Building a High Quality Global User Experience
Ask anyone who has released software to a global audience without properly understanding the implications for the user experience, and they’ll tell you. It’s a train wreck. Building a comprehensible and intuitive application for an internationalized application requires diligence, focus, and forethought. Failure to ensure a properly acculturated, translated, and localized product can not only hurt tactical business goals, but can create lasting damage at a strategic level.
The good news is that the work isn’t difficult; it just requires creativity, mindfulness, and flexibility. In this article, we will discuss why usability is so important in the global marketplace, how global usability is different, and then explore three case studies to understand best practices and lessons learned. Project managers will get a nice overview of the process, usability experts may get a few creative ideas on how to research and design, and techies can gather some insight into how a sound international user experience impacts the work that they do.
Defining and Justifying Usability
Lately, there has been a lot of talk about usability and questions about its being a flavor of the month marketing topic to enhance sales. The reality is that usability has always been crucial to business success, but it’s just now that businesses are recognizing and profiting from it. Good usability is the junction where audience needs and business goals meet. More than a pretty interface, and more than giving the user a lot of options, usability is creating a holistic experience, encompassing all aspects of the user’s interaction with an application.
Global usability, in short, ensures an application is functionally intuitive and culturally appropriate for all of the intended audiences. If it’s done right, the aesthetic manifests itself in elegant design and creative thought at all levels of the application, and is actively owned by each discipline on the team. Project managers need to make sure that they account for usability exercises in the budget and project plan. Engineering teams need to ensure that the backend of the system can accommodate the needs of users from many different backgrounds -- both linguistic and technical. Information designers need to step out of their cultural boundaries and plan for people who might not perceive information the way they do.
From a strategic standpoint, global usability is critical to ensure that the information or functionality being localized is relevant and worthwhile to the user. If not, the user will not engage, and money is wasted on extraneous effort. Moreover, users around the world will have different technological backgrounds and widely varying computers. These differences impact how they will use the application being made for them, and must be accounted for in system design. When crafting the site or application, the information schema must reflect the mental model of users from different places, with different backgrounds. For example, workers in the U.S. expect to find retirement information to be the purview of HR. In Europe, it’s a function of treasury. Similarly, different cultures will interpret words differently. The word ‘flat’ in Nebraska is not the same as a ‘flat in London. Homonyms in different languages can be tricky, as well. In English, ‘gift’ is a nice treat, like a fruit basket. In German, ‘gift’ means poison. Not only do these details need to be considered when creating and naming a navigation schema, they will also impact both internal site search, as well as findability on the web. Test your navigation schemas with multiple audiences around the world, create faceted taxonomies for each language, and work with search specialists to ensure that the internal and external searches are properly translated.
Another fundamental issue to consider is how visual design works when applied to multiple languages. Languages which go left to right must have a different design than those that go right to left. An application in Hebrew needs to have different iconography, imagery, and layout than its English counterpart. This can mean developing more content and layouts to support it. Different character sets can pose challenges on the level of the technical infrastructure as well; if a legacy database system only handles basic ASCII characters, then information input by the user can wreak havoc with the system, raising cost of ownership. Therefore, developing a good international user experience is crucial to the success of any global software development effort.
Research and Analysis for Global Usability – Three Case Studies
It should now be clear why global usability is important, but the real trick is how to do it. Experience is the best teacher, so let’s examine a few case studies and discuss what these companies did to help their users meet their goals, regardless of where they are from and how they do business. First, we will discuss how a large manufacturer is tailoring a web application to reach audiences in Japan and China, and explore how the research was conducted and the lessons learned. Next, we’ll look at how a well known service provider in Europe planned, built, and deployed a large retail marketing website for customers in 38 countries and 10 languages. Finally, we’ll take a look at how a major consumer products brand retooled an internal knowledge management application for multiple business groups in 10 different languages. By analyzing these cases, the reader will come away with an understanding of best practices, as well as mistakes to avoid.
One company is a global manufacturer of the components found in cellphones, video games, televisions, you name it. They wrestle for market share with four other big players, and all are simultaneously upgrading their web sites to enhance communications with their audiences in Japan and China. The business goal was to optimize their site for this growing user audience as best as possible, while conforming to time and budget constraints. The company knew that translating everything at once was impossible, and wanted to prioritize the critical content for different user types. The first exercise was to perform a competitive analysis to understand the overall market landscape. In addition to a traditional evaluation, the level of translation, cultural sensitivity, and brand positioning within the respective marketplaces was also reviewed. It was found that level of translation correlated closely to brand perception, as well as overall site functionality. Sites also used imagery which was specific to the particular cultures, using themes, languages, and design choices tailored to a specific locale.
