Are You Using the Power of UX and Localization?
Localization is essential to exploring, entering, and succeeding in different markets. The ability to adjust your product, service, and content to your audience's cultural expectations and nuances can go a long way toward helping your business establish itself in that audience's mindset and consideration set. Digital marketers, especially, will already be familiar with user experience — or UX — writing and design. The concept describes building visual and written content to appeal to your audience's needs. It also makes navigating your brand presence as intuitive and straightforward as possible.
The two concepts are closely related but must be linked more closely for too many brands. However, their combination can help your brand content stand out, and you can create a more integrated and successful experience for audiences across the markets you want to serve.
The Nuances and Benefits of UX Content
Discussing the link between UX and localization must include a thorough understanding of what UX content means. In simple terms, we will define it as content specifically built to be approachable and intuitive to users, solving their pain points and answering their questions or concerns.
UX content exists within the larger UX philosophy. As its name suggests, this philosophy embraces building everything around a product or service focused on a great customer or user experience.
Across industries, UX has become such an important concept precisely because of how the experience impacts user behavior. Studies have found that:
88% of online shoppers do not return to a website after a single bad experience.
Usability is the reason for failure for 70% of online businesses that fail.
A bad experience on mobile devices is a brand-deterring annoyance for 48% of users.
On the flip side of that equation, UX-driven businesses grow 1.7 times faster on average while increasing their customer lifetime value by 2.3 compared to their counterparts.
Within that larger equation, UX content becomes the credibility builder. This is the avenue through which you can answer audience questions, place complex concepts into their frame of reference, and build an approachable, personalized brand personality. This is how UX leaders like Zappos have become market leaders on the back of an outstanding user experience.
Exploring the Links Between UX and Localization
At its core, UX is a global concept with best practices that apply across industries, demographics, and physical borders. Best UX practices will undeniably appeal to any audience in any country. At the same time, best practices will inevitably need to be applied differently because of audience nuances. That is why localization becomes essential to build and optimize content for audiences in different countries.
The UX component of the content may be the core reason why more than a plain translation of an existing text is required.
Consider, for example, the common brand practice of linking into local traditions. Local holidays, cultural habits, and other actions have long been a core strategy to make a product feel part of that culture's fabric. That makes interacting with it more natural for your target audience. Consider how brands embrace the Super Bowl as a yearly central marketing strategy.
That same emphasis naturally only works when the cultural context is recovered. An ad campaign focused around the Super Bowl or even content and designs that loop to tap into the phenomenon lose their effectiveness in Europe where "American Football" remains a niche sport. Instead, the user research will unearth different user characteristics that make them look for different types of content.
How UX Best Practices Change Across Cultures
Another common best practice, streamlining the navigation, also changes depending on cultural context. For example, academic studies using Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions seek to understand how audiences in different cultures categorize information and thus expect 'ideal' data to help them. For example:
Individualistic cultures may look for customizable navigation styles with as many options as possible. However, collectivistic cultures may tend to prefer fewer, more centralized options.
Cultures with low power distance need a flatter informational hierarchy with many options at every level. But high power distance cultures seek a tall hierarchy with more layered levels.
Cultures with a short-term orientation look for quick hit results and a web-internal search. Those with a long-term orientation look for more information, leaving them with multiple options.
Finally, the common UX best practice of placing value over promotion is locally defined by what value means in a given culture. As another example using Hofstede’s theory, individualistic cultures may look for content that helps them self-actualize. In contrast, collectivistic cultures likely need content that makes them feel part of a greater whole.
Add these examples together, and one thing becomes clear: UX may be a ubiquitous concept, but its application is not. Brands exploring new and different markets must apply core localization insights to these generalized UX best practices to improve and optimize audience impact.
How to Combine Localization and UX for an Integrated Experience
With the need for combining your localization and UX efforts evident, the next natural step includes taking the best actions to achieve that integration. The following tips and best practices provide a start:
Generalize UX best practices. If you already have best practices in your home market, create general rules that apply across cultures. If not, following industry standards is a great start.
Perform localization research. Summarize everything you know about your new markets, then perform research to fill the gaps and build a comprehensive audience profile for marketing and communications efforts.
Account for behavioral nuances. As part of your research, analyze nuances like the abovementioned differences in navigation preferences. Other examples include differences in font preferences, color theory, differing meanings of images, etc.
Embrace cultural traditions. The more relevant your brand can be to local communities, the more likely they will embrace it. Local philanthropic efforts, tying your efforts to local events, and more can all impact the UX of your content.
Create flexible designs and layouts. Even the most nuanced localization will only allow you to create some content from scratch. Instead, localized content may fit into broader design or visual templates. The more flexible these designs and layouts are, the more relaxed you can be on changing character limits or other content nuances applying to single markets.
Test localized content for UX performance. Finally, embrace the importance of testing. Putting new content in front of test audiences in different cultures first allows you to tweak and optimize before broader market exposure.
Of course, it helps your UX and localization team to work closely together. If you only have one or the other, consider the advantages of cross-training. Ensure that your UX experts are also content experts and vice versa.
Get Support as You Integrate Your UX and Localization Efforts
UX and localization are closely related, so expanding successfully to new markets is nearly impossible without considering both connections. Getting there can be difficult, but you are not on your own.
Instead, get help from localization experts who have embraced UX as a core part of their effort.