Adapting Your Content Strategy and UX for International Customers

UX localization includes adaption, but it’s essential to implement this in your international UX design. Providing users with comfort and ease in every corner of the globe makes global applications like Instagram, Airbnb and more, so popular worldwide.

Adapting your content strategy to international UX design starts the development process and allows you to build a long-lasting impact on internationalizing your UX app.

Well, let’s not waste any more time because in this article we will dive deeper into finding ways for how you can adapt your content strategy for UX and international customers.

What is user experience (UX)?

User experience is about how a person thinks and interacts within an application, whether on desktop or mobile. It comprises several elements, from the design and user interface (UI) to the application documentation and how it responds to a user’s behaviour.

The user experience (UX) will either improve the success of your app or not. However, keep in mind that if users don’t find your app easy to use or don’t receive any value from it, they won’t use it.

Additionally, there may be another problem. Sometimes, your app might work great for local users but isn’t optimized for international ones, which is a huge issue.

What shouldn’t you do in UX?

Talking more about international user experience, let’s dive deeper into what UX isn’t:

Having poor UX but making your product look good isn’t a great idea. Only optimizing UX for local areas and not for international clients is not a good practice. Caring about how you think the UX should be and not considering what the users say. Addressing issues after the product is launched and not before.

6 Ways to adapt your content strategy to international UX customers

Card sorting

Card sorting is a UX research method that allows you to identify how your users identify and categorize the information you present. Keep in mind that this differs in each country.

During a card sort, individuals will group their ideas into different categories in a way that makes enough sense to them. There are plenty of ways card sorting is used for research, but the ways UX designers and researchers will card sort are the following:

Creating an easy-to-navigate product or service Learning how people understand different ideas, concepts and how they feel about them

Understanding what the user expects the content to be Inspiration for grouping ideas and content When discussing the types of card sorting, each of them has their own usage cases:

Closed card sorting: Information architecture (IA) evaluations and naming conventions

Open card sorting: Used for creating new ideas and defining IA

Hybrid card sorting: Used to fill in gaps and be flexible

Internationalize the app with audio transcriptions and more The UI is a crucial UX element and always needs to be designed and kept localization in mind. It’s usually when international users will start to recognize local issues. Therefore, there are plenty of practices you can use to eliminate this.

Translating audio files: This is done by using software. It’ll depend on how many languages you want your service to be, but always try to translate audio files in more than 10 languages, it’s a good number and allows you to target a wider audience. You can translate your audio using the software in just a few minutes. This can either be done manually or automatically.

Consider the font size and language length: Texts in foreign languages are either longer or shorter. However, the differences might be shocking because each language has its own nouns, verb usage, adverbs, and more. Therefore, you don’t want to crumble letters into a shorter version because that may cause usability, display and layout issues.

Managing layout issues: Localized app versions might lead to changes in the layout, even when an automatic layout is used (particularly in iOS). An excellent layout in the local language but not in a foreign one won’t be a good sign for displaying foreign language equivalence. To solve these issues, you can try to use dropdown menus to disguise length differences, dynamic layouts for longer texts, and programmatic alternatives for each language change. Otherwise, you will face issues resulting in a poor UX experience.

UX writing while keeping localization in mind: When doing UX writing with an international audience, achieving a global user experience becomes much easier. To make UX writing international-friendly, you can try a shorter UI copy, conduct A/B testing to validate your results, avoid using homonyms, standardize terminology usage, avoid using phrases that won’t translate in a proper manager and more. Provide a cross-culture UX: Ensure you support all local currencies, dates, times, address formats and units. Setting the proper time zones for each market, ensuring international phone numbers are appropriately formatted, and formatting calendars properly.

Prioritize your design flexibility

You can’t ever make it perfect on your first try. However, taking enough measures to promote enough design flexibility helps you make any edits necessary after you conduct several tests with your international audience. For example, if you allow extra space in your UI to not have to force in a footer or redesign the menu.

Overall, if you keep text out of status images, it’ll make it easier to translate. However, if texts are included in the embedded images, graphic designers will need to remake the element for each target country, which isn’t the best idea to go with.

Design flexibility is recommended for data storage. For example, databases accommodate countries based on addresses, dates, names, and more.

Consider cultural differences

When you start analysing your target audience, you need to take into consideration that there are cultural differences. Therefore, you need to modify your design and explore how different they are from your domestic users.

Based on Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, six dimensions in cultural and national groups differ the most. Here they are:

Individualism and collectivism: People will put more interest in their personal or group interests.

Power distribution: The way people accept how power is distributed in their society.

Masculine or feminine: Considers the stereotypes associated with men and women (masculine or feminine societies).

Threat level: The level at which a culture feels threatened by an unfamiliar situation.

Future or past-oriented: Claims that society is orientated towards the future or past.

Life attitude: Includes if the society wants to enjoy life or follows traditions more.

Use a cash receipt template

A cash receipt template involves the amount of cash received during a transaction involving a cash transfer. There are plenty of different cash receipt templates you can use. For instance, Smallpdf’s free cash receipt template allows you to edit the template, add text, insert your logo, secure high-tech TLS encryption and more. Best of all, it’s free to use, unlike some templates.

A cash receipt template can be quite helpful when dealing with an international audience. Overall, every cash receipt will ask for basic information such as:

• Company name
• Receipt
• Address
• Contact details
• Receipt No.
• Who it is billed and shipped to
• Classify cultural differences during product usage

Even though cultural differences exist, they won’t influence all people in the overall population. However, it’s important to consider them, so here are a few factors you need to consider:

Frequency of product usage: How frequently does your target audience use your product or service? If the frequency is lower, your product doesn’t need to be too localized, but if it’s high, you need to focus on it more. For example, selling a product in the United States might be suitable, but this might not be the case in Germany.

How you differentiate from local competitors: It’s never wrong to run a competitor analysis and see how your target audience perceives your product to your competitors. Analyze what kind of differences your product has from your competitors and see if it fits in the cultural traditions. For example, in China, Alibaba is a popular platform and if you are in the same niche, it may be more difficult for you to make a place for your product.

The context users use your product: Are users using your product through mobile or desktop? If the context is more complex, your design should be more localized.

How users seek to achieve goals: If you want to learn more about this, it’s a good idea to conduct a task analysis. For example, does the task involve communication and collaboration amongst multiple users or not? If it does, localized designs might be more helpful since they impact the company’s structure and hierarchies.

A summary of adjusting your content strategy to a global audience

UX localization will depend on numerous factors regarding your global target audience. To make your content strategy available to a global audience, you must learn more about cultural and language differences. Each culture is different and the way they use your product might significantly differ. However, it is essential to know how you’ll bring value to them.

Moreover, it’s important to know about the language differences as well. Make the translations right and even extend what you need to. It’s not smart to squeeze all letters into a page and avoid translating properly. The more localization is required, the more careful you must focus on UX and a global audience.

About the author:

Tony Ademi is a freelance SEO content and copywriter. He has been in the writing industry for three years and has managed to write hundreds of SEO-optimized articles. Moreover, he has written articles that have ranked #1 on Google. Tony’s primary concern when writing an article is to do extensive research and ensure that the reader is engaged until the end.