Most good marketers know how to gain top of mind. Good marketers are adept at widening the funnel at the top end. They are good at introducing new lines, new variants, new dimensions – in order to attract new customers. They know how to work with their agencies and their internal teams to fashion a story that intrigues to draw an audience. They know how to weight media flights and craft promotions that persuade consumers to call or to visit. They’ve learned to charm. Competition’s taught them to do that well.
That used to be their biggest challenge.
Some would argue of course that’s never been more difficult, but, ironically, it’s not the biggest challenge marketers face anymore.
Now the biggest challenge facing marketers is gaining and retaining front of heart: sustaining the appeal for those who already believe in the face of ongoing enticement from determined competitors.
That’s because, between initial purchase and continued purchase, a vital change takes place. What consumers need at first is awareness, authenticity, excitement and a sense of gain. The sales funnel works well to get them through the obstacles to first buy.
But after that comes the need for affirmed faith. Once consumers are passionate about a brand, they need different things. They certainly don’t need to be sold to anymore – at least not like they were sold to at first. Now they need to be reminded that they’re making the right choice every time they buy, and they need to feel rewarded for the decision to lock in.
Problem is, for so many brands there’s no real sense of that reward. They either ignore loyal consumers. Or smother them. They group them as stats. Or they don’t segment them at all.
Here are four of the biggest mistakes that marketers make that lead to a loss of brand loyalty:
1. They can’t make the transition from sell to story – some brands put product targets ahead of relationship targets in the mistaken belief that if they sell more, they will earn greater loyalty. They keep using the same sales model with people who are already loyal to them in the belief that they have to keep convincing consumers to buy again and again and again. But, once a strong relationship is established, revenue is one of the outcomes of that relationship, not the qualifier, and that’s where more brands need to focus their attention. No loyal buyer wants to feel that they are only as important as what they last paid for. And no-one wants to feel taken for granted. Brands need to become much more adept at telling stories that keep loyal customers intrigued and wanting to become more involved. After the initial challenge of conversion comes the deeper challenge of immersion.
2. They’re afraid of conversation – many brands are afraid of debate and honest discussion. Conversation concerns them. It feels like a distraction from the real issues of getting out there, competing and making money. I’m always intrigued by how readily marketers agree that word-of-mouth is the most powerful way of winning business, and yet how so few seem to act on the logical extension of that thought – that WOM must be the most powerful way of keeping business. Question: what are you doing to keep your loyal customers talking?
3. They think a community is a high-maintenance relationship – so many brands say they welcome feedback when in fact they don’t. They listen to it. They probably record it. But that’s as far as it goes. Actually, they think of their front line as a defensive line and their frontline staff as a resource that is there to limit damage, absorb or deflect criticism, and basically function as a human answer machine service with scripts and carefully cured responses. But if you don’t give your people the permissions and the tools to genuinely interact, to ask questions and to feed back what they hear into the organization, you are paying a lot of people a lot of money to frustrate everyone by the book. It may look right operationally. It may function correctly by the numbers. But its greatest efficiency, in reality, is the streamlined manner in which a regimented contact center destroys the desire for interaction. In time, people switch off.
4. They stick with what they know and they tell themselves it’s what people want – the last thing any brand should do is treat its loyal fans as a static constituency, and yet so many do. The more they get to know their consumers the more they look to categorize them in ways that feel familiar. Problem. People are just not that simple. If you fail to test the boundaries with consumers who love the brand, all you continue to offer them is more of the same. That’s not exciting. The challenge for any brand is to bring its loyal customers with it as it evolves, so that they feel involved and included based on what they know, at the same time as they feel stimulated and intrigued by the new things that are presented to them.
Brand loyalty is basically about keeping people interested. It’s about elevating your loyal customers’ heartbeat over a sustained period of time. That’s harder than it sounds in a world teeming with distractions.
Contributed to Branding Strategy Insider by: Mark Di Somma, Brand Consultant
via Branding Strategy Insider http://www.brandingstrategyinsider.com/2013/07/brand-loyalty-4-ways-brands-get-it-wrong.html
“Finding information resources regarding a strategic approach to UX design is a challenge because most UX publications and presentations focus on tactical solutions to common design challenges.”
