Say Yeah! Article: How to turn a linguistic convenience into a nationalist uproar

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Monday June 01, 2009

How to turn a linguistic convenience into a nationalist uproar at benlucier.ca.

Posted by Lee Dale

Design is about communication. And effective design doesn't bewilder or misdirect. Symbols and images have the ability to clarify, but in the worst case they may completely obscure what you're trying to communicate.

Case in point, EA's current home page for The Sims:

The Sims Language Chooser.

With this design they've managed to turn a a language selector into a debate about nation. Canadians and Mexicans are not represented but these flags. What do the Spanish speaking contingent of North, Central and South America click on? The flag of Spain? Customers in Quebec are to look for the flag of France? In the best case, this design is tedious. In the worst case, it's offensive.

An incredibly poor design decision that would have been more inclusive, but still unclear, with the use of a globe, and solved completely with a language selector (barring any sales based regional requirements, which opens up a whole other issue of whether or not they support North American Spanish or French, etc).

More here from Ben Lucier, who started this topic of discussion earlier today.

Update, Jun 4:

Just few days later, and I'm at the American Apparel online store. Now this is how you do it right with flags:

American Apparel Language Chooser.

Update, Jun 22:

And here's yet another reason not to use flags as a landing page language selector: imagine if this was Apple's landing page.

More Graphic Design

Comments

steve h.

1st Comment Jun 16, 2009 at 3:27p

How about using a geographic IP database to make an educated guess as to what country page the user wants based on where they're coming in from?  I suppose you'd still need to split off areas like Canada into English/French, though from a marketing perspective it may be more personal than landing on a global page.

Updated Jun 17, 2009 at 12:19a

Lee Dale replied Jun 17, 2009 at 12:10a

This has become a complicated mess for no other reason than it's being over thought. We're starting with marketing saying "We have country sites where we need to direct specific traffic" and you've got global users who are concerned with language, not geography. 

For the end user, geography is near irrelevant to language. And if geography is that important to marketing, then they should be explicit about the country sites that they have in addition to the general .com. Point being, your .com should not be represented as US only, as EA has done here.

The solution here isn't fancy tech or more flags, the solution is not conflating language with geography, and not being so nationalistic with your content that you alienate users who don't fall into your selected categories. 

Any way you slice it, flags just don't make sense as a solution. And I don't think using technology to determine geography is particularly helpful when geography isn't necessarily the problem that needs to be solved.

Simplifying this down, the solution is a general site to serve all customers, with country specific sites for users within specific sales regions which are a marketing priority, and language options to serve all users. The problem with EA's approach is they've unnecessarily nationalized what should be their general site.