This demonstrated where localization efforts needed to be focused, and more importantly, provided context for the next step in the exercise: user surveys. The surveys were conducted with massive audiences in China and Japan, and were challenging to write. Not only did a well crafted usability survey have to be developed to explore weak spots from a user’s standpoint, but the survey also probed areas such as cultural expectations, the impact of translation quality on brand perception, and myriad considerations required to make their version of the site easy for them to use.
Once developed, the site had to be translated into the native languages, flawlessly from both a grammatical as well as cultural standpoint. In order to do so, the approach was to enlist native speakers to assist in writing the English version, before writing the translations. As the survey results were studied, it was important that we accounted for cultural bias in the answers. Normally, Japanese culture tends to be very group oriented, and people are generally hesitant to express opinions which differ from the group. The saying “The nail which sticks out gets hammered down” sums the mindset up nicely. Unlike the results from the Chinese user group, which tended to skew towards one side or the other, the Japanese data tended to form a bell curve. It is important to consider how phenomena like this impacts research, and account for it.
The end result, however, was worth the effort. With a strong understanding of what mattered to the end users, and deep insight into areas which needed to be changed, a strategic go to market plan was conceived which addressed larger business needs. On a tactical level, informed decisions ensured that the site would be able to scale easily, and grow to support the usability needs of an international audience.
The next case study talks about planning an information schema which will adapt to the needs of users around the world. The client is a household brand name in Europe, with a strong presence across the EU and beyond. They wanted to create a common user experience which reinforced the brand globally, while speaking to the particular needs of the individual consumer in each country. Differing product lines in each country, combined with individual IT staff and marketing teams, complicated the approach. The goal of the information design was to ensure that the application architecture was consistent across the brand, yet individualized for each firm while accounting for growth over time. To meet this objective, the first step was crafting a comprehensive, detailed sitemap which depicted core content elements organized by key topics. A very clean architecture diagram was constructed to educate stakeholders around the world. Each country office listed what they needed on the sitemap, what was extraneous, and what additional content should be added. This information design was coupled with a visual design that could be cleanly represented in multiple languages. Testing on multiple platforms and browsers made it clear, for instance, that drop down menus need to be given room to expand to accommodate the relative length of German content. Arranging the navigation on a vertical plane not only made more room for multiple translations, but it also provided the room needed to add their particular service offerings. This exercise ensured that the site architectures and interfaces were consistent across the board, while allowing each country to feel like their individual customer’s needs were being met. End users saw the content that they needed, in a consistent look and feel which conveyed the brand values. Another key aspect of a solid user experience was ensuring that the site content properly addressed the audience. For example, the UK site had a cheeky jocular voice which was perfect for wry British humor, but was not well received by the German audience. By working with local translators and involving local marketing resources, the copy was crafted to the specific needs of that audience.
The final practical example is from one of the largest manufactures of consumer goods. Given their global breadth and the immense span of their product offerings, business strategies, and internal practices, it was clear that a knowledge management portal was required. Over time, each of the different countries had evolved something particular to their user’s needs, not always considering the standardization requirements of a global enterprise. In this case, the task was to combine the best aspects of different countries into one knowledge management repository that would be easy to manage and use. One key consideration was how different users in different areas searched for information; to make it easy to find, the application should be tailored to what the users are looking for. Where different countries had different requirements and cultural viewpoints, they would search using different phrases, and expect to find information in different places. One approach to making the site more usable for these different locations was to understand how they searched. Analysis of log files to map keyword prevalence was a very helpful exercise, as it provided insight not only on how users searched, but what was most important to them.
By looking at what users sought, and how their mental models grouped information, we were able to create a navigation system which supported ongoing globalization and growth. The structure enabled different administrators in the geographic areas (EMEA, Europe, etc) to insert specific data, while maintaining a globally consistent organizational schema. Another interesting output of the research was an understanding of how multiple languages impacted taxonomy. Some specific industry terms were global, while others were different between individual countries with common languages, such as Germany and Austria. A faceted localized taxonomy was developed for each country, to improve site search and search marketing.
Users are the key to success for any application, and building them a good user experience requires the participation of the entire team. Developing a system which is usable across cultural and linguistic boundaries compounds the challenges, as a multitude of other factors must be considered in order to ensure success. But the extra work is critical, and pays off in a happier user base and fiscally successful applications. There are many steps that can be taken to account for the user’s need, and based on past experience, it is possible to learn and grow, simplifying the process and improving the output.