How to solve for localization of your product is a good problem to have. If you have a product that has been accepted well in the urbane, globally homogenized, typically tier I city user segment, then you thinking about localization shows that you are driven to increase the user base of your product and your product has value for other user segments too, which is fantastic. Or else, if you want to launch your product in the regional user segments first and that’s what has started you thinking about localization, then too it’s good news as the competition in that segment for a lot of consumer Internet product categories is not as fierce, at least for now. It has its own challenges and more to that later, but solving for localization is a nice journey that starts and ends with user empathy, and brings a product manager that much closer to end users.
Almost all products solve for vernacular support as the first step towards localization. Translating your product’s UI in local language is surely a step in the right direction, but it is just that. A step. Solving for localization demands much more than that, and there’s even a chance that translation may not be your first step towards it at all. Let’s explore some of the facets of this exciting problem.
Solve for both low intent and high intent users
Many product features that require user input face a drop off problem in their funnel even when they explain everything on the UI, and yet users tend to exit instead of proceeding next. Be it giving more details about your preferences to personalize your experience, or more details about your credit worthiness to underwrite you better, or even your location and expectations to serve you better, drop off problem is everywhere. The reason is low intent of users. We assume that the end user reads what is shown on the screen. But you talk to enough users and you get to know that users skimming through the information on the screen within seconds and wanting to move on is more common than users carefully perusing all the bits. Users’ attention span for your product features is hardly a few seconds, and that’s the time you have to make them discover your product’s value proposition. The attention span varies from a few seconds to a few minutes depending upon the category your product lies in, e.g. higher duration for utility fintech products and lower one for life style and entertainment products, but the need to solve for low intent users cuts across all product categories. Most importantly, this low intent to read everything on the screen seldom coincides with the need of localized vernacular support on the UI. Users simply don’t want to read or spend more time understanding the product.
So the first step before translating your product’s UIs is to make them work for low intent users. A low intent user wanting to zip past the screens and get to the product value should be enabled to do that. And yet, all the information needed by the high intent user who likes to carefully go through the details before making her decision should be made available too. Highlighting funnel CTAs and providing more details behind info icons can be one way to solve the UI, and more on that later in the post, but what lies at the heart of solving for low intent users is to guess their inputs and present the product for the most common persona by default. You let the user get to the product value and discover what is in it for her, and get her hooked. Once you cross the barrier of discovery, chances of the user to slip into the high intent cohort multiplies.
Solve for cultural nuances and the most common persona
In addition to segmenting users on the basis of their intent to use the product, in order to understand the most common persona, it helps to understand the user behaviour when they are thinking fast or slow [1]. The socioeconomic and educational background of your users shapes them and influences how they react or respond to what they see and assimilate. Understanding the cultural nuances of your user base and identifying what piece of information or interaction results in what kind of stimuli in their brains enables the product manager to relate that much more with the end user and solve for localization.
To understand this, consider this example set in the context of north India. Among Raj Singhania, Budhi Ram and Teekaprasad Shastry, who will you identify as a businessman running his own venture, a farmer tilling land, and a priest presiding the rituals in a temple. If you come from the north part of India or are someone who has decent understanding of social and regional setups of this region, you will find it almost compulsive to associate the names to the roles in the respective order they are given here. Not only this, depending on how deep your understanding of popular depiction and general consensus view of this region is, you will be able to conjure, with varying degrees of accuracy, the gender, the religion, the age group, the educational background, the economic status, and even to some extent, the physical appearance of these names and the roles you have identified them with. That’s the “fast thinking” part of your brain at work. Now if I were to give you additional information that the farmhouse where the farmer is working is named “Singhania Organic Farms”, and the business venture of the businessman is a publishing house named “Shastry Publishers”, you will be bound to rethink about the associations you made earlier. Even though this additional information is not decisive, you try to analyze more and based on general conventions used in naming businesses and assets, some of you might want to change your initial guesses. That’s the “slow thinking” part of your brain at work now. And these two parts of your users’ brains are the ones evaluating your product.
So analyze your product features from the minds of the fast thinking part of your users’ subconscious, as this part always comes first. Your product should make sense to this part of the users’ brain first. Post that, if it is necessary, solve for the slow thinking part of the users’ brain. And, as a rule of thumb, always make sure that the product understanding formed by these two parts of the brain always coincides. More deliberate thinking and analysis might result in additional complimentary information and understanding, but all these additional layers of the product should align well with the basic understanding of your product that comes from thinking fast.
Solve it in the UI and UX
Be it the idea of solving for low or high intent, or the idea of solving for slow or fast analysis, it boils down to the user interface of the product where these ideas need to be put into practice. In addition, all the different elements and the product details and offerings on the UI need to be sewn together in an interplay of interactions, to create the best user experience which eases a user into the product. Without going into the depths of product design which comes from formal design education and experience, let’s discuss the design ideas and requirements which will help to create UI elements and the UX around them which are real manifestation of these abstract ideas.
Every UI element and the UX around it matters when you need to empathize with diverse user segments in the light of localization.
- Colors: Colors have deep cultural significance. Each culture and society deeply associates with colors, so much so that a simple brush of paint carries a specific and often distinct meaning to it. While some of these associations are global, like color Red for danger, Yellow for warning, White for peace, there are others which hold special meaning to a specific sect of people. In context of India, colors can denote religion like Saffron for Hinduism and Green for Islam. Colors can denote affinity like White for color of clothes for men in Haryana and Rajasthan in general and Red for special occasions for all married women almost throughout the country. Colors can have different meanings for different societies like Black to be worn for mourning in some sections while others wear White. Some societies prefer bright hues while others prefer subtlety. Understanding these distinctions and accommodating this knowledge in presenting your product’s UI to your users goes a long way in user acceptance.
