UI/UX design for a multilingual world: languages & digital literacy in app design
As much as design is a visual language, interfaces also need to be translated and localized accordingly across written languages and cultures to make sense to a global userbase.
Setting the context: a mobile world
The majority of the world’s internet users are mobile-based. Mobile internet traffic has gone up 222% in the last 7 years. It is estimated that by 2025, 72% of people who use the internet will do so only on a mobile device. 70% of all videos on YouTube are streamed via mobile devices.
That means more than ever, designing understandable and easy to use apps and mobile websites is crucial. As the field of user experience and interface design is quite broad, for the sake of brevity, I’ll only be focusing on mobile apps and mobile websites in this article. I’ll be looking specifically at how apps can be made better to support and empower a global, multilingual audience.
For multilingual users or those who often code-switch, it’s tedious to have to switch keyboards each time you want to write in a different language. However, it can be advantageous to use different writing systems and languages when it comes to character count and space on a screen.
Character count & writing direction
Chinese
Twitter has a tweet limit of 280 characters. That includes spaces and fullstops. If you’re typing in Chinese, which doesn’t need spaces between words, you already have more space that you can type in.
A single Chinese character can be an entire word — so you can write double or triple of what you wanted to write in English when you use Chinese! I tested this, writing the same content in Chinese and in English, and it was clear that I still had lots of writing space left on the Chinese tweet. The same content filled up a quarter of the space in Chinese, and just past half of the space in English.
What does this mean for app and mobile website design?
Chinese apps often have more space on the screen that can contain content because Chinese characters take up comparatively less space than Latin characters might. Chinese users are also used to seeing lots of information upfront, and interact with superapps daily. That means, more often than not, Chinese apps will contain much more information and actions on a screen than English apps will.
Oirat language and Todo Beshek/Clear Script
The Oirat language is spoken in Mongiloa, Russia, China and Kyrgyzstan. It can be written in Cyrillic or Clear Script, also called Todo Beshek or Todo. Todo is an alphabet created in 1648 by the Oirat Buddhist monk Zaya Pandita. It was developed on the basis of the Mongolian script with the goal of distinguishing all sounds in the spoken language. What’s special about it is that it is written from top to bottom, left to right.
While doing research, I soon discovered that the Todo script was not supported well on digital interfaces. Because this language is endangered, there are very few apps and websites that feature it.
I found an app for a Clear Script text input that someone created for Android. On the GitHub codebase of the person who developed this app, he shows more of the components he created. Here’s an example a toast. A toast is a component used in Android apps much like a little popup notification.
Let’s compare an English toast and a Mongolian Todo script version. Though there aren’t many languages that are written from top to bottom, it’s still interesting to see how designers and developers can create interfaces that support these scripts.
It’s interesting to note the buttons have been placed vertically on the right of the screen instead of horizontally at the bottom like we might be used to. Take a look at the typing cursor which is facing horizontally.
Arabic and Hebrew
Analyzing the top 10 million websites on the internet, W3Techs estimates that 1.1% of those exist in Arabic and 0.5% of all the top 10 million sites are in Hebrew. That means there’s a significantly large user base for Arabic and Hebrew and apps and websites can benefit from catering for localisation of these markets.
Both Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left, which means the same app can look completely flipped around when you toggle the language from English! Here’s a mobile website from the UAE called Property Finder.
A lot has been done by big tech companies like Google to set standards and guidelines for multilingual design. Material design is the design system for interfaces set out by Google. They have rules for designers and developers to follow.
Icons are a visual language in themselves too, and it’s fascinating to see how Arabic and Hebrew interfaces will switch the order of the icons to make sense with the written language.
UI/UX design conventions across cultures
Let us take a look at how different countries approach app design, not only in terms of visual design, but also alphabets, character spacing and cultural influences.
JAPAN
Let’s begin by comparing the English mobile website for Yahoo versus yahoo.jp from Japan. Yahoo is the most popular search engine in Japan. You can immediately tell Japanese one is more crowded than the English one. On average, Japanese websites use 150% more text than their English counterparts.
This could be because western internet users might have a shorter attention span and prefer short, snappy headlines, and could also be because in Japan, more information is valued. Websites are so information dense because people want to understand things thoroughly and see the value that a website can give them upfront.
Comparing the menus, you can see that the English menu is very brief and high level. The Japanese menu is so long that it needs multiple scrolls to reach the end. It is categorized alphabetically and includes everything from real estate to games to maps, payment portals, weather, a calendar, flight booking and astrology.
Another example is the Cosme app versus the Revlon app. Cosme is a Japanese makeup brand. Every category of makeup as well as gifts, points, premium memberships and specials are shown up front. Revlon puts the product at the forefront and their menu is much simpler.
Japanese consumers like seeing things upfront. Think for instance the plastic food you see at a restaurant in Japan before you enter. Japanese apps remind me of fliers that come with the newspapers. From a young age, Japanese consumers have trained their eyes to scan through masses of information to find what they need. A Japanese audience is used to scanning through lots of information before making a decision, and this has impacted app and web design too.
Japanese users want to read and analyse a whole page before forming an opinion — the more information, the better. If a western app were to go to Japan as is and just translate their page to Japanese, it might fail because they aren’t taking into consideration cultural and mental models that the Japanese internet user has.
