CX strategy for translating website content

Overview

Planning to expand our platforms internationally; Marketing website, Ecommerce, Customer hubs to Rest-of-World, I provided a CX strategy for launching and translating a global experience on three platforms.

Problem statement

Recommend a design and communication strategy for launching platforms where the native language may only be available on some platforms.

Users & audience

Internal Director or Systems, Director of IT, Chief Architect

Roles & responsibilities

CX Design lead

Scope & constraints

Translation costs are high. 128 pages of English content translated to 8+ languages is out of scope. Collaborating developers and business teams across three different platforms.

Translation strategy dilemma in black and white

Process

Our North America partner platform (salesforce) was planning to expand to Rest-of-World and become the new standard platform across the globe. With the expansion, our Shop and Explore (marketing) would need to accommodate for an authenticated, relevant and seamless experience. I was asked to provide a CX perspective and recommendation for the role of language and how it will affect the user experience.

My recommendation needed to account for existing features. At the time, we had a country selector that allowed users to move between localized marketing sites, and a language selector that was built for French speaking Canada.

Current language and region controls

Business teams expressed bias towards an on-boarding experience where users input their preferred language. My goal was to leverage as much system data as possible in order to predict or obtain and display a user’s preferred language prior to signing in while still enabling a user to change their language in preferences.

My initial research pointed towards two paths, localization or globalization - localization being regionally relevant, and global being a single template versioned for the region. Good CX uses both. At the time, there was a single regional experience and it was in English.

Moving into specifics, the 3 metrics I focused on were GeoIP, browser language and location, and language selector used for French speaking Canada.

Google analytics for an existing platform showed a strong correlation between the native language of a country and the language browser setting for users within that country. While this may seem obvious, business obsessed over a scenario where a “native German speaking user from Germany would travel to France and need to use French for his customer.”

Behavior analysis of the language selector showed that, in general, the interaction metrics were low (<1000 opens per 120K sessions) and of those opens, only ⅓ changed their language preference.

User flows within each platform were concise and easy to follow but the CX began to suffer as a user moved across platforms where their preferred language was not supported, i.e., English only.

For an ideal CX, all global applications (registration, sign in, preferences, dashboards, etc) and platforms would need to support a language before it is rolled out. English only Explore pages will need to choose a localized or globalized strategy. Long term, our goal will be to combine our country and language selectors.

In the interim, while not recommended, if we need to build an experience where language may not be supported, I provided three scaling solutions of interruption that communicated the users’ preferred language is not supported.

Outcomes & lessons learned

The cost to “internationalize” 128 English pages to 7 different languages proved too high. Interim solutions will provide clear communication to users about their language options as they navigate the site. At the time of this posting, this work is in development and proceeding with design iterations.