What do global teams miss when they try to understand local users? As part of our first Local Lens report, The Myth of the Digital Health Native, we spoke to Tokyo-based researcher Maya Azumi about the realities of healthtech adoption in Japan. In this conversation, Maya reflects on the cultural nuances that shape behaviour, the assumptions global teams should be cautious of, and why some aspects of a market can only be understood through lived experience.
The Local Lens Series was created to help Product, UX and Innovation teams close the gap between global assumptions and local reality. Each report explores how culture, context and everyday behaviour influence the way people engage with technology in different markets around the world.
Our first report, The Myth of the Digital Health Native, examines a common assumption: that digitally fluent Millennials will naturally embrace health technology. Through research conducted in Japan, we found a more nuanced picture, one shaped by cultural attitudes towards privacy, wellness, routine and social responsibility.
To explore these themes further, we sat down with Maya Azumi, the Tokyo-based researcher behind the report. Having lived and worked in both Japan and the UK, Maya brings a unique perspective on the challenges of interpreting behaviour across cultures. In this interview, she shares what surprised her most about the findings, the assumptions she believes global teams should challenge, and why understanding local users requires more than data alone.
The report opens by debunking a core assumption about millennial tech adoption. What was the most surprising contradiction you found between digital fluency and actual healthtech usage in Japan?
The use of simple healthtech like pedometer, weight-control, and diet apps is common, but not the more advanced ones that require data sharing or AI-driven support. As a Japanese, this didn’t surprise me, since digital fluency doesn’t always lead to adopting new tech, and adoption of AI is not prevailing in Japan yet. People here tend to be cautious about new technologies, especially when it involves personal health information, so the gap between digital skills and actual usage feels quite natural to me.
One big theme in the report is that wellness in Japan is often subtle, embedded, and communal. Could you share a cultural behaviour or product example that really brought this to life for you during the research?
I saw one participant doing yoga at home with her baby beside her, which felt like a subtle and embedded form of wellness. For the “communal” aspect, a good example is people running together with friends or colleagues, making wellness a shared activity. And as I know more generally in Japan, people often apologise to coworkers after taking sick leave, which also reflects the communal sense of wellness.
You’ve worked between London and Tokyo for many years. How did your own experience of returning to Japan sharpen your view on what global teams often miss when they think about local users?
As someone born and raised in Japan, I can fully understand Japanese ways of thinking and feeling. But when I actually returned to live in Japan, I was struck by the strength of peer pressure and how easily I was absorbed back into it. Living abroad allows you to observe things from a distance, but there are atmospheres and undercurrents you can only feel when you are fully immersed in the culture and everyday life. These influences are often hard for global teams to grasp, and I see it as the role of local researchers to convey them.
The Local Lens series is about helping UX teams break free from “default thinking.” Based on this report, what’s one default assumption you think UXRs should be especially cautious of, regardless of which market they’re working in?
One default assumption UXRs should be cautious of is that people everywhere engage with digital technologies in the same way. Historical cultural differences are easier to notice and often treated with respect, but digital tools are wrongly assumed to be “equally new” for everyone and therefore used in the same way. This belief is further reinforced by the perception that, because people increasingly encounter Western culture through the internet and media, their ways of thinking and feeling are becoming more homogeneous. Such assumptions blind us to important differences in how people actually adopt and integrate technology.
This report focuses on Japan, but many of the insights feel relevant beyond that market. In what ways do you think the findings here could inspire better design or strategy decisions globally?
The project focuses on healthtech apps in Japan, but the real insight comes from looking more deeply at the broader concept of wellness in Japan to understand why and how these apps are used. This report highlights connections that may appear unrelated on the surface but are in fact deeply linked, and this way of thinking can inspire better global design and strategy. Such insights are drawn from observing people’s everyday activities and then uncovering the feelings behind them, which are shaped by unique cultural and social contexts. Understanding those feelings is essential, because it helps frame both the problems and the opportunities for creating designs and strategies that resonate more broadly.
Finally, if a UX team has only five minutes to skim the report, which one section would you want them to focus on, and why?
I would suggest focusing on the 4th insight, because it clearly illustrates the contrast between a typical assumption and the actual reality.
The findings in this report are just one example of how cultural nuance can influence user behaviour in ways that aren’t visible through analytics alone. If you’re exploring new markets, localising an existing product, or trying to understand why adoption differs across regions, we’d be happy to discuss it.
Get in touch with Nitika Wahi, Commercial Director at intO, to explore how our network of Local Researchers helps global Product, UX and Innovation teams close the context gap and make more confident decisions.
Nitika Wahi
Commercial Director, Studio intO
Get in touch with nitika@studio-into.com
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What happens when one of product development's most accepted assumptions turns out to be wrong? In Japan, highly connected, digitally fluent Millennials are proving surprisingly cautious adopters of health technology. This article explores what their behaviour reveals about the limits of demographic thinking and why context remains one of the most overlooked drivers of product success.
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