UX Around the World in 300 Seconds
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UX changes across culture, and so as UX-ers we need to adapt. But so much changes in culture, it's difficult to know where to start when localising a product. Here are a few UX elements which change. Taking you around the globe, from America, to the UK, Egypt, through to India and China! Also keep an eye out for my Budaya series, with more detail at http://echesters.co.uk/2016/11/20/introducing-budaya.html
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UX Around the World in 300 Seconds
- 1. UX Around the World in 300 Seconds Elizabeth Chesters Ladies that UX London @EChesters
- 2. Individualist culture - “Go on, treat yo’self” 6 time-zones across the country America Localising for @EChesters
- 4. 1 of 11 countries with letters in postcodes Inconsistent measurement systems Mars Probe lost contact - NASA Low score in Power Distance The United Kingdom Localising for @EChesters
- 5. @EChesters Low Power Distance - McDonald’s Dutch websiteUK website
- 6. Official language is Arabic Design is flipped horizontally Design patterns change Don’t have letter boxes Retail websites focus on Lookbooks Egypt Localising for @EChesters
- 7. @EChesters Language Differences - McDonald’s Egypt Arabic website English website
- 8. Around 150 spoken languages Navigation relies on landmarks Common to not have a surname (in the South) Prefer SMS to communicate India Localising for @EChesters
- 9. Colgate toothpaste localises for the Indian market with spicy flavours @EChesters
- 10. 8 official languages Mobile users surpass desktop Family names are before given Red - dominant cultural colour China Localising for @EChesters
- 11. @EChesters KFC China Chinese website Canadian website
- 12. Thank you! Elizabeth Chesters Ladies that UX London Follow my work at echesters.co.uk
Editor's Notes
- So basically I’m talking about localisation, what changes across cultures and how to design for specific countries and continents. Taking your UX across the narrow seas
- America is an individualist culture - taken from Gert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions So the tone of language and focus on ‘who’ in content is all about the person - examples on screen Individualist cultures asks that people are independent - like the American ‘rugged individualism’ attitude America is also bloody huge, so even inside this country, there are huge differences between states. Blue are very liberal and red are very conservative. Blue would be somewhere like California, and a red state would be somewhere like Texas Priorities in content can be very different between the two And you can also have blue cities inside red states! (like Houston in Texas) When data in an app relies on multiple time zones - like restaurant opening times or business hours, you have to build a UX and system flexible to account for each time zone
- The KFC US website, starts off with localised “Howdy folks” and takes a minimalist approach. The branding is vintage, maybe taking America back to ‘good old days’. It also focuses on you. Finding stores near you, and offering you conversations It’s worth noting that individualism vs collectivism is a spectrum, which all countries fall on. It’s not an either or thing
- Letters in postcodes matter because you find the validation for this on forms - and payment forms. If your users can’t pay for something on your site, that’s a huge problem for business The UK despite officially adopting the metric system in 1965 still uses units of volumes from the Imperial measurement system - like pints for milk and beer; and yards or miles. Which may not seem relevant, but when you discover NASA lost contact with the Mars Probe, a billion dollar project because teams didn’t realise one was using English measurements, and another team was using metric and it failed to convert. The Probe went off course. Taken from Gert Hofstede’s 6 cultural dimensions, the UK has a low score in Power Distance; meaning people in that culture do not take kindly to forced authority, and only develop trust based on expertise. On websites, we prefer to see a variety of options so we can make our own decisions. This is the opposite to the cultures with a high score, who prefer to have less options and guidance to what to choose rather than basing their decisions on information.
- The Dutch website is similar to the UK version, as both cultures have low Power Distance scores. Both have a multitude of options, and offer a lot of information (with links further down the page to the FAQ, and an infographic of the top questions) The UK website, has a minimalist homepage, offering extensive navigation for the user to make up their own mind of where they want to go on the page. There’s even a small section at the bottom asking “Want to know where our food comes from?” Later, we’ll see the Chinese KFC website, designed for a culture with a high Power Distance score; offering more visuals and uses more colours and promotions than less factual information.
- Designing for different language directions like Arabic, changes more than the direction of text flow Whole designs flip, so the primary and secondary buttons are on the opposite sides to English, the navigation is on the right hand side. Home logos in navigation bars are on the right. Because the whole direction and journey flow flips, patterns in eye tracking reveal that design patterns like the F Pattern and Z Pattern , also flip horizontally. So an obvious F pattern would be Google’s search results. Not every country has the same postal structure that we do, like with post boxes and letter boxes on every door. Egypt relies on PO Boxes, so their retail websites tend to focus on inspiring people and finding a store. It’s less delivery and buy-online focused than a lot of retail sites around the world
- McDonald’s website for the UAE, showing just how much can change when localising the website for a right-to-left speaking language
- 150 languages with a sizeable speaking population - there are actually over 1600 languages. Only 2 official, English and Hindi. But Hindi uses a different script and needs support in characters and fonts Directions are given using landmarks, rather than using streets. This affects transport apps, like Google Maps or CityMapper which provide this information Particularly in the South, people do not have surnames. Forms can cause issues when surname fields are required. This was because their surname usually indicated caste, so instead they get around it by using their parent’s name, or village SMS is preferred method of contact - for marketing material (aka spam)
- This is not the only spicy flavour of toothpaste that India offered. It turned out that cloves are a natural antiseptic and anti-anaesthetic, and is ideal to use for tooth ache - so they include it in toothpaste!
- 8 official languages - including the common Mandarin Cantonese but also includes Portuguese! And their pages are often commented on as “busy” or “cluttered” because we can’t understand some of their scripts. Scripts like Mandarin or Cantonese, don’t have the same hierarchy or structure - no capital letters etc. The characters are all equal. Mobile users hugely surpass other devices - and this has lead to a whole new genre of mobile apps called qing ying yong. (One off mobile apps with one purpose) Form fields need to accommodate for names to be in a different order, and “first name” doesn’t help Chinese users on Western sites, as in personal emails you’ll be addressing people by their family names - even though it’s their first. Be specific with labels.
- The Chinese website offers a lot more visuals up-front. While this may look like there’s a lot of information on there, most of what you see are basically more adverts. You have sections for the phone app, the food, Chinese New Year offers While the Canadian website uses red, most of the colour is because of the product branding, whereas the Chinese site uses red for backgrounds, the text, the icons, first option in the list etc. While at the moment this may be because of Chinese New Year, in my other research on Chinese websites, red is used time and time again regardless of company branding The banner here offers a free burger, red envelope and blessing for your home during the lion’s parade! That is how much they’re localised!
- Speak to someone in a language they understand, that goes to their head If you talk to someone in their own language, it goes straight to their heart.