Companies around the globe are realizing that they need to take a more strategic approach to user experience design. UX teams are feeling the pressure to be both better and faster, as agile development squeezes UX processes into short sprints; while analytics provide an instant read on how designs are performing in the marketplace. UX leaders are trying to keep up with changing technology and an explosion of devices, while at the same time trying to be smarter about how they make decisions for their UX roadmap.
Finding information resources regarding a strategic approach to UX design is a challenge because most UX publications and presentations focus on tactical solutions to common design challenges. In this column, I’ll discuss some ways to get help with formulating a UX strategy and communicating your strategy to an organization.
Graduating from Usability to UX Strategy
“Once you’ve solved the basic usability issues for a particular digital experience, your UX team can shift its focus to more strategic considerations.”
Usability is typically a key consideration when creating a Web site, application, or other digital product or service. Customers are quick to abandon an unusable product and move on to a solution that is easier to use. Poor design can cause users to make mistakes that are costly for them, and for you, to fix. When users are having a really difficult time, some will call customer service, adding to your cost of doing business. However, once you’ve solved the basic usability issues for a particular digital experience, your UX team can shift its focus to more strategic considerations.
While the goal of usability testing is primarily to remove obstacles and fix clunky interactions, UX strategy is about building a rationale to guide your UX design efforts for the foreseeable future. Changing your focus from usability to UX strategy is analogous to a person’s progressing from going to a doctor to cure an illness to meeting with a personal trainer to get in peak physical condition.
Usability testing answers the basic question: What parts of our design are difficult to use? UX strategy asks more complex questions such as the following:
How can our design do a better job of engaging customers?
What can our product offer that will differentiate it from our competition?
What data should we be collecting to inform our efforts to deliver better user experiences?
How can we meet our customers’ needs more comprehensively, providing a holistic solution across all touchpoints?
For complex businesses and designs, UX leaders and teams may find that they need help formulating a comprehensive UX strategy and communicating their strategy in an effective way to the rest of an organization. Here are some resources you can use to obtain the help you need.
The Internal UX Strategist
“Contact a UX Strategist at your project’s inception, as soon as resources are being allocated. … A UX strategy guides the overall design concept for a product, not just its feature set.”
Over the past couple of years, some larger companies have created a new job: UX Strategist. In a previous column on UXmatters, I interviewed three people working as UX Strategists. If a UX Strategist role exists in your company, obtaining help may be as simple as engaging part of a UX Strategist’s time to work on your project. If possible, contact a UX Strategist at your project’s inception, as soon as resources are being allocated. Once your design has started taking shape, it’s probably too late for a UX Strategist to have an impact. A UX strategy guides the overall design concept for a product, not just its feature set.
If the UX Strategist role has existed in your company for a while, it’s likely that many departments and product teams within the company will have realized how critical UX strategy is to a successful design—especially in terms of aligning the user experience with the rest of the business. In this case, you may have difficulty getting a UX Strategist allocated to your product or program. On the other hand, if your company has only recently created the role, it’s likely that there aren’t yet many people who understand the value a UX Strategist brings to the table. To take advantage of this early-stage availability, explain your goals for your program or product and request the participation of a UX Strategist as early in the process as possible.
The External UX Strategist
“The first thing you should look for in an external UX Strategist is experience with large-scale programs and products. UX strategy is based on a wide variety of complex data sources….”
Today, in the vast majority of companies, either there are no UX Strategists, or there are too few to go around. So you may want to bring an external UX Strategist on board to help you formulate a UX strategy or communicate your UX strategy to the rest of the organization. (Disclosure: This is how I make a living, so keep this in mind as you read this section.)
The first thing you should look for in an external UX Strategist is experience with large-scale programs and products. UX strategy is based on a wide variety of complex data sources, business strategy analysis, deep understanding of evolving customer needs and behaviors, awareness of the competitive landscape, detailed interaction modeling, and more. If a UX Strategist can’t demonstrate that he understands these strategic facets of UX design and has created a comprehensive UX strategy in the past, he is unlikely to be the right partner for this kind of engagement.