- Icons: Just like colors, some icons too are global in nature. Cross icon to close a screen, tick icon to give selection, question mark icon to denote help are some of the icons which have been accepted well throughout regional and educational proficiency spectrum of users. But yet there are icons which denote intended meaning to some user groups but may appear confusing to others. The cart icon in an eCommerce product might appear very intuitive, but would it be intuitive enough for users who have never been to supermarkets where shopping carts are as much the part of the shopping experience as the merchandise itself. Another example of a thoroughly accepted icon among a very large user group is the home icon, used to denote the home screen of a product, used for easing the navigation back to start. Though it appears as intuitive as it can get, would it be equally intuitive for users who are coming online and discovering consumer Internet for the first time and are unaware of the concept of the home page. Coming up with personalized icons for different user groups is challenging, and even if you solve that, equally challenging is to identify when to change the iconography of the product…users more often have very low intent to let you know who they are and what they want. Transitions on the UI when a user interacts with different icons, and defining interactions between related icons can help go beyond the challenge of conveying the literal meaning via the icon graphics. Animating the product going inside the cart icon when a user taps “Buy” has been found to work well towards making the cart icon intuitive over the years. Glowing the download cloud icon to indicate progress and destination of your downloads goes beyond the prerequisite of assuming that the user understands storage cloud. Shaking the input box in case of incorrect input works manifolds better than showing info and warning icons along with lengthy error codes. Identifying such animations and interactions and sprinkling them lightly over your UX would help a lot.
- Graphics: No other UI element can help as much in resonating the product idea with your user group, as the thoughtful use of graphics and images, wherever applicable. It sounds cliched but a picture indeed is worth a thousand words. Quite literally so. A picture of a person cooking in a kitchen for a food blog home screen tells the end user what to expect from the blog, and clearly communicates that this expectation is different than that from a fitness blog which has the picture of a person working out in a gym. Furthermore, thoughtful graphics go beyond conveying a meaning through pictures. Experimental studies found that using a human face on the pop-up asking for subscription to a product results in more conversions than using a pleasant still life photograph. The presence of a human face makes the act of subscribing more personal. To make this work for different user cohorts would simply require putting a picture of a person the user cohort can relate with. Another way to use graphics effectively to bridge the gap between regional and global users is to depict a product process in terms of infographic images. A simple flow diagram can convey what is required from the users much more effectively than many painfully long sentences.
- Clutter vs space: Another widely accepted best practice for UIs is to avoid clutter of elements and information details to allow breathing space for the elements on the UI. It appears the right thing to do especially for low intent fast thinking user groups. But when it comes to localization, it would be worth the effort to challenge this norm. Case in point here is China. From the lens of urbane Internet user if you look at any Chinese consumer Internet product, which have started making inroads to India in leaps and bounds, you might find the UI cluttered with many features. But the fact is that what appears broken information architecture to a typical Indian user accustomed to westernized consumer Internet products, is used very effectively to go about their lives by more than a billion Chinese users. It requires careful study to attribute this difference may be to the fact that Chinese people adopted technology in their lives much earlier than Indian people, or the fact that Chinese product developers started afresh with a clean slate with no western influence and the users evolved with that clean slate too, or the simple fact that Chinese users grew up learning Mandarin which has a pictographical script that is traditionally written top to bottom and thus differs so much from the languages learned by Indian users thereby differing in their adoption to consumer Internet product UIs too. What stands apart is the fact that what appears broken to one user segment, appears helpful and easy to navigate to another user segment. When it comes to making products for regional user segments, this fact is worth exploring.
- Translation: Finally, it would be worth exploring the nuances of this often misjudged straightforward step in solving localization. Translation is anything but straightforward. Translation deals with one of the very basic and distinct elements of our cultural upbringing…our language, especially the local vernacular. Attempting translation without the deep understanding of users’ culture is an ineffective attempt which fails to convey the meaning of the translated text. Eskimos have multiple dozens of words for “snow” in their language, which is a direct depiction of the importance and existence of snow in their lives. Using one of these words for translation would require understanding the correct context of using “snow” in the text to be translated and also the correct context in which that word is used in native Eskimo language. Another problem with translation is that certain idiomatic words in a language go much beyond their literal meaning and are used to convey a concept. In context of rural northern India, people coin the term videsia for those people who go to urban regions in search of better livelihood. This term is derived from the word videshi in Hindi which means something or someone related to other countries outside your own. As you can see, translating videsia as foreigner in English in the given context would be grossly inadequate. Yet another problem with translation is the lack of proper word for a given term or concept as that concept itself might be alien for the local culture. On top of that, translating in some local languages which rely heavily on gestures or sounds is a problem almost impossible to solve. Luckily, when it comes to translating UIs for consumer Internet products, these problems diminish in magnitude. A small care keeping the above aspects of translation in mind would go a long way. In addition, choosing where to transliterate instead of translate, e.g. for all proper nouns and certain widely accepted keywords in that industry, would help a lot.
Localization is an ever evolving challenge which evolves as and when the users evolve. How it was solved 5 years ago may not be relevant today, and what you do today to solve it will surely be not relevant 5 years down the road. Having a strong empathy with your users is a constant though, which will always help you solve for localization. As my understanding evolves around this exciting problem, will explore more in future posts.
[1] “Thinking, Fast and Slow” is a fascinating read in behavioural science by Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel laureate who won Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in the year 2002.