Thinking i18n

While designing an application or website for multilingual capabilities or Internationalization (i18n), culture and context play a very significant role in the way people perceive and approach their interaction with an application or website.

Many offer services in various languages especially online marketers, retailers and financial products through translation in order to penetrate into local markets. During this process users find it difficult to navigate in these applications. Usability testing is one of the methods to refine the application by tracing problems; however a standard structure of usability testing becomes very rigorous in multilingual scenario and does not offer clear insights for evaluating such applications. Therefore it is important to design applications keeping in mind the internationalization aspect. Here are a few common suggestions to keep in mind while designing multilingual applications:

1. Language

Avoid the use of machine or automatic translators. Allow the application to address the language preferences of users.

2. Culture

Conduct user research to understand the cultural considerations for your target audience. Regardless of language used, the experience that you create must be culturally relevant to achieve an emotional connection with the audience.

For example: USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov has the same structure and look and feel, the Spanish site offers content , images and color scheme that resonates with the Hispanic community.

3. User Expectations

Manage user expectations by providing notice when a user is going to navigate to an English-only area, external website, or require a special program or software to view an application.

4. Toggle

Enable users to toggle between comparable content or features on the English and multilingual application if available.

One of the main goals of vendors offering applications and websites in multiple languages is to ensure their presence globally. These applications offer them a channel to reach local customers in an efficient and effective manner. As Steve Krug (author of the book - Don’t make me think!) puts it’s across that we use the website/applications for scanning, satisfying and muddling through and if people can’t find their way around it they would simply not use the system. Usability is a quality attribute of an application/website which measures the ease with which users interact with the website gauging the effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction with which specified users achieve specified goals while using a software product.

Multilingualism adds another dimension to the usability of an application by incorporating the cultural context to which the user belongs. Only translation from one language to another doesn’t result in mapping of cultural norms, thus the user doesn’t feel at home with the application/website.

Following are some results from a web survey; the results are not exhaustive and have its own limitations, however the results would give an insight how people have been thinking internationalization.

News Websites

After surveying websites like Yahoo and BBC, you notice that news websites in general vary in design because of prevailing customization for each language. These sites are separate from each other in terms of layout, design and content due to extensive localization thus keeping the cultural context of users it is meant for. However due to extensive localization you find it difficult to correlate them across languages.

While testing these sites on different languages yahoo shows design obstruction when it comes to navigation, while BBC, the simplicity and consistency of the design aided ease and efficiency of navigation.

Note: I assumed the navigation in English language in each of the websites, as the benchmark, given that I am accustomed to reading news in English.

Ecommerce Applications

Ecommerce applications offer products and services to users. Amazon and eBay are websites that I considered for this category considering the fact that their presence is known on a large scale across the globe.

The common pattern found across these two applications was that both Amazon and eBay have two aspects viz.

i. Static information/content

ii. Content for a group of audiences

The static content typically the global content remains constant across all languages for the simple reason that their business is same across all audiences. Global content in Amazon and eBay typically comprises of product catalogs and account services which remain same in terms of information content and hence the content need not be drafted from scratch. Thus issues arising out of global content would be purely translation issues.

The distinctive feature of content for a group of audiences target specific needs. It is created keeping in mind specific needs of the users. For example, product reviews and other information that assist customers in their buying decision falls under local content because they are drafted by the local audience which incorporates cultural context.

After the above studies one can say that websites/application under a specific domain have similar patterns of localization based on the target audience. However one of the major aspects with respect to internationalization/multilingual is the cultural context. One needs to design keeping in mind the target audience. It could be only translating the key areas, or redesigning certain aspects of the application on how they behave or redesign the complete application.