As with the internal UX Strategist, you need to bring the external UX Strategist into your program early, so he can help get things moving in the right direction from the start. While you can devise and apply a marketing strategy once a product is in its design phase, you can’t wait to devise or apply a UX strategy until that point. A UX strategy helps you to determine what you’re designing, what a product’s feature set should be, how it can meet customers’ needs and expectations, and how it can achieve strategic business goals. Trying to retrofit a UX strategy on a product that already exists just doesn’t make any sense.
The Design Agency
“Before assuming that your agency can help you formulate a UX strategy, take some time to identify what specific people would be taking on this role and determine whether they can meet your needs.”
Larger companies typically have an ongoing relationship with one or more UX design agencies. Even smaller companies often depend on agencies for all or part of their UX design needs. Depending on your organization’s internal UX capabilities and its relationship with a UX design agency, you may expect the agency to handle the UX-strategy aspects of your program. This would, of course, be very convenient for you because you wouldn’t have to hire someone specifically to fill the UX Strategist role. Since you already have a business relationship with the agency, having them play this role would be just a matter of resource allocation and a little paperwork.
However, before assuming that your agency can help you formulate a UX strategy, take some time to identify what specific people would be taking on this role and determine whether they can meet your needs. Because of the importance of this role to your program’s future success, you should go through the same vetting process you would with an external UX Strategist, as I described earlier. Don’t assume that someone with the title UX Director or UX Lead necessarily has the experience they’d need to assimilate all of the relevant customer and business data and existing strategy documentation and produce a comprehensive UX strategy. If the agency doesn’t specifically offer UX strategy services and produce deliverables detailing their UX strategy, it’s likely that their approach would be more tactical, so you may need to look elsewhere for help formulating your UX strategy.
On the other hand, some agencies are well known for their strategic competence. If you are fortunate enough to have one of these agencies as your partner, you won’t have to worry about people working out of their depth. Such agencies tend to charge significantly more for their work than tactically focused agencies, but they will guide your program or product onto the right path. This is a very valuable service and worth the expense.
Do It Yourself
“If you want to play the role of UX Strategist yourself, you’ll need to gather the necessary ingredients for a UX strategy from disparate areas within your company.”
If you want to play the role of UX Strategist yourself, you’ll need to gather the necessary ingredients for a UX strategy from disparate areas within your company. The size and complexity of your company will have a substantial impact on how you go about doing this. In small companies, people wear many hats, so obtaining the information necessary to formulate a UX strategy can be relatively straightforward. In large companies, it may be difficult to track down some or all of information you need, because it lives in different pockets within the company; and people in other parts of the company may feel that, by not sharing the information with you, they can enhance their job security.
If you happen to be a product owner and have the necessary interest and experience in UX strategy, you may be in a good position to take on the role of UX Strategist. But if you are not the product owner, you should establish a relationship with this person as soon as possible, explaining your intention to develop a UX strategy. The product owner may see himself as having this role by default, so it’s best to clarify your intent before progressing too far into a project.
In addition to the product owner, you should establish contact with the people who have the following areas of responsibility or have access to the information that you need to formulate a UX strategy:
business strategy
customer experience
customer research
analytics
competitor analysis
product marketing
merchandising (ecommerce only)
content strategy
social media
scrum master or front-end development
platform architecture
Each of these departments, roles, or specialties informs important aspects of a UX strategy. So, even if you’re hiring out the UX Strategist role, you’ll need these people and information sources to provide key inputs. Opening the lines of communications with them early on is a good idea.
Information Resources
“Only recently have UX professionals and businesses begun to recognize that UX strategy is essential to the success of digital products….”
Only recently have UX professionals and businesses begun to recognize that UX strategy is essential to the success of digital products. Therefore, good information resources on UX strategy are still fairly limited. However, here are a few of the available resources:
UXmatters—My UX Strategy column on UXmatters—including this edition—has been focusing on the topic of UX strategy since 2011. Other authors contribute articles on UX strategy to UXmatters as well.
UX Strategy and Planning Group on LinkedIn—This LinkedIn groupdiscusses the topic of UX Strategy and has over 5,000 members from around the world.
