy, and social interaction in digital spaces
• Payment systems, address formats, and the messy reality of “universal” data
• Testing and research methods for cross-cultural validation
• Building scalable localization systems into your design process
• Real case studies of what worked (and what spectacularly didn’t)
• How to conduct global user research and develop a UX strategy that fits multiple locales

Because here’s the truth: January 1st isn’t universal. Neither is anything else you think is “standard.”

The sooner we design with that reality in mind, the better our products become—not just for users in distant markets, but for the increasingly diverse, globally connected communities using our products every day.

Ready to wish your users a happy New Year on the day they actually celebrate it?

→ Enroll in Cross-Cultural Design intensive over at Maven 

P.S. — It’s currently 2026 in the Gregorian calendar, 2018 in Ethiopia, 1446 in the Islamic calendar, 5786 in the Hebrew calendar, and 4723 in the Chinese calendar. Happy New Year—whenever that is for you.