4.5 Globalization

4.5.1 Introduction

While there is much debate about the positive and negative effects of globalization, it is quite clear that globalization is happening and has become part of everyday life. Many companies have failed in the past, because they did not keep the global market in mind when developing new products. Many companies find that over 60 percent of their revenues come from the international marketplace . More significant still is the year-to-year growth rate of the international sector. Many countries still have a huge potential.

To be successful in the global economy, it is important to provide products that have the look and feel of local products. Only about 25 percent of the world population understands English, and only a fraction of these people are native speakers and part of the Anglo-American culture. Again, smart appliances and online services need to adapt to the needs of the user and not the other way around.

The value of localizing solutions and their user interfaces for the international market is no longer in question. Localization can lead to greater potential for the introduction of products, both in terms of penetration of new emerging markets and by allowing you to reach more users in existing areas. It helps you maintain customer satisfaction in the face of increasing demands and expectations from international customers. It is often essential to meet legal requirements. And, last but not least, it helps you maintain a competitive advantage over other product vendors .

In typical product development, localization is treated as an afterthought. The base product is designed and developed with a focus on the home market, and the localization group or vendor is engaged somewhere towards the end of that cycle. The problem here is that you are likely to be introducing obstacles to effective localization as you develop. This typically has adverse impacts on your international offering.

If you do not consider localization from the beginning, it takes much longer to develop a product that meets the local requirements. For every month the foreign version of your product is delayed, you can be losing very large amounts of potential revenue, as well as losing ground to your competitors . Delay is bad, but in many cases it means that a certain product cannot be introduced into a market at all, as it may not be possible to localize the product for certain areas because decisions based on a home market focus during the development phase are too costly to re-engineer. For example, changing the code base of your product so that it supports the thousands of characters needed for Chinese, Japanese, or Korean can be a daunting proposition if the need only surfaces while you are desperately trying to fend off the competition by last-minute localization.

4.5.2 Internationalization

It is essential to understand the needs and requirements of the international marketplace as early as possible in your development cycle, and then to build the capability to support these into your design and development processes (see Table 4.3). As discussed above, a customerfocused design for products and services is essential. Including international customers in the reviews is a must. This will allow for easier internationalization of the product, which means that the design and development of the product allow for reduced time to market, reduced cost and higher customer satisfaction when the need arises to introduce the product to a particular market. Internationalization is, therefore, the process of creating a base design that can be readily adapted for use in various international markets. It does not mean that you can use it automatically everywhere, since some additional work such as translation is required, but the cost is much lower and the process is repeatable for every country, making a worldwide roll-out less risky.

To ensure the success of a product in other locales, it is necessary to check the relevance of the solution to the work practises and processes of the particular locale. Many computing solutions, for example, use text fragments that are composed dynamically for a given situation. If you would translate these text fragments and use the same rules in another language, you would create a very funny but unusable solution. Therefore, it is important to ensure linguistic appropriateness and translatability. The spoken words or written text need to be checked in context. With respect to written text, it is important to enable the application to use different character sets and encoding, and allow for multiple text directions. Besides these rather technical issues, there are two additional areas that need special attention: cultural and organizational issues. Different working habits and methodologies can have a major impact on the success of a product, if they are not taken into account, because they will determine whether the new smart appliance will be considered useful or not. Other cultural issues, such as locale-specific data format conventions and measurement systems, must be taken care of in modern systems. The process and organizational issues also need attention.

Table 4.3. Internationalization Issues

To make a product successful, you need to consider the following features:

• Appropriateness The relevance of the solution to the work practices and processes of the international user.

• Linguistic Issues Including text fragmentation and reuse, linguistic appropriateness and translatability, and message expansion.

• Foreign Text Issues Including character sets and encoding, glyph complexity, character rendering, and text direction.

• Cultural Issues Including differing work habits and methodologies, locale-specific data format conventions and measurement systems, and cultural bias.

• Process and Organizational Issues Including ways of creating text or graphics and additions to the product delivery process.

Internationalization is simply a "quality" way of working, aimed at reducing non-conformance costs by addressing issues before they occur. However, internationalization does not mean one will need no change for any marketplace. Nor does it mean adding every bell and whistle you could possibly need for any market during the development phase. What internationalization does mean is developing your product in a modular, extendable, and accessible way, so that when the need to localize for a particular market arises, the localization can be done as easily and cheaply as possible.

4.5.3 Localization

Localization is making different versions of the same product for different international markets. The tangible factors of localization are straightforward and publicly observable elements. They include date, calendars, weekends, time, telephone number and address formats, character sets, collating order sequence, reading and writing direction, punctuation, translation, units of measures, and currency. The intangible factors deal with the elements that depend on culture.