UX Strategy Conference—Leaders in the field of UX strategy will be sharing their knowledge at UX STRAT 2013, September 9–11, 2013. See the conference Web site for more details about the conference, as they become available.
Experience Strategy: A Practical Approach for User Experience Leaders—I am coauthoring this forthcoming book with Stephanie Sansoucie of Kohls.com. Morgan Kaufmann will publish our book in late 2013. The book describes the various inputs, steps, roles, and deliverables that formulating a UX strategy involves, as well as how to communicate UX strategy to your organization.
Conclusion
“UX strategy is a rapidly growing field—and one that will bring a huge return on investment….”
If you want to bring the benefits of a comprehensive UX strategy to your program or product, but need some assistance in doing so, there is a growing number of resources to help you. UX strategy is a rapidly growing field—and one that will bring a huge return on investment to the companies who are savvy enough to dedicate resources to UX strategy early in the digital product lifecycle.
"We write down everything," says a U.S. director for Taj Hotels, which also runs the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai, above.
STORY HIGHLIGHTS
Social media and Google have made gathering information on hotel guests easier
Hotel staff often collect information about guests to anticipate their needs
Guests might shudder about what hoteliers -- and everyone else -- can find out about them
(CNN) -- Shhh. They can hear you. They're listening as we speak -- logging every word, tracing every step. Even tonight, while you sleep under your hotel-monogrammed duvet, rest assured that 20 stories below, in some undisclosed location, researchers are hard at work documenting your whims and wishes -- Loves biking! Hates bananas! -- trying to crack the profound mystery that is You.
How much do they know? They want to know everything: your relationship status, your income, your allergies, your preferred brand of toothpaste, how you like your eggs -- all those sundry habits, peeves and predilections, even the ones you didn't know you had.
Hotels have always kept logs on their guests, tracking previous stays, comments and complaints, even which pay-per-view movies you ordered. "We write down everything," says Karambir Singh Kang, area director, USA, for Taj Hotels and general manager of the Taj Boston. So when the bellman casually inquires, "Where are we off to today, folks?" no doubt your reply will be fed into your ever-expanding profile. Sometimes this "research" can take on questionable ethical dimensions. One veteran general manager told me his staff aren't above going through guests' trash.
But fishing around is not a recent development. What has changed, in this brazen new world, is the sheer amount of data that hotels now collect on guests, and the often startlingly personal nature of that data. With the explosion of social networking, and our increasingly unguarded presence online, profiling guests has become a lot easier, and a hell of a lot more effective.
A representative for a prestigious Beverly Hills hotel recalls welcoming a first-time guest to the property. "We knew very little about her before she checked in, so we searched for her online and discovered she had a dog named Bo," the rep says. "When she arrived, there was a little doggy gift waiting in her room, with a note card that said 'Bo misses you.' " Creepy? Cute? You be the judge.
Prying is the new pampering. The payoff, hospitality executives say, is the ability to tailor service to a guest without the guest's initiating any requests herself. Under the old model, a guest would have to volunteer that she loves tennis and might enjoy a lesson. Now, ideally, she need no longer say a thing; the staff has already sussed her out and booked a 9 o'clock with the pro.
As for that quaint "pre-arrival questionnaire" they used to send to incoming guests? Nearly obsolete, except at the most traditional properties. Who has the time to fill one out? Besides, for many of us, our identities, preferences and proclivities are already posted online, and ripe for the culling.
For hotel companies, social media has essentially become a sanctioned form of eavesdropping. "Hotels have trained their staff to be intense listeners and mine information about their guests. This gives them a whole new realm in which to listen," says Niki Leondakis, CEO of Commune Hotels & Resorts (formerly the president and COO of Kimpton Hotels & Restaurants). And listen they do.
At One&Only Resorts, reservation teams look up incoming guests on Twitter, work-related sites and blogs, then draw up detailed profiles (photos included) to distribute to top-level managers.
The St. Regis Bora Bora Resort, meanwhile, Googles every guest two weeks before arrival. "We actually create a little story about them -- just a paragraph or so -- and share that with the heads of each department at our daily NDA (next-day arrivals) meeting," says general manager Michael Schoonewagen. (You didn't know they had a little story about you, did you?)
