UX Localization: Design for the global audience by Shantelle Liu, Zoom
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As we are in a global market, there’s more to win over international audiences than just translate text into another language or simply updating UI components. Localizing your user experience design is to adapt international products for a specific region to create relevant and appropriate experiences for users. With extensive experience in UX/UI design and visual design for the global audience, Shantelle Liu will share the the matters, the definition, and best practices of localizing user experience design.
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UX Localization: Design for the global audience by Shantelle Liu, Zoom
- 1. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 UX LOCALIZATION A 文 Design For The Global Audience
- 2. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 ABOUT UX and UI Designer Minimalist, user-centric, pixel-perfect Large tech companies, public sectors, and non-profits Currently: eCommerce UX Designer at Zoom
- 3. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHY The importance of localization to users and business WHAT The definition of user experience localization HOW Best practices for design localization CONTENT
- 4. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHY 9% Of new coming online user speak or write in English 25.9% Of online content is in English
- 5. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 UX localization is way beyond text translation WHY
- 6. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHY Design decisions need to take localization into consideration.
- 7. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHY
- 8. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHY MUJI America MUJI Japan
- 9. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHAT Adapting international products for a specific region to create relevant and appropriate experience for users.
- 10. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 WHAT Language Test translation and finding the right meaning, tone, and style Compliance Be compliant with local legal requirements Verify the cultural appropriateness of languages and visuals Interaction Fit your design content into the user habits of your target market Culture
- 11. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW Best Practices in UX Localization
- 12. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 As a manager HOW 01 Increase the localization awareness in business strategy 02 Integrate design localization in the product development workflow 04 Adjust design strategy based on the local user data metrics 03 Be compliant with local law requirements 05 Leverage internal and external resources
- 13. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 UX HOW 01 Use formats that align with local users’ habits
- 14. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 02 Be mindful on the content UX
- 15. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 03 Don’t make assumptions UX
- 16. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 01 Stretch test with the real copy English Português UI
- 17. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 02 Responsiveness will save your time UI
- 18. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 03 Consider cultural meaning in colors UI 🇨🇳 🥰 🇺🇸 😳
- 19. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 04 Use icons wisely UI
- 20. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 05 Order matters UI
- 21. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW 06 Take care of images and videos UI
- 22. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 HOW Don’t over think ● Users aren’t that different from country to country ● It’s ok to not be perfect ● Users don’t expect flawless language
- 23. Shantelle Liu | Oct 2022 THANK YOU
Notas del editor
- I am a designer with experience in UX, UI, and visual design. I’m currently working at Zoom as an eCommerce designer where I am creating design solutions to help our users easily purchase and manage their Zoom products online. Throughout my career, I am lucky enough to have the privilege to work for some large tech companies and public sectors where I learn how to design at a scale for a global audience. I was born and raised in China, and came to the United States to study design and started my design career here. Living here as a first generation immigrant, I’m constantly switching between two languages and cultures.Half of the apps on my phone are in English, and the other half are in Chinese. This gave me the unique perspective of belonging to two cultures, and the ability to study the difference of the digital interaction within those two cultures. As I design for a variety of people from other cultures through my work experience, I developed a natural empathy for cultural similarities and differences in the digital world.
- One thing I noticed is that localization is not something you can learn from school or textbook. When you are a UX design student, you work on a specific problems with limited use cases. But when you enter the professional work, especially when you working for a large audience, things start shifting. What you need to take into consideration is beyond the screen you are working on. So today I’d like to share some of my insights on localizing user experience. I will talk about why this is so important to our user and business, what it means as UX localization, and at the end I will also share some best practices from UX and UI perspective.
- To start with, I’d to share some data with you all. Research has shown “The online population continues to grow at a rate of nearly 1M per day, but only 9 out of 100 newcomers use, speak, or write in English.” In 1995, 90% of the online content are written in English, but in 2022, only 25.9% of online content is in English. English is no longer the dominant language in the digital world. And this trend isn’t stopping. In the early days of the internet, localization was often limited to larger tech companies that already had the resources to expand into different regional markets. So, it was a luxury thing to do. But now, competition and demand in the tech industry have practically make localization as a common standard, because everyone wants to get more market share.
- So you’re probably wondering, OK, let’s go translate English into as many languages as possible. Hold on for a second, I want you to take a look an example. This is a slider we are very familiar with. (short description of the function). However, it will be a totally different story in other part of the planet. In some countries, it will look like this and have a mirror interaction. Right to left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew not only change the direction of text compared to English, but they also change the direction of interaction. You can image how this will apply in other places. For example, next button will logically be on the right and next button will be on the left. UX localization is not as simple as just text translation. It’s about fit your design content to the usage habits of your target market rather than just a word to word translation
- Localization also affects our design decisions. Take this design I recently worked on as an example. All the micro copy we want to test on the button works well in English. They all fit into our viewport. However, if you just made a decision based on which one performs better in English, you are running issues with other languages. Some CTAs in Russian couldn’t fit into smaller mobile devices. And that will require our UX designers to think alternative solutions, such as just a text link CTA, or move some information to other placements so we can keep the CTA short.
- when we’re working across a more diverse slate of countries and cultures, we must make more significant changes to the images as well as the language. See below for how we present a “Happy Hits” playlist in the United States, India, Taiwan and Turkey.
- Localization no only has impact to small UI components or micro copy, but also has a large impact to product strategy. MUJI America has more a minimal design with a big highlight in product images. MUJI America also shows less faces and more focuses on products. MUJI Japan uses a tight design where their target audience feels more familiar with. MUJI Japan uses more portrait photography with a storytelling approach. As we can see from those examples, localizing your user experience is a very complicated process. It’s not just translation. You need to use correct number conversion and currencies, adapt the UI to different space requirements, verify the cultural appropriateness of graphics and images, etc.
