WEBVTT

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As you're designing, it's so easy just to design
for the people that you know and for the culture that you know. 
However, cultures differ. Now, that's true of many aspects of the interface;
no[t] least, though, the visual layout of an interface and the the visual elements.
Some aspects are quite easy just to realize like language,
others much, much more subtle.

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You might have come across, there's two... well, actually there's three terms because
some of these are almost the same thing, but two terms are particularly distinguished.
One is localization and globalization. And you
hear them used almost interchangeably and probably also with slight differences
because different authors and people will use them slightly differently.
So one thing is localization or internationalization.
Although the latter probably only used in that sense.
So localization is about taking an interface and making it appropriate

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for a particular place. So you might change the interface style slightly.
You certainly might change the language for it;
whereas global – being globalized – is about saying, "Can I make something that
works for everybody everywhere?"
The latter sounds almost bound to fail and often does.
But obviously, if you're trying to create something that's used across the whole
global market, you have to try and do that.
And typically you're doing a bit of each in each space.

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You're both trying to design as many elements as possible so that they are globally relevant.
They mean the same everywhere, or at least are understood everywhere.
And some elements where you do localization, you will try and change them
to make them more specific for the place.
There's usually elements of both.
But remembering that distinction, you need to think about both of those.
The most obvious thing to think about here is just changing language.
I mean, that's a fairly obvious thing and there's lots of tools to make that easy.

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So if you have... whether it's menu names or labels,
you might find this at the design stage or in the implementation technique,
there's ways of creating effectively
look-up tables that says this menu item instead of being
just a name in the implementation, effectively has an idea or a way of representing it.
And that can be looked up so that your menus change,
your text changes and everything. Now that sounds like, "Yay, that's it!"

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So what it is, is that it's not the end of the story, even for text.
That's not the end of the story.
Visit Finland sometime. If you've never visited Finland, it's a wonderful place to go.
The signs are typically in Finnish and in Swedish.
Both languages are used. I think almost equal amounts of people
using both languages, their first language, and most will know both.
But because of this, if you look at those lines, they're in two languages.

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The Finnish line is usually about twice as large as the Swedish piece of text.
Because Finnish uses a lot of double letters to represent
quite subtle differences in sound.
Vowels get lengthened by doubling them.
Consonants get separated.
So I'll probably pronounce this wrong.
But R-I-T-T-A, is not "Rita" which would be R-I-T-A .
But "Reet-ta". Actually,
I overemphasized that, but "Reetta". There's a bit of a stop.

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And I said I won't be doing it right. Talk to a Finnish person,
they will help put you right on this. But because of this,
the text is twice as long. But of course, suddenly the text isn't going to fit in.
So it's going to overlap with icons. It's going to scroll when it shouldn't scroll.
So even something like the size of the field becomes something that can change.
And then, of course, there's things like left-to-right order.
Finnish and Swedish both are left-to-right languages.
But if you were going to have, switch something
say to an Arabic script from a European script,

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then you would end up with things going the other way round.
So it's more than just changing the names.
You have to think much more deeply than that. But again, it's more than the language.
There are all sorts of cultural assumptions that we build into things.
The majority of interfaces are built... actually the majority are built
not even in just one part of the world, but in one country,
you know the dominance... I'm not sure what percentage,

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but a vast proportion will be built, not just in the USA,
but in the West Coast of the USA.
Certainly there is a European/US/American
centeredness to the way in which things are designed.
It's so easy to design things caught in those cultures
without realizing that there are other ways of seeing the world.
That changes the assumptions,
the sort of values that are built into an interaction.

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The meanings of symbols, so ticks and crosses,
mostly will get understood and I do continue to use them.
However, certainly in the UK,
but even not universally across Europe.
But in the UK, a tick is a positive symbol, means "this is good".
A cross is a "blah, that's bad".
However, there are lots of parts of the world where both mean the same.
They're both a check. And in fact, weirdly, if I vote in the UK,

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I put a cross, not against the candidate I don't want but against the candidate I do want.
So even in the UK a cross can mean the same as a tick.
You know – and colors, I said I do redundantly code
often my crosses with red and my ticks with green because red
in my culture is negative; I mean, it's not negative; I like red (inaudible)
– but it has that sense of being a red mark is a bad mark.

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There are many cultures where red is the positive color.
And actually it is a positive color in other ways in Western culture.
But particularly that idea of the red cross that you get on your schoolwork;
this is not the same everywhere.
So, you really have to have quite a subtle understanding of these things.
Now, the thing is, you probably won't.
And so, this is where if you are taking something into a different culture,
you almost certainly will need somebody who quite richly understands that culture.

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So you design things so that they are
possible for somebody to come in and do those adjustments
because you probably may well not be in the position to be able to do that yourself.