It's not rocket science, Schoonewagen adds, and it doesn't cost them a thing. "The first page of Google results is usually sufficient. We're not digging into every last detail of someone's life -- we just want a picture of who they are."
As Lema sees it, guests are looking not only for great amenities but also for "connection" -- with a staff that can intuit their tastes and desires, including unspoken ones.
"Previously, we did all our profiling via manual online searches, and only VIPs and guests paying a certain rate were researched," Lema says. "Now every reservation is processed by Libra." In today's social-mediated paradigm, wherein everyone lives in public, all guests can be treated like celebrities.
This proves especially useful in orchestrating what hotels call "surprise-and-delight moments." So if you happen to tweet "Just arrived @FSLosAngeles for anniversary weekend!" don't be shocked if a bottle of wine appears at turn-down. (Be surprised and delighted, but don't be shocked.)
"A guest's Twitter feed can provide information that they aren't even telling you -- and then you can really surprise them," notes Leondakis. "For instance, maybe the hotel will find out the guest is an advocate for LGBT rights, in which case the staff can personalize the welcome amenity by including a magazine they would identify with. Something unique and personal that says, 'This is just for you.'"
Cranks and paranoiacs will surely see all this probing and profiling as a sign of the apocalypse, or at least a serious incursion into their privacy. (It's worth noting that, because of privacy regulations in the EU, companies are less likely to gather personal information online, so these practices are more common at U.S.-based and independent hotels.)
Some may pine for the days when travel could be refreshingly anonymous, when hotels were at least purportedly about discretion above all else. But would we really want to go back?
The fact is, profiling works -- most of the time. Who wouldn't want their hotel to know, without even asking, what type of pillow to leave on the bed, which magazines to leave on the coffee table, what brand of juice to put in the mini-bar? Who doesn't enjoy being surprised and delighted?
And just so we're clear, we're talking about hotels here. Hotels -- where, discreet as one might hope to be, it's impossible not to leave an identifiable footprint. Long before Twitter this was so. You might hang that flimsy privacy sign on your door, but you can't hide. You can't "turn off cookies." The staff's eyes and ears are everywhere. (For God's sake, they're going through your trash!) Trust me, they know plenty about you already, and they didn't need a search engine to find it.
The key, as one hotel manager puts it, is "to act on that knowledge without calling undue attention to it." If your profile says you requested the Wall Street Journal on a previous visit, a skilled desk clerk will simply have it delivered again this time, without comment.
Nobody wants to hear the words "And we see from our deep background check that Sir enjoys the Journal"! No, we prefer to think this stuff happens by magic, not by design; that the staff are just incredibly good at their jobs, not following a computer-generated set of directives -- which, frankly, seems like cheating.
Bear with me as we compare your hotel to Santa Claus. One would like to believe that Santa knows what you want -- and whether you've earned it -- based on his compassion, care and superior powers of intuition. What you don't want to discover is that Santa's elves have been monitoring your Google, Bing and Amazon searches for gift ideas, then poring over your Facebook wall to see if you've been good enough to deserve them.
Of course, there's a delicate line between intuitiveness and intrusiveness, between "personalization" and, well, stalking. Consider this curious tale from New York restaurateur Danny Meyer, who literally wrote the book on hospitality. (It's called "Setting the Table," and it's required reading for anyone in the industry.) Last June -- on Father's Day -- Meyer returned to his room at the Little Nell in Aspen, Colorado, to find a framed photo of his wife and children beside the bed. "On the frame it said 'Happy Father's Day from your friends at the Little Nell,'" he recalls. "They'd gone online to find a picture of us."
To me that sounds neither surprising nor delightful, but downright terrifying. I'm trying to picture my own reaction: You hunted down my FAMILY?!? Leave them out of this, you monsters!! But Meyer, to his credit, found it touching.
"I almost started crying," he says. "That photo is now on my dresser at home. I thought it was a genuinely thoughtful gesture. Look, anyone can give you a plate of cookies, and sure, that feels nice. But this wasn't off-the-rack. It was about customization -- one-size-fits-one. That's true hospitality."
