Can One Site Appeal to All?

The increasingly multicultural Web poses problems for designers

As the Web grows to fulfill its worldwide promise, companies that want to extend their presence beyond North America are facing a difficult design issue: whether to localize or globalize their sites. In theory, either strategy can help increase market share. In practice, neither is easy to implement.

The ideal is localization--rendering multiple sites in different languages, with different looks, using local themes and expectations, and avoiding cultural negatives. But this is expensive, and it often requires in-country staffing. Globalization, meanwhile, may be less expensive, but making a single site accessible to as many cultures as possible can produce a rather dull site.

Regardless of the approach, companies increasingly need to look outward. According to a recent Gartner Group study, 55 percent of today's Internet users live in the United States. By 2000, that number is predicted to fall to 40 percent. As a result, those who aim their sites at only the U.S. market are missing a great opportunity, said Tiziana Perinotti, founder of TGP Consulting, a Palo Alto, Calif., firm that advises clients on localization and translation issues.

"The most common mistake companies make is to think they can get away with a U.S. look-and-feel Web site," said Perinotti.

sprechen sie 'globalization'?

Despite their immediacy as a barrier, language differences are just the beginning of the international-audience problem. The list of cultural obstacles grows in relation to the number of cultures a site tries to accommodate.

Humor, sex, and politics, for instance, fail to cross borders successfully, said Teri O'Connell, director of the advanced user interfaces lab at IT consulting firm American Management Systems, Fairfax, Va. Colors, food, and body parts are also suspect. White is a funereal color in many countries, while purple is sometimes associated with penitence. A site displaying hamburgers would not go over well in India, she said, and a Belgian audience may not look kindly on a picture of the bottoms of feet.

"Even showing a hand can be a problem," O'Connell said. "How many times have you seen the icon of a pointing finger? Yet in Portugal, there's a gesture used to beckon a prostitute that looks an awful lot like a pointing finger." With these and other cultural proclivities in mind, the truly international site would avoid politics, humor, history, sex, and religion; the numbers 2, 4, 13, and 666; the colors white, black, red, blue, yellow, and purple; pictures of children, food, animals, body parts, flags, and women in authority positions; slang, acronyms, abbreviations, long sentences, and, in fact, excessive text.

n other words, the Web page that appeals to everyone is the Web page that doesn't exist.

For J.G. Sandom, director of interactive at Ogilvy Interactive, a subsidiary of OgilvyOne Worldwide, running a site through this multicultural sieve--besides leaving not much to work with--is emasculating.

"Instead of a geo-neutral site, I'd rather have a site that takes advantage of local idiosyncrasies--including slang and navigational flow and use of color-if I know that it's effective for 80 percent of my market. It's all about finding high-value customers and relevancy, not just numbers," Sandom said.

Effective localization, however, requires an in-depth knowledge of the market, which in turn requires resources usually limited to big players. Excite, for instance, has slowly built local sites, offering versions in Italian, French, and German, as well as English-speaking sites for Great Britain and Australia. With people on the ground in those countries, Excite can more accurately home in on local interests. Unlike its U.S. site, Excite's U.K. site offers weather as a top-level channel, as the British are obsessed with weather, said Judith Hoffman, Excite's European product director. Germans, meanwhile, like "modernist, cool-look colors, blues and grays, with red as an accent," while the Japanese are more comfortable with blacks and blues, Hoffman said. With its personalized 'My Excite' capabilities, the portal can also suit personal tastes, she added.

Unless a site is capable of building one-on-one, My Excite-style relationships, localizing for a region may still be too broad a stroke to draw. Internet Outfitters, a design firm based in Santa Monica, Calif., is dealing with this as it develops a site for a U.S. beverage manufacturer whose product targets women in Latin America.

"The Spanish-speaking audience has so many different cultural backgrounds," said Stephen Paik, Internet Outfitters' CFO. As a result, sacrifices are inevitable, he said. "You can't be too specific in designing graphics for, say, a Brazilian audience versus a Chilean audience. In Chile and Argentina, they're going to be very European in taste, whereas Brazil tends to be a lot more flamboyant, for want of a better term. You want to make it clean for the European audience, yet make it somewhat exciting and vibrant for the Brazilian and even the Mexican audiences."

following through on localization

Some commerce sites, such as CDnow and Lands' End, have taken stabs at localization by offering sites in other languages. Yet to purchase at these sites or view product information, users must use English pages. For TGP Consulting's Perinotti, this approach has good intentions, but is off the mark. "The message is, 'We didn't forget about you, but we don't value you/your business enough to invest in providing you with the same level of service we grant our American users,'" she said.

Ogilvy's Sandom added that this interim step might best be avoided. "On some level, it's better not to bother to do the translation if you don't go all the way," he said. "If you're just going to translate the [marketing], that's not enough. If you don't do e-service and e-commerce as well, then for my money, you're missing the boat." Sometimes, however, a full translation may go too far. Ogilvy Interactive, which has created localized sites for IBM, Ford, and Jaguar, has conducted studies showing that translating technical specifications "actually works against you," said Sandom. Technicians in non-English-speaking countries are skeptical about the capabilities of those who translate specifications and would prefer to get the specs in English, he said.

Ultimately, Sandom said, personalization will be the salvation for those dealing with the globalize/localize problem. In the meantime, however, site builders have some increasingly difficult, and inherently exclusionary, decisions to make.

"Slowly but surely, the group of users who are not English speakers is growing," said AMS' O'Connell. "It's time for people to start remembering it's the World Wide Web when they're doing their design."

[Yesterday]