- So what is UX localization exactly? In my opinion, UX localization means adapting international products for a specific region to create relevant and appropriate experiences for people. It involves everything from translation—finding the right meaning, tone, and style—to all the details from how people pay and the terms of services they read, and the images, colors, icons, fonts, and cultural references they see. In some cases, you will also hear terms like cross-cultural design, geo design, etc. It’s all about laying the groundwork for the app or website to meet global users’ needs and expectations.
- Localization is the art of adapting an internationalized product for a set of people who share the same language, interactions, laws, and culture. Those four things are the foundation for us when it comes to UX localization. For languages, besides the basic translation, you also need to tailor your copy so that makes sense to the local audience You also need to be aware of the local laws, which can effect you design layout. We often time needs to add a checkbox or legal disclaimer for certain countries, and display more or less information for different regions And of course, you need to change you design interactio based on your target market. I will talk about it in more depth in a second. Lastly, culture needs to plays a big role in our design considerations too.
- With that being said, how should we do for UX localization?
- If you are in a manager position, you need to understand that it takes a village to get localization down. So you need to work with cross functional partners and educate people the importance of the localization. Localization is not just a part of design process, it also affects how the business work in other countries or regions . As more of more designers have a say in the table nowadays, we should up level localization to a company-wide initiative. Once you have the blessing from the leadership, you will need to build out a process to let localization to be a part of design workflow. For example, target country and regions should be include in the creativity brief. Design variants need to be identified before graphic production starts. You probably will also need to set up rules on naming conversions and file handling for those geo design variants. Proper localization should really begin at the conceptual stage. As you plan and design your user experience, your brand should aim to build a platform that can adapt. One of the most important cross functional partners during localization is Legal team. You want them to weigh in your design and give feedback because compliances is their specialty. As a design manager, you need to make sure legal team will do an extra round of review on the localized design variants. Another important partner is data analytics team. You can work with them to understand your user behavior in different location. For example, some regions like APAC are heavily on mobile and some regions might use chatbot more often. Those data can help you to decide how different the user experience should be in your target market. One last thing is let experts do their thing. There are a lot of companies that provide localization service for the creative team. Even figma and sketch now has localization tools to help streamline the process. My favorite is Crowdin.
- Ensuring support for local currencies, units, dates, time, address formats, and time zone. Common design systems such as Google’s Material design and Apple’s Human Interface all have guidelines for localization, especially RTL languages.
- Because you content will be translated into so many languages, you want to cause as less confusions as possibles. Even if you’re not directly involved in writing copy, ensure that the products you design are free of idioms and slang. For example, some phrases English natives speakers would be familiar with, like raining cats and dogs, will make no sense to those who are not proficient in English, or, worse, be offended by them. Use clear, simple words in your products that accurately convey their intended meanings.
- If you have time and recourse, don’t just do a general user research and call out a day. Knowing what country someone lives in gives enough information on the legal and cultural setup, but it doesn’t tell us what language they’re expecting. For example, just knowing that someone lives in Canada doesn’t tell us whether they’re expecting content in English or French. So do more research if you can. That way you can have a full picture on who you are designing for.
- One of the most common issue with localizating UI is text wrapping. When you know your target language, you should do a stretch testing to see how your design hold in the extreme cases. As a basis, you can design your UI for the "longest" text. Generally speaking, longer text like German and Russian is 30% longer than English. And Asian characters like Chinese and Japanese are usually 30% shorter than English.
- To solve the challenge of text length, a great way to do is to make sure you UI components ar responsive. Minimize the use of bounding boxes and containers with fixed dimensions. This includes buttons. If a call-to-action requires a lengthy text string, use a hyperlink instead of a button.
- A lot of nuance can be conveyed with color, and we often use color to signify different sections of an app or website. But colors have different meanings in different cultures. For examples, In Asian cultures, red represents good luck and joy, while in the western countries it represents "stop" or "error."
- Over time, icons have become standard representations of different elements, no matter the language. Most of icons are globally recognizable to users, such as close, save, trash can etc. So use icons whenever possible for any elements that don't require a written label. But be mindful, you still need to consider mirroring icons when you work on RTL languages.
- One concern with fully-automatic address auto-complete features is international users/addresses. In several countries, the street name is written before the street number. This in practice forces users to type the entire address line 1 themselves because while the auto-complete will suggest the correct street name after just a few characters, the suggestion won’t have a street number. This limits the auto-complete to detecting postal code and city. More critically, some users will end up selecting the auto-complete suggestion and only have street name pre-filled. Assuming they notice the missing number, users will now have to edit the pre-filled information; which we’ve found can be particularly taxing on touch devices (i.e. tablets and smartphones).
- When sourcing images or videos for your application, avoid showing symbolism or language that might be offensive or confusing to users in other cultures. In your creative team, you can even do a design critique, and invite colleagues or peers from other cultures to challenge your assumptions. Get their feedback. And use more relevant images and visuals just like the example we saw early in MUJI website.
- People are far more similar globally than you might expect them to be. Some places are more multilingual than you think. We all human beings connected in some way. There are some globally shared phenomenons, like we all want to less distractions on the page, and we all want to get the job done quickly. So no need to worry too much about user difference. Even if we mess up something. That’s ok. It’s part of our learning experience. I always like to say, for UX design, you never get it right. Everytime when you improve something for the users, you just one more step closer to be perfect. The world is changing. We need to evolve too.
- Thank you for listening. I hope you find it helpful. If you have any questions, feel free to reach out to me on Linkedin or Discord. Have a great one!