UX personalization is essential to keeping users engaged. Plus, different factors exist that might influence users’ preferences, including their locality.
For a multinational firm that is releasing an app in different regions, if the app’s content lacks an auto-translation feature, this could cripple the user experience that the app offers. You might assume that potential users of the app would understand your preferred language. But for those users who don’t? This is just one scenario that demonstrates the significance of localization in optimizing the user experience.
Multiple challenges relating to the need for localization could prevent your app from engaging your audience and ensuring high satisfaction. You must understand the preferences of diverse audience segments and learn to tailor the user experience accordingly. In this article, I’ll provide guidance on how to adapt app experiences to users worldwide.
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Defining User Experience
User experience refers to users’ perception of interacting with software, an app, or a digital platform. The ease or difficulty with which users can complete their interactions influences users’ feelings about an app. For example, if a user wants to purchase something on an ecommerce Web site and the platform lets users find their desired products without any hassle and check out effortlessly, this will lead to a satisfactory user experience.
On the contrary, if the user encounters issues such as difficulty in finding a desired product, struggles through a complex checkout process, and errors result when the user is making the payment, the poor user experience would make the user less likely to return to that platform to make additional purchases.
A variety of elements come into play when you’re striving to offer a seamless user experience to the intended audience. One size doesn’t fit all, so personalization is the way to go. Because your audience segments might represent diverse behavioral characteristics, they may perceive the user experience differently.
What Is UX Localization?
UX localization calls for initiatives to become acquainted with different regions or cultures that represent the audience segments you’re targeting and efforts to personalize the experience that you offer to create high user engagement and retention.
As I discussed earlier, different elements of the user experience dictate your audience’s perception of the experience that you offer to them. One such factor is regional representation, which requires considering various aspects of the user experience such as language barriers, cultural nuances, and behavioral preferences. To address these elements, you might need to consider different design layouts, content frameworks, and information structures that would make your app or platform native friendly.
For example, if your app targets regions representing high-context cultures such as that of Japan, you might rely heavily on nonverbal cues to help users perform their desired actions. To offer an enhanced experience to users who represent such regions and achieve high user engagement, you can incorporate visual cues and leverage implicit information navigation.
In contrast, when targeting low-context cultures such as that of Germany, you should focus on relaying information through explicit communication and detailed instructions. Prioritize written instructions over visual cues in combination with straightforward navigation and clears call to action.
Furthermore, people representing different regions might interpret the symbols or images that you use differently. What people in most regions would perceive as normal visualizations, a few might consider offensive. The same is true of your choice of colors and other visual elements.
For example, most regions around the globe would take a hand gesture symbolizing the word okay as a sign of approval or agreement. However, some localities in the world would interpret it as offensive or even a symbol of hate.
How to Adapt Experiences to Users Worldwide
Understanding the diverse preferences of your audience segments who represent different regions of the world can be a tricky process. Let’s consider how you can adapt and tailor the user experience you offer to meet the expectations of users worldwide.
1. Conduct thorough UX research.
First, you must identify your target audience and the segments you intend to serve. You need a clear understanding of your target market to initiate your UX research and understand user behaviors that are characteristic of different regions.
You need to dive deep to explore diverse user preferences and cultural considerations to shape an enhanced user experience. You cannot merely support multiple languages and call it a day. You must consider various possible cultural interpretations of the text and visual elements.
You can consider different sources of information to inform your research and gather useful insights about your target audience. For example, you could conduct surveys, initiate focus-group discussions, and leverage social media for sentiment or behavioral analysis.
2. Make adjustments to visual elements and layouts.
Once you’ve gathered useful data and relevant insights, initiate the implementation process. Identify areas for improvement and determine which aspects of your app or platform require changes.
Next, prioritize the necessary changes and assess current capabilities. UX design modifications might require additional resources. For example, according to your regional preferences, you would need the help of translators to support multiple languages.
You can then customize your visual hierarchy and layout to make the necessary modifications to the user experience.
Figure 4—Core elements of visual hierarchy
Visual elements of your app or digital platform include images, icons, patterns, and color palettes. You should know what the visual elements represent in different cultures and adapt them accordingly. The same is true for layout adjustments.
You could enable an auto-translation feature in your app or on your Web site. However, you’ll need to make necessary optimizations. For example, words in different languages that have similar meanings might occupy different amounts of space. If you’re not careful, translating text from a language that uses the Latin alphabet such as English to another character set such as Japanese could compromise how the information appears.
For an auto-translation feature to give better results, you must avoid using complex sentences and metaphors when presenting information to users. Use simple phrases and sentences.
3. Optimize menus and buttons.
Also consider text expansion when designing menus and button labels. Again, the characters for each language might occupy space differently. If the available space is insufficient, text elements might seem cluttered, compromising readability.
You also need to observe cultural conventions when presenting information on menus. For example, countries use different formats for date and time. Attention to detail is key to your success in offering an enhanced experience to your users.
4. Support multiple languages.
When your goal is to offer a seamless experience to users worldwide, your app or digital platform must support multiple languages. Use the languages that are appropriate to your audiences’ locales to make it easier for users to understand the information you provide and help users perform their desired actions. Remember, you not only need to make your app or Web site’s content accessible in different languages, but provide the appropriate context as well.
Your objective is to convey your message effectively. So you must ensure that the translated text makes sense to people representing diverse cultures. Therefore, the words that you use to present information, your tone, and your style of information delivery must be well thought out.
Support for multiple languages doesn’t apply just to the text, but also the nontextual content on your app or digital platform. This content might include images, sounds, videos, and various types of visual information.
If you want to take your user experience to a whole new level, consider translating your marketing material into different languages. This content encompasses your email newsletters, social-media posts, ad content, and any other information that you leverage in engaging your users.
5. Test and evaluate.
Test your UX design modifications and evaluate the functionality of your app or digital platform before making it available to its intended audience.
Localization often requires making critical changes to the user interface, which might increase the likelihood of bugs or glitches. Therefore, testing your implementation is essential because it could prevent your UX modifications from causing more harm than good. Ensure that all the features and capabilities of your app or digital platform function properly in both standard and localized modes.
Conduct linguistic testing to look for grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, and contextual blunders to ensure that your messages read the way you intended. Leverage usability testing to help you assess the user-friendliness of your app or platform. You should also check that your digital solutions are compatible with all leading devices and offer a smooth user experience on different screen sizes. Check the performance of your app or Web site to determine whether it’s able to handle a high volume of traffic, swiftly responds to users’ interactions, and has minimal page-load times. While it is less likely that your localization changes might cause security vulnerabilities, it’s best to test the security of your app or platform to ensure that it is safe.
6. Ensure continuous improvement.
Successful UX localization requires consistent evaluation and design iteration. So, even after you go live with your design changes, stay open to user feedback so you can identify room for improvement.
Even if thorough research and analysis back the experience that you offer, there’s always the possibility that you might miss a few issues. Actual users who are interacting with your app or platform can guide you in identifying issues, enabling you to make necessary refinements to the user experience. Obtaining user feedback can help you evolve the design of your app or platform, enabling you to gain a competitive edge over other alternatives in your respective industry.
Summing Up
For those of you who have wondered about UX localization and wanted to know how to adapt your experiences to users worldwide, this article has provided an overview of the UX localization process, which can help you offer an enhanced user experience to culturally diverse audience segments. To amplify user engagement in the various regions that you’re targeting and achieve high user retention, follow my recommendations.
As the founder of WPBeginner, the largest free WordPress resource site, Syed is one of the leading WordPress experts in the industry, with over ten years of experience,. You can learn more about Syed and his portfolio of companies by following him on his social-media networks. Read More
