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Unlocking the Global Potential: Mastering UX Localization with Localization Companies

September 30, 2024 by
Unlocking the Global Potential: Mastering UX Localization with Localization Companies
IQnewswire

Introduction

With the world connected online, the way forward for any company that wants to reach audiences worldwide is to create user experiences that correspond with the quirks of local cultures. Localization companies can help international companies, bridging linguistic and geographic barriers to allow businesses to go global while being locally relevant. Localization companies tweak user interfaces, navigation structures, and content to suit local tastes so that the applications can be just as helpful and fun for people outside the company's home base.

Understanding the Essence of User Experience (UX)

Before exploring UX localization, we must familiarize ourselves with the concept of user experience (often referred to as just UX). User experience (UX) includes a user's perceptions, thoughts, and actions while interacting with an application, such as a website or a mobile app. UX is a complex combination of elements, including design, user interface (UI), documentation, and responsiveness to user behavior.

 At the end of the day, however, user experience (UX) makes or breaks an app because if users don't get value, pleasure, or satisfaction out of their interactions, the app will not be used, and the whole project will become a dinosaur. Even if the tech is perfect, cultural matching across national borders is what will make an app stand out.

Debunking Common UX Misconceptions

To grasp the importance of UX localization, it's worth debunking some of the most common misconceptions about user experience:

  1. UX is not solely the responsibility of marketing or UX specialists: By definition, it belongs to everyone – to every part of the organization that works on a product. It is fundamentally a cross-functional task.
  2. UX is not a vertical slice or an afterthought: From the start, it's a core part of development – it informs the app's core functionality and design.
  3. UX is not just about visual aesthetics: Eye-pleasing design is excellent, but a pleasant-looking interface is not enough to ensure a positive UX.
  4. UX is not based on gut feelings: To make their judgment calls, UX designers base their decisions on rigorous user research, data analysis, and testing so that the solutions provided are based on evidence.
  5. UX is not limited to web development: The code might be the technical scaffolding, but UX is how we plan a user's interaction with that code and design the experience.
  6. UX is not confined to a single market: Culture and language matter tremendously in defining user behaviors and expectations, which means that UX has to be localized to succeed globally.

 The Art of UX Localization: Adapting to Local Expectations

Too often, localization is mistaken for translating an app's content word for word, but proper localization is a translation of the word's entire sense. It never stops at language but adapts the app's content, user interface, and experience to the specific cultural tastes and habits of the local market.

Effective UX localization involves:

  • Employing the correct number of conventions, currencies, and formats
  • Adapting the UI to accommodate the spatial requirements of different languages
  • Verifying the cultural appropriateness of graphics, visuals, colors, and icons
  • Tailoring the experience to regional norms, thought processes, and language preferences

This requires intimate knowledge of the audience's culture, so localization firms will identify pain points that can knock native speakers out of the user experience.

Distinguishing UX, UI, and Usability in App Localization

UX, UI, and usability might be interdependent, but they each have distinct roles in app localization:

  • Usability: The ease with which users can achieve specific goals with effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction in a particular context. The five usability principles are learnability, efficiency, memorability, error prevention, and subjective satisfaction.
  • User Interface (UI): This is the part of the design that the user can see and interact with, such as touch-sensitive controls, layouts, navigational structures, white space, visual hierarchies, buttons, and copy.
  • User Experience (UX): UX is the general umbrella term that covers the totality of a user's perceptions, feelings, attitudes, and cognitions brought about through an app's usability, the quality of its UI, and the appeal of its content and features.

The purpose of localizing the UX is to ensure that international users perceive the app in a way that's consistent with the experience of domestic users—just as if they were interacting with a version of the app that was developed in their own country.

Laying the Groundwork: The Role of International UX Design

When an app is destined for use by people in many countries (and often has many language editions), international user needs and expectations must be considered and planned for before localization begins. This process is called the internationalization of user experience or cross-cultural UX design.

International UX design is not just about ensuring that your product's core functionality or look and feel work across languages and regions but also about developing a holistic approach that combines all the best usability, UI, and localization practices.

  • Usability: Let users choose their language instead of forcing them to use English because they live in England, for example.
  •  UI: This allows users to change their preferences, such as turning on the dark mode or arranging things in a list/grid view.
  • Localization: Ensuring prices are shown with local currency symbols, images don't contain untranslated text, and local payment systems are accepted.