CHINA
This is a Chinese app for ebooks and cartoons, and this is Blinkist an English app for ebook snippets. The Chinese one similarly shows all the information upfront. The characters take up less space, so it’s easier to show many things at once. You can see on the English titles, some of the book titles get cut off because the letters take up a lot of space. I’d say Chinese gets a point here for being able to put more on a screen and still having it be readable.
On the right is an app from Taiwan where users can post things they’ve written. Because Chinese can be written from top to bottom, some of the titles are displayed as such and they look beautiful with the extra white space. Even though both Chinese apps are different in content, you can see how the language can affect the visual display of the app.
INDONESIA
Next we move to Indonesia and Singaporeand take another look at a super app called Gojek. Gojek started out as a transport app and has since expanded to food delivery, ticket purchases, parcel deliveries, massage and beauty services, a payment app and a car hire app. 1 in 2 people have the Gojek super app in Indonesia, and they have more than 125 million downloads.
So what makes this app so successful? Apart from it being convenient to do everything in one app instead of accessing multiple apps, there are also cost savings when you’re mindful of mobile data or phone space when downloading apps. Superapps are also more popular in countries where it’s common to use your smartphone over a desktop, so countries that digitised later use smartphones as a main tool.
On top of that is language. The Gojek app is localised and available in Bahasa Indonesia, using language that feels familiar to connect better with the users. For instance, this screen says “yeah, the internet is down” instead of something like “no connection”. The text below tells the user to check their internet connection and try again, with an informal “yeah” at the end.
SINGAPORE
When Gojek came to Singapore, they had the challenge to localise it for the Singporean market. Singapore is such a linguistically diverse country. Mandarin, Tamil, Malay and English are the official languages, not to mention multiple other Chinese dialects like Hokkien and Twochew. Where Indonesia can standardise an app using Bahasa Indonesia, researches at Gojek were wondering if there was something that connected everyone in Singapore. Gojek thought to bring in the Singlish!
They did research into how the typical Singaporean speaks on a daily basis, looking at vocabulary, tone and style. When I first downloaded the Gojek app to book a taxi, I was pleasantly surprised at how relatable the copy was — I felt like the app was really catered to a Singaporean market. When the app loads, it says “wait ah, getting ready”. “Wait ah” is a very common Singlish way of saying “please wait”.
Gojek isn’t a super app in Singapore yet, but I’m sure that as they add features, they’ll keep in mind how to stay relevant and fun for a local Singaporean market. I recently spoke to a UX writer who told me that you can’t just use Google translate because it’s hard to convey nuances like Singlish to other languges.
Localisation and translation of interfaces
Now lets look at localisation and translation for changing one app to another language.
What about countries that prefer English apps to apps in their native language? What might the reason be for that?
App designers need to do better to take into account translation and localisation for different markets. I spoke to an Indonesian friend on Twitter and he told me sometimes app translations are so inaccurate with Bahasa Indonesia that many of his friends prefer just to use their phones in English.
PHILIPPINES
One can’t simply Google translate a screen on an app and expect it to work. There are design constraints to keep in mind.
I spoke to a UX designer friend in the Philippines and was interested to learn how different it is to design for English, Tagalog and Bicolano.
He mentioned “when I make dialog boxes, If I write a caption in english, I can express my thoughts in just a sentence. But If I do it in Tagalog, it will take me a sentence or two. We also did an app written in Bicolano, the native language in the Bicol region, and on that one, it’s even trickier”.
Bicolano is syllabic and syllables are repeated to signify different parts of a sentence and tenses. That means words can be very long. I don’t speak Bicolano, but a quick Google search confirmed this — just look at how much space the Bicolano sentence takes up compared to the English one!
Digital literacy
Simply put, someone who is digitally literate can find and evaluate information on a digital platform. An example would be understanding how to do a google search on your phone, or how to send an email. Digital literacy can also encompass someone’s ability to produce text or images using technology
On the note of money, I want to share an interesting learning I had when I was working on a mobile banking app in South Africa four years ago. The majority of African internet users use the internet only on their phone, and many people haven’t used laptops before. In addition, some countries are largely unbanked.
We started researching in three countries — South Africa, Nigeria and Uganda to understand frustrations and needs that the users had with the current version of the app. We found that 75% of respondents across the countries had trouble using the app because of technical terminology. The terminology used by the app included words like “merchant short code”, “recharge”, and “topup” which were all terms that the business understood but not the every day user. A simple solution we employed was to use visuals with the words to better explain what they meant.
Delving further, we found that it was difficult for people to understand their mobile money statement. After we took away complex terms like debit and credit and rather switched to Money in and Money Out, we noticed participants could complete a task of checking their statement in half the time. All this just because we organised the language, added color to indicate meaning, and simplified terminology.
Exploring different words to use on buttons is also something people should be mindful of when creating apps. Many companies have tested and found that just adding the word “now” to a button increases conversion significantly. You can probably think of your own examples where you may have been more inclined to click a button because it says “buy now” instead of “purchase” — the former seems more appealing and pressing, right? Perhaps this can also be used for evil or for pushing an agenda from companies who are eager to make money faster.
Design is also a language. To be understood by users, interfaces need to be translated accordingly across different markets and languages.
As we saw, even in a single country like the Philippines or Singapore, humans and languages are diverse and fragmented. App designers and developers should take into consideration how best to localise for a diverse and growing mobile world.
Consider next time you open an app all the thought that has gone into it both from linguists, UX writers, product designers and engineers.
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