Tips to design digital products for global use
Designing software that works globally requires a bit of extra thought. Being mindful of cultural and practical differences will create a more inclusive experience for your users around the globe. As your users start out, they will feel right at home as the interface won’t have any local difficulties. This will help to build confidence, and hopefully, a happy, returning user.
These are a couple of tips to help you avoid pitfalls, and are applicable from mobile apps to enterprise software. So, what should you be mindful of?
Translations
Chances are you’re working on your application in a multidisciplinary team, perhaps consisting of multiple nationalities. You’re then likely discussing and designing your tool in English, which is a fairly short, concise language. When translating labels in your buttons, form fields, or general copy, keep in mind text can get longer quickly and your interface should be able to handle that. Checking translations has never been easier with free tools like Google Translate. When you’re unsure your UI elements will handle the length of translations, try some languages your product will be launched in. Typically Greek, Finnish, and German are great languages to do a quick stress test as these are lengthier languages.
Copy: keep it simple
Try to focus on keeping your copy as simple as possible. Refrain from using expressions like “barking up the wrong tree”, as there might not be an equivalent available for a translator.
Also, when designing a form field connected to a sentence, make sure to not place it in the middle of the sentence. With a translation, the entire order might switch due to different grammar rules.
Fonts
Think about what fonts you’d like to fall back on in case your application is loaded in e.g. Japanese, Korean or Russian. Not all fonts accommodate these languages. A safe bet is falling back on system fonts. From a UI perspective, it’s a good idea to mock up a few screens to see how your app is holding up.
In case you’re rolling out your app in Hebrew or Arabic, consider the reading order is right-to-left instead of left-to-right. This means the entire interface will be flipped. If you’re used to reading from left-to-right, you might find it hard to judge if the interface works well when mirrored. If you want to make sure you won’t miss any mistakes, check in with someone who’s familiar with using the web from right-to-left.
Cultural differences
In a Japanese business-to-business environment, you won’t likely call someone by their first name. In Western cultures, however, this might be far more common — even preferred by companies to convey a certain brand perception. Check if your tone of voice matches the country you’ll be releasing in. Colors can be interpreted differently as well. Red might stand for danger in the West but symbolizes good fortune in China. Also, if you use icons to communicate something: be aware that the hand symbol 👌 means ‘OK’ in most cultures, but in Brazil, it’s considered vulgar. Instead, use a 👍 to get on the safe side.
Time and date formatting
Take into account different time formatting (and even time zones), if you’re communicating anything regarding hours and minutes. Not all countries use a 24-hour clock to annotate time: 18 countries including the US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and the Philippines use a 12-hour format (with AM/PM cycles). How dates are displayed is another key element. Say you’re displaying 06/09/2022 to an American user: they will interpret this date as June 9th, while a German user will interpret it as September 6th. Adapt dates and times to the local customs to avoid any confusion. Discuss this with your developers: often they don’t have to code this all in themselves but use e.g. OS-specific standards that take the user's preferences into account.
Entering personal details
When entering data like addresses, there’s not a default order of showing fields — this will depend on the country. Even the fields you show can differ per country, or the way a label is displayed (think zip code in the US versus postcode in the UK). Also don’t forget that you could or should cater for spaces to be entered, and allow or disallow symbols like a ‘+’ when entering a phone number.
Local legal requirements and restrictions
Be mindful of local legal requirements, like the American Disabilities Act (ADA) which requires certain businesses to make accommodations for people with disabilities. This includes their online points of contact. Of course, it’s always important to keep accessibility in the back of your mind when designing and developing, but in this case, it can have legal consequences if there’s slack on the line.
Another example: are you relying on e.g. Google Maps while your app is rolled out in China? You (and your user) could have a bad time as Google services are blocked in Mainland China. When relying on third-party integrations, make sure they are actually available in your target countries.
Numeric values
Not everywhere decimal separators are used in the same way. E.g. in the US, it’s common to write the number five hundred thousand as 500,000 (using a decimal comma). In the Netherlands, you’d find it as 500.000 (using a decimal point). In India, you’ll find another system displaying it as 5,00,000.
Design defensively
As it will be almost impossible to check every edge case for every country during design or development you want to set up your design defensively. Make sure that your interface is flexible enough to scale if a sentence is twice as long as the one you’re using in English. Design a pattern in case, for example, a menu item label becomes too long: do you for example truncate the menu name, or let it overflow on a second line?
Closing thoughts
Designers play a key role in making sure all of the above-stated pitfalls are covered. Of course, you shouldn’t have to do this alone: talk to the developers and testers too to make sure it’s a shared effort. If you’re starting on rolling out your current platform to more countries, challenge the software and your design system to see if it holds up in say Chinese, Greek, or German and if any cultural differences could play a key factor in making your work succeed or fail.
One thing you can’t take care of all by yourself is having a broad view of the world, and achieving a broader view if all designers in your team have a similar background is not going to help either. If you have the chance, try to get a diverse design team so you can have as many perspectives on your application as possible.
Randstad helps people get jobs in 38 markets, and we’re only able to delight our clients and candidates if our digital products are top-notch all over the world. Want to help out? We often have new research and design-related vacancies listed on our LinkedIn page.