This cross-cultural UX design process can be broken down into four key steps:

 

Step 1: Ensuring Usability in Every Market

As the author Steve Krug writes in the bestseller Don't Make Me Think (2000): 'Designing applications for people is almost all about designing how people will think – and how hard they'll have to think.' (Krug's focus when he wrote this was web applications, but it applies to mobile apps equally well.)

 

Some of Krug's pithy suggestions include:

  • Minimizing cognitive load: Applications need to make sense from the first screen without requiring the user to think about how they work.
  • Respecting users' time: Concise text and minimized navigation distances provide a streamlined experience.
  •  Embracing user intuition: Back buttons and undo commands are intuitive and encourage forgiving design.

 Nonetheless, in the case of app localization, more attention must be paid since usability may not be the same across cultures: what is intuitive in one context might be baffling in another:

  • User input forms: While many cultures require separate fields for given and family names, some, such as Spain, require two fields for family names (paternal and maternal).
  • Symbols, icons, and colors: Studies show that using design elements that are culturally familiar can help to improve usability. In areas such as China, red is associated with good luck (as opposed to Western connotations of danger).
  • Information architecture and navigation structures: Studies show that task completion rates vary across cultures depending on site structures that are deep versus broad. Heat maps also show different patterns, depending on whether textual menu items are scanned in cultures that read from left to right or the entire page is scanned before navigation begins.

 

Step 2: Internationalizing the App

This is the user interface, and it's the one place where international users are most likely to encounter localization issues. Therefore, it must be designed with internationalization best practices in mind from the very beginning.

 

Considering Language Length and Font Sizes

Texts in foreign languages can be much longer or shorter than their originals. For example, the English word user translates in German as Benutzer (twice as many characters) and in French as utilisateur (almost three times as many characters).

 Trying to force these expanded character counts into boxes designed for the shortest version can result in display, layout, usability, and, therefore, UX issues. Minimum font sizes that work for English can render complex characters in other languages (e.g., Chinese hanzi 漢字) illegible. Line heights suitable for Western languages can be too low for languages where vertical spacing is required.

 

Using Double-Length Pre- or Pseudo-Localization

Volume expansion leading to word-length problems (as illustrated by English/German/French) can be detected by generating double-length versions of any text strings that are candidates for display. Text overruns will be easier to identify, allowing for proactive corrections.

 However, for languages that lead to volume shrinkage (e.g., English to Chinese), input from a native speaker who is also a layout-savvy individual can be highly useful in immediately spotting excessive white spaces and areas that would benefit from layout changes.

 Handling App Localization UX Issues Caused by Layouts

Even with automatic layout reflowing, locally localized app versions can have quirky layout distortions as the UI tries to fit foreign language equivalents. Standardizing dimensions for languages with medium space requirements can fall flat when text lengths can double or halve.

Potential solutions or compromises may include:

  • Using dropdown menus to disguise size differences (which might have an impact on usability: increasing the number of clicks/taps)
  • Dynamic layouts that display longer texts on multiple lines (potentially appearing inconsistent across locales)
  •  Localized programmatic layout changes, e.g., to enable entering a name in different languages; localized changes to layouts if there are other name field requirements in various cultures.

 

Supporting Right-to-Left (RTL) and Left-to-Right (LTR) Languages

Right-to-left (RTL) languages such as Arabic and Hebrew reverse text direction and the expected sequence of actions into time. For instance, the 'trash can' icon expects native RTL speakers to find it on the left – where the end of a sequence of actions logically starts.

 Similarly, the 'next' and 'back' buttons would need to switch places, with 'next' to the left and 'back' to the right, instead of LTR conventions. Time will flow from right to left, so text justification icons need to mirror this directionality.

 Apps highly dependent on lateral movement as an underlying logic or UX paradigm might have to be rethought to deliver a comparable experience for RTL languages.

 

UX Writing with Localization in Mind

When UX writing is designed for global audiences from the start, a more consistent international user experience is possible. Here's how to write UX copy that's easy to localize:

  • Remove colloquialisms, idioms, and ambiguous phrases that may not translate well across languages
  • Remove colloquialisms, idioms, and ambiguous phrases that may not translate well across languages  Standardize terminology throughout the app and rely on term bases and glossaries
  • Write concise, unambiguous UI copy and avoid homonyms
  • A/B test UX writing to validate international results

Thinking about future localization during UX writing is essential because internationalization is an investment in localization. UX writing is an investment in localization because if it is done well, the localization or translation process can benefit from it.