Je ne suis pas monsieur Lebowski. C’est vous monsieur Lebowski. Moi, je suis le Duc.
The Big Lebowski, French version
There is a world where Harry Potter’s arch enemy is “Du-weißt-schon-wer,” Facebook users click the “Me gusta” button, and the Dude is named “le Duc.” This world is a translated world.
We—the people who make websites—now study almost every aspect of our trade, from content and usability to art direction and typography. Our attention to detail has never been greater as we strive to provide the best possible experience. Yet many users still experience products that lack personality or are difficult to understand.
They are users of a translated version.
When we pledge to embrace the adaptable nature of the web—to make our websites responsive and even future-ready—we’re typically talking about diversity of devices. But the web’s diversity also comes in the form of different languages and cultures.
Translation affects users’ experiences—and our organizations’ success. It’s time we consider translation part of our jobs, too.
Waiting for C-3PO
“Do you want your forum clean like this?”
I had just set up a user forum in French when I stumbled upon this rather bizarre banner. “What makes the forum so clean?” I wondered. “Do they tidy the code every day?” I had to change the language back to English to understand it: “Do you want your own forum like this?”
In French, “propre” means either “own” or “clean,” depending on how it’s used. The rule is simple; any translator would know it. More precisely, any human translator. Google Translate, the system behind the French version of the forum, obviously wasn’t so sure.
It’s not just Google Translate, either. In the 1950s, Alan Turing, the father of computer science, devised a test to evaluate machine intelligence through conversations. The biggest Turing test ever was held last June to celebrate what would have been Turing’s hundredth birthday. The winner was probably the most advanced chatbot ever created, yet Eugene Goostman—as this bot is named—failed to fool the judges 70 percent of the time. When will machines pass the test? In the year 2029—maybe.
This should come as no surprise. Languages are amongst the richest and most complex systems humankind has ever produced. When machines gain the ability to really speak (and therefore translate), it will be possible to use Google Translate in a professional context—and no doubt we’ll also have Google Design and Google Copywriting by then. But today, Google Translate is to translation what the auto mode is to photography: a quick-and-dirty solution. It comes in handy when you need to get an idea of what’s being said about your project on Weibo (China’s version of Twitter), but it isn’t a good option when you need to translate your website into Spanish.
While we’re waiting for C-3PO, we need professional translators. We must also acknowledge their creativity and recognize them as peers.
Great design deserves great translation
Translating is a respectable, valuable, creative and worthwhile use of a human brain.
Le Big Lebowski is a masterpiece. I would even argue that it surpasses the original. Everything is just perfect: the dubbing, the humor, the dialogue. The translators retained the essence of the film while adapting it for an audience that has no idea what a “dude” is. They managed to translate not just the words, but the Coen brothers’ genius as well.
E-mail service provider MailChimp is a masterpiece, too. Aarron Walter’s UX team has succeeded in creating a unique personality. Much of this personality manifests itself through copy: the greetings from Freddie, the company’s joke-cracking mascot; the always-relevant error and help messages; and—above all—the “funny but not goofy, informal but not sloppy” voice and tone used throughout the application.
Now, if MailChimp were to be translated into Spanish, Russian, or Chinese, what would become of this personality? What does it mean to be “informal but not sloppy” in Japanese? Should the mascot’s name still be “Freddie Von Chimpenheimer IV” in German, or could that be misinterpreted? Can you greet an Indian user with “Hi. You could be a part-time model”?
There are no easy answers to these questions. Translating is walking a tightrope. The challenge is to remain faithful to the original design while adapting it for a new audience, for a different culture.
If you think a machine can do this, take a look at this Google translation of MailChimp’s success message, “High fives! Your list has been imported”:
Cinco años de alta! Su lista ha sido importado.
Show that to a Spanish-speaking friend and you’re sure to get a bewildered look.
The road ahead
The web is home to plenty of innovation. But when it comes to translation, other industries are far ahead.
If we want to reap the benefits of translation, we must learn what it takes to do it well—and why it matters. Let me give you two examples.