Product localization is not just translation. Localization is the process of re-packaging and re-engineering a product and software application and their associated on-line help, "readme" file, documentation, printed manuals, packaging, and marketing collateral materials for a specific target language different from the market for which the product was originally developed, and ensuring that the functionality, usability, and screen content is acceptable in the local culture. The ability to effectively localize solutions for efficient release depends on the integration of project management, engineering, and linguistic and cultural review.

An example of misinterpretation is the use of the "trash can" icon in the Macintosh user interface. Thais, for example, might not recognize the American trash can, because, in Thailand the trash can is actually a wicker basket . Some visuals are recognizable in another culture, but they convey a totally different meaning. A black cat is considered bad luck in the United States but good luck in the United Kingdom.

Typical problems also involve symbols and gestures. Let's say a product includes a graphic of a cartoon character waving at the user. This is not considered a friendly gesture in Greece or Nigeria, for example. In those nations, the palm-forward wave is a nasty gesture indeed, as is the thumbs-up signal in Irannot to mention the thumb-and-index-finger "okay" sign, which is most definitely not OK in Brazil.

Cultures perceive things differently. The influence of childhood, upbringing, education, and social aspects affect the way we interact with the environment. Members of each particular culture share similar attitudes and behaviors, as well as think and act similarly in certain situations. Cultures may be defined by country boundaries, language, or cultural conventions such as race or ethnic groups.

To make a system usable in a certain culture, experts of the target culture need to be involved in the design process. They will need to actively participate in the decisions on what sort of elements will go into the interface design. User interface designers work collaboratively with this group.

4.5.4 International Design

International design can start with two premises, as we have learned. Either you design an all-inclusive product that is shipped everywhere but with different defaults, or you create a modular product, which allows for localization of modules as required before shipping to specific locales.

The procedure for international design could be based on the following. First, you should identify all target locales and gather information about them. Within these locales, you should determine the target audiences. Then start an international impact assessment. This assessment should determine which features will function identically across international boundaries, which of the features are generally okay, but have to be implemented differently in target locales, and which features have to be discarded or completely re-engineered to make them work in a specific locale.

A good internationalized interface should use localized feedback. The United States, for example, has very low visual literacy , so you should adapt to these needs. The interface should use a minimum number of commands. This can be achieved by introducing a service for retrieving the required context by the system.

International design requires that the intelligent appliances speak the correct language and, when necessary the correct dialect . While this may seem negligible, this will bring real power to these appliances. Only if it adapts to the person using it on the language level will it become really useful. And dialects are a means to make things more enjoyable and accessible. In case of text interfaces, the correct scripts and alphabets need to be taken into account as well.

When using graphical signs, it is important to make sure that you do not use visual puns (e.g., a picture of a key to signal keyword searches, a little table to represent a table of numbers , a wooden log to represent a log file). Instead, use icons that look like a universally recognized object or represent a universally understood process. Where you cannot find culture-free icons, you will have to implement different icons for each culture. When you look for inspiration for your icons, get inspired in your target locales, not your local country.

Make sure that you respect other people's cultures in your design. You would demand the same. Avoid using numbers except to convey numerical information, as the number 13 means bad luck in some countries and good luck in others, for example. Hand gestures are notoriously different from culture to culture. Therefore gesture-based interfaces should be always checked for a specific locale before introducing them to that market.

There are many more things you need to take care of when designing international products, which can fill a complete set of books. Please consider this section as a hint and not as a complete listing of all issues that may arise. It is a complex subject, but worth studying when developing a new appliance or service.

4.5.5 Accessibility

While not directly connected to globalization, accessibility is a related issue. Accessibility solutions (for the physically challenged) can be easily built if we stick to the design criteria we have developed in this chapter. Most of the user interface concepts we've described are essential for successfully addressing people with physical handicaps of one sort or another. The number of such people is huge and growing, and governments are requiring that products usable by be everyone regardless of physical limitations. The United States has already implemented regulations, and the European Union is following suit. In Germany, all governmental Web sites, for example, already have to be designed in a way that allows access for everyone, but especially for physically challenged.

Traditionally, accessibility solutions have been oriented to assisting external devices that could be connected to standard computer systems to overcome accessibility issues. Nowadays, following the design for all principles, efforts are mainly directed towards including accessibility aids in standard systems (hardware and software) in such a way that everyone will be able to effectively use an off-the-shelf computer system regardless of his or her disabilities .

As a result, most hardware and software manufacturers have to invest in accessibility solutions over the next few years . Therefore, me-centric products would need to be invented at this time, just to do a good job on the accessibility issues. IBM ^[12] , Apple ^[13] , and Hewlett-Packard ^[14] , for example, have already introduced accessibility policies for all future product developments.

^[12] http://www-3.ibm.com/able/

^[13] http://www.apple.com/disability/

^[14] http://www.hp.com/accessibility/