Title: Design for internationalization
Context: Not everyone speaks the same language, and everyone certainly doesn’t speak the same language as your UI.
Synopsis: According to the most recent statistics the average global digital consumer owns almost 4 connected devices. Of this number about a quarter of them have some understanding of English. I won’t hazard a guess for the percentage of all apps developed with only the English language in mind but my assumption would be that it is well over the 25% of users who could potentially understand it. back in the early day of application development when all of your UI text and controls were by necessity hard-coded, building software that could work for multiple languages required multiple separate code bases. Fortunately, today’s technology and platform flexibility makes the task of localizing software for different languages, alphabets, and character sets infinitely easier. Alas, I will hazard another guess that the number of applications built to take advantage of this flexibility without breaking their users’ experiences is much, much lower than the aforementioned 25% English-speaking threshold. And no matter how, where, or to whom you say it, that sucks in any language.
Best Bit: “Because many apps are only designed with English in mind, some design details can get lost in translation if you’re not careful.”
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