LINGUISTIC VALIDATION
The pharmaceutical business may not seem to share much with web design, but it has one best practice that could inspire us: linguistic validation.
Introducing a new drug into the market is a complex and controlled process that includes a long series of trials and reviews. Some of these tests involve the patients themselves, such as Patient-Reported Outcomes questionnaires, which assess whether a drug has actually improved a patient’s quality of life. These questionnaires are written in English by clinicians and then translated into hundreds of languages.
Ordinary translation is usually a two-step process: translation then proofreading (some even skip the proofreading). The linguistic validation of patient questionnaires has a few more steps, such as doing both forward and backward translations and pilot testing.
Why such a complicated and costly process? Two reasons: First, the original version is a precise research instrument. Nothing has been left to chance. Second, it is essential for patients to perfectly understand the questions, because what they report will serve as scientific data. The questionnaire must therefore be intuitive and patient-friendly.
Thoughtfully designed products, user-friendly interfaces—aren’t these what we aim for? If we care equally about all our users, it’s time we start thinking of translation as something slightly more complex than a word-to-word job.
CULTURAL EXPERTISE
Raving Rabbids is a humorous party game designed in Ubisoft’s Paris studio. The development team includes a localization specialist in charge of the game’s eight localized versions. She works hand in hand with designers to ensure their jokes, references, and altogether craziness are translatable. For the U.S., Rabbids’ biggest market, a duo of Americans from Nickelodeon even gave the team a little extra cultural insight.
It costs millions of dollars to produce a major video game, and even more to target international audiences. Because playing a game is such an immersive experience, the teams behind Rabbids and many other games have found that localization specialists are critical. They are not given a finished product to adapt—they take part early in the project, as their feedback on cultural matters may profoundly change the game’s design.
The game industry prefers the term “localization” to “translation” because the latter is too often restricted to text. This says a lot about how seriously game studios take cultural expertise. Because they know a cultural misfit can stall a game’s chances of success—and they know for every dollar invested in localization, there’s a $25 return.
Because they know that translation—sorry, localization—is UX.
Translate early, translate often
Most startups employ what could be called the lemonade tycoon approach: Start in your neighborhood, amongst the people you know; this is your best bet. Get it right at home before expanding into far-off lands.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t start in your own country. Local knowledge is priceless. But why wait to internationalize? Unlike lemonade selling, the web is international by nature. From day one, your website will be accessible to any person on this planet.
What’s more, procrastination has a cost. According to Smartling, a translation software company, “it can take companies 12-18 months to internationalize their code and launch their first foreign language site, absorbing much of the company’s engineering resources.”
Companies face the same problem when they develop a mobile version of their site afterward. Good thing many now adopt a “mobile first” process.
Perhaps they should consider “foreign first,” too.
It’s a big world out there
When you come from a non-English-speaking country, as I do, a “foreign first” approach is very likely to mean “English first.” But what if you’re based in New York, Manchester, or Auckland? Which language should you go for?
The answer is actually not to think “language,” but rather “opportunity” and “culture”—as these three companies have:
Wufoo is a popular form builder from Tampa, Florida. At the beginning of 2012, it launched Wufoo Español, its first foreign version. You won’t find the Spanish version at wufoo.es, but at wufoo.com.mx—because it saw an opportunity in a neighboring market, and language was a means to reach that market. Besides, Wufoo doesn’t mix up language and local culture: It plans to roll out additional localized versions for Spain and Argentina.
CanaDream is a Canadian RV rental company whose website is available in three languages. English and French are obvious choices, but the third one is trickier: German. Again, the company saw an opportunity—Germans love RV travel. But German people generally speak good English, don’t they? Yes, many do—but they will still prefer a company that attends to them in their own language.
Bla Bla Car is a car-sharing service born in France. Here we can see that “English first” isn’t always the rule. Bla Bla Car’s first foreign version was in Spanish. The car-sharing market was less competitive in Spain than in other European countries, which gave Bla Bla Car the opportunity to test-run its internationalization before moving on to other markets—which it eventually did. Car sharing is getting more and more popular in Europe, and Bla Bla Car aims for leadership in the region—and in a multilingual area, this has required translation to seven languages and counting.