 

Other App Internationalization Considerations

Besides the localization issues discussed above, there are many other internationalization best practices to make the user experience genuinely cross-cultural:

  • Ensuring support for local currencies, units, dates, time, and address formats
  • Choosing appropriate decimal and thousand separators
  • Using Unicode UTF-8 encoding to support international text and symbols
  • Setting the correct time zone for each market
  • Formatting calendars correctly (e.g., some cultures start the week on Monday, others on Sunday)
  • Ensuring correct formatting for international phone numbers
  • Considering prevalent hardware and operating systems in the target market and adjusting the UI accordingly

Those internationalization and localization best practices combine to create a user experience custom-tailored to the global consumer's needs yet crafted with a distinctly international aesthetic.

 

Step 3: Identifying Non-Textual UI Elements for Localization

However, delivering a great user experience when launching into a new market often involves localizing culturally relevant non-textual content. All non-textual content must be identified before localization can take place.

  • Images of people, animals, symbols, places, and objects that are culturally significant to the target market
  • Color palettes used in the UI, considering potential negative connotations in some markets
  • Layout, visual hierarchy, and information architecture
  • Animations and videos used in onboarding screens and tutorials
  • Awards and badges are displayed on the app's store information page, ensuring local relevance
  •  Use of white space
  •  Call-to-action buttons
  • Font sizes
  • Internal and external links on the app's website prevent international users from being misdirected.
  • Considerations include available payment methods at checkout and the frequency of in-app purchase prompts for international users.

Striking a good balance at the strategic level early in app creation is the most important thing you can do if you want your international user experience to succeed.

An example of effective but textless localization is Airbnb's home screen, offering an 'Explore nearby' section for international users, with access to nearby accommodations displayed with landmarks and attraction outlines in the immediate area.

 Step 4: Content Localization

From there, step two is to adapt and localize the text of the app (headings, body copy, error messages, onboarding screens, tutorials, etc.) and also the parts of the app that aren't text [Content localization goes well beyond the app itself, for example:

● App store descriptions

● User-generated content (e.g., reviews)

● Customer support emails and responses

●  Social media and other marketing collaterals

● Email marketing campaigns

●  API Documentation

Organizations may choose whether the content is visible, impactful, durable, or sensitive and needs a human-only, automated, or hybrid translation workflow. For example, a brand may have a human-only workflow for a creative copy but machine-translate and human-edit scripts for chatbot workflows or error messages. Highly perishable content, such as app store reviews, is often left in raw automated machine translation.

The Technological Edge: Empowering UX Localization

They should be able to work smarter and faster, just like any other developer, designer, copywriter, marketer, or customer support rep. UX localization is no different in this capacity.

For example, An app localization platform provides a web interface to manage all the localization workflow issues:

  • Creating teams, projects, and tasks
  • Pulling strings from the source code into the localization platform
  • Assigning team members for translation and review
  • Importing translated strings back into the source code
  • Compiling localized builds of apps or websites
  • Centralizing collaborative efforts across developers, designers, marketers, and executives
  • Generating automatic UI screenshots for context
  • Checking linguistic consistency across projects
  • Automating tasks and workflows to save time

This means that, by having an app localization platform in place from the start of a project, teams can avoid, even before they embark on development, the UX internationalization and localization pitfalls that could quickly edge their app out of global markets.

Conclusion

Localization companies play an essential role in today's tech landscape as more businesses compete to reach a global audience. If your app hasn't been adequately localized or doesn't work for your target users, given their cultural context, then goodbye market share. You better hire a localization company, then.

 By providing user interface translation, content adaptation, and localization strategy from day one, localization companies help businesses go global, not just speak a foreign language. With the help of technology and the best globalization practices, they ensure that a product is brought to the market with a smooth, trouble-free expansion process so that users from all around the world will benefit from your product and become your loyal customers, wherever they may be and whatever they may speak.

 As cultures converge, though, the role of localization companies in making the experience feel natural to users will likely grow in significance. Companies that prioritize localization and those that can take advantage of skilled localization practitioners will be best able to cultivate an international audience and claim their place on the world stage.