Favorite Quotes
"Global work adds to the criteria for success. It's not just "can people complete the tasks or use the product effectively." Now you want to know whether it fits comfortably into all of their local contexts, whether it gives them a sense of trust, or matches the way they think about the product, across languages and cultures." (W. Quesenbery, Global UX Design and Research in a Connected World, Chapter 9)I agree with this statement because design is much more than usability. Depending on the product, other things can be equally important: eliciting trust, respect, comfort, motivation, etc. That can be very different for different cultures, so the work of design globalization is hard in the sense that it requires a researcher/designer to find universal truths that will work across cultures.
"Although many graphics do work for more than one culture and can sometimes communicate across boundaries of language, graphics are subject to cultural interpretation (Forslund, 1996). Without careful choices and appropriate rendering, expressing ideas graphically is no guarantee against misinterpretation when viewed by someone from a different culture." (Horton, "Graphics: The Not Quite Universal Language")
Even designed within the same culture, graphics can be misinterpreted if proper visualizations are not created (too detailed, not clear what they depicts, or other).This means design choices should be considered even more carefully when designing for a foreign culture, since graphics and their elements are subject to local interpretation - the prism of the language, traditions, signs (good and bad), gestures, colors, etc.
"The strategy is simple. First, globalize to make the graphics work for as many people as possible. Then, localize the graphics that are not truly universal to specific cultures." (Horton, "Graphics: The Not Quite Universal Language")
I agree that you don't have to localize every time. Some icons/design elements work equally well across languages and cultures when they are simple, neutral, and represent general concepts. I would start with a global design and then test it with foreign users (see how they interpret it) to determine if it needs to be localized, or the global design works just fine.
Explorations
The readings made me curious if there are any online tools or databases for international graphics, because such a shared resource would be really helpful for designers and would lessen the amount of research they need to do. I found the Noun Project, which is an online curation of icons, created by a "global community." Their mission statement is, "Creating, sharing, and celebrating the world's visual language". At first, it seemed like a really cool tool, but I decided to test it out. Typing in the word "OK" in the search bar revealed a collection of graphics - from checkmarks to hand gestures, some of which can be considered inappropriate for some cultures or misinterpreted. It's nice that it offers graphics from designers all over the world, but I haven't found a way to search by a designer's country. I think this feature would have been very helpful because it would mean you could filter graphics collections by country and thus find out how locals depict certain concepts that you are searching for.
Sketches
Exercise
Analysis of "Best Global Site" (microsoft.com) using bytelevel's criteria.
Why was microsoft.com ranked in the Top 10 Best Global Sites for 2018? Here's what I think:
✓GLOBAL
REACH
It supports a great number of languages as can be found when clicking on the globe icon at the bottom of the global (English) version of the website. The global web template is so simple (rectangular images, minimal text) that it gets easily adapted (localized) to any language, even to Arabic with its right to left reading. The languages offered by the global website are easy to understand for native speakers because they include local spellings.
✓GLOBAL
NAVIGATION
Microsoft.com uses country and language codes in the browser fields for local websites (e.g., the Russian website gets the "/ru-ru" code at the end, as in "https://www.microsoft.com/ru-ru". Ru-ru in this case stands for (Russia - Russian). But even when you type in "microsoft.ru", the website recognizes you are looking for the Russian version of the site, so it redirects you to this very /ru-ru/ page. Some countries' codes are different, even when the language is the same. For example, Microsoft offers French adaptations for both, Tunisia and France, but except for the common language, the websites look slightly differently (content-wise), and due to that specific localization, the two websites use different country and language codes - /fr-fr/ vs. /fr-tn/.
The global gateway looks like an icon of a globe (a universal sign) and is located at the very bottom of the website, no matter what language you have selected, so you can easily navigate back to the global version.
Also, when a foreign site is selected, a pop-up window appears that offers a translation of the website to the language of your geolocation, since your IP is taken into account. For example, when I select the Turkish website, it offers to translate the site's content to English (since I'm located in the USA) and actually does a pretty good job at translating it!
✓GLOBAL/MOBILE
ARCHITECTURE
The global architecture is simple and stays pretty much unchanged across various local versions. There is a simple top navigation menu with 4-6 options and scrollable images with call-to-action buttons. Towards the bottom of the page you have different rectangular images with various products and short bits of text and descriptions. This very geometric and simple model can be easily adapted for local websites.
✓LOCALIZATION
& SOCIAL
The global website and local sites do not have any icons of graphics, except for Microsoft's own applications icons and social media icons at the bottom of localized pages. There is a lack of localization in the imagery - most photos of people and products are re-used across different local sites. This means images of white people and families appear on the Chinese (Hong Kong site) and Arabic sites. The text orientation is adapted to right-to-left for the latter. The sites overall look generic and do not seem to be localized, at least from a visual perspective.
Currencies and numbers are locally adapted. For example, for the local site in the Netherlands, the currency is shown in euros, and the spelling of the number is also modified from what it would look like in America (1.277,99 vs. 1,277.99). The phone numbers for support also look to be locally adapted.
Social media icons on the local sites direct you to local channels (Twitter, Facebook, Indeed, etc) of information and they seem to be localized very well - in the kind of images they include (showing people of local nationality) and the curation of local user-generated content, thus making them great local channels for user communication.
As a result of being a great global platform that allows for easy localization, but not providing enough cultural localization at its current state, microsoft.com gets a B grade from me.
Inspirations
The practical in-class exercises (especially the second one) were very helpful because they made me put my knowledge and theory to practice. As a researcher, I should be asking questions like these all the time, when a foreign audience is involved, so coming up with a variety of research topics for cultural dimensions is a great tool of thinking outside the [cultural] box. Next time I'm preparing my research questions, I'll try to think of the cultural dimensions and incorporate such questions into my plan, if they prove to be valuable to explore for any given project.
As far as globalization/localization of graphics goes, the readings made me realize the importance of the smallest details - such as hand gestures, elements of attire, and even colors. It's hard to miss such things when you are not aware that somebody might think differently than you do, so just like with any UX (local or international), testing is super important. I will keep that thought in my mind at all times, and hopefully, it will push me to test (and to encourage my colleagues to test) more often.
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