Bargain-basement market research
Most startups can’t afford international market research. That’s why they focus on their home market. But just as Paul Boag taught us about bargain basement usability testing, we can find affordable market research techniques, too.
Once you’ve settled on a country to target, go to ProZ and look for a translator or agency based there. Brief her about your project and send your prototype or an access to your beta. Ask her to translate the key screens. Even at this stage, you can get lots of feedback: “Are you aware your app name can hardly be pronounced—let alone remembered—by Brazilians?” “I’m sure having Acme Inc. as a client is a great reference in the U.S., but nobody knows them here.” “This photo of a blond-haired, blue-eyed guy probably won’t resonate with a Turkish market.”
Then ask your translator to run a user test using her network of proofreaders. You don’t need hundreds of people—with only ten participants, you’ll uncover any major cultural faux pas. You’ll also gain a general understanding of whether people are interested in the project, what their main questions are, and whether they like the visual design.
Finally, discuss your personas with the translator: Maybe Harriet should be renamed MarÃa and relocated to Valparaiso. And what about adding Hugo, the typical backpacker from the Netherlands? With localized personas, all your users will be given equal consideration throughout the design process.
Of course, you’ll need more precise data eventually. But this quick-and-dirty research is enough to get you started. You’ll iterate from there.
Your new teammate
When you start translating early, you make the translator part of your team. Chances are this will be a very rewarding experience. At Novius, my company, it’s changed the way we work.
For major projects, we now create and feed a glossary—or as I like to call it, a “style spreadsheet.” CSS stylesheets are understood by both designers and developers and guarantee style consistency across an entire website. Similarly, glossaries are by and for the whole team and ensure the consistency of content. Just like you want a color scheme that’s thoroughly followed, you also want to make sure “module,” “plugin,” and “extension” aren’t all used to refer to the same concept. Le fond et la forme.
We have also learned that a quality translation begins with the code. Developers strive for reusable code, and strings are no exception. Depending on how a developer handles them, he could make the translator’s job straightforward, or virtually impossible.
When dealing with sentences like, “1 person has this question” and “X people have this problem, including you,” translators are often asked to translate strings like: “person has,” “people have,” “this,” “question,” “problem,” and “including you.”
Even with context, deconstructing these sentences is a translator’s nightmare. For languages with gender, the string “this” is untranslatable (e.g., esta pregunta andeste problema in Spanish). In many languages, like Russian, plurals take several forms (e.g., for the plural “persons,” you would say four челове́ка, but fiveчелове́к). And the list goes on.
Since language isn’t code, developers and translators have a lot to learn from each other. Translators will tell them the software they use has translation memory, so there’s no need to avoid repetition. They will discuss how to handle variables in text. They will also decide together which internationalization system (such as gettext) and text file format (like XML or PO) to use.
Not a one-off thing
I won’t lie to you. Once you’ve translated your website, you’re in for good. People don’t care that they’re using a translated version. For them this is the only version. So you’ll have to keep translating.
They will hate being considered “second-rate” users. Once you’re out of beta, 90 percent translated is not OK. How would your users feel if every website update resulted in a buggy mobile version? Users of translated versions experience this all the time, with English text suddenly popping up out of nowhere. To make it worse, the newest features—proudly announced and long-awaited—are usually the ones left partially translated. Users do get the message: You’re not important enough for us to prioritize translation quality.
While good localization boosts conversion rates, bad or partial translation may ruin a user experience, giving users an uneasy feeling about the whole company: If they can’t even get their website right, how bad will the customer support be?
In fact, I recently chose not to purchase a service because of a pricing page that proclaimed, “Give a price to these ladders with your growing company.”
Guess what it was selling? Translation software.
A multilingual web
If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.
The language of the web is English as much as HTML. If the web had a capital, it would be somewhere around San Francisco Bay. Web professionals worldwide use English expressions in almost every sentence: Like, browser, responsive, Tweet, SEO, etc.
In our move toward universal design, we must not forget languages and the people who master them. “Translating is writing,” said French writer Marguerite Yourcenar.
