![]() Now, this is a great scenario for automation. But what good would a localized site be if the user never has the option to select their language? The goal behind localization is to make your website as accessible to users as possible. There's a lot to consider when designing a great language selection menu for your website. Who wants to scroll through an endless menu? What happens on mobile when you can only display 20 languages at most at a time? ![]() Of course, that's a quick and easy fix, but it doesn't foster the best user experience possible. It seems simple at first, right? Maybe a quick drop-down menu listing different languages, and some flags for visual aid. A great example is designing the language selection menu on your site. This requires precise attention to detail and some creative thinking to innovate. You want to make your website as easy to navigate as possible, and you want a satisfying experience to keep users coming back. – Having a dropdown somewhere and hoping for the user to find the language switch function is not enough.Every little detail matters. – Save the language on the browser for returning users. – Show “English” word written in English when the language of the service is not, or an autodetected recognized language written in the language itself for the user if you can not show a flag for some reason. Here is a good article about designing a language switch. But here is what I say why do we use a floppy disk icon to save a file while a lot of young people don’t know what a floppy disk is? Because it is how it was defined and people know the meaning. There are some arguments about not using it and they are understandable. – Show a flag as it’s understandable by most of the users. – You can show English if the majority of your target audience prefers English and show a suggestion to switch to the native (auto-detected) language. A lot of people understand English or at least can find the “language” option easier (depending on the business, of course). – When in doubt, switch to English, and mix and match with other solutions. (There are scripts for this that you can find easily with a simple search) – Try to figure out the user’s language by any means possible. Here are my suggestions that may be useful for some, and of course remember to test them as much as you can for your own service to find the best solution required for your own target audience. I live in Thailand, so here is what it looks like for John if he decides to come to Bangkok like this on some of the accommodation booking websites. A website, on a phone, in an unknown language with a slow connection of airport wifi. The IP shows that he is in Vietnam, so the service switches the language to Vietnamese. He connects his phone to the free wifi of the airport and goes to a booking website. He jumps on a plane and lands in Ho Chi Minh City without a prior room booking. He wants to go to Vietnam for his next unexpected trip. No judgment here, and trust me, there are a lot of people like John. John Smith is a traveler who wants to get to the next destination without thinking twice. ![]() Accommodation booking services are one of the most important ones in this situation. Working as a UX designer in the travel industry for a while, showed me how important it is to fix this problem and not lose the customer. Oh oh! (Hint: As a business, you don’t want this to happen.) If it was not important to me to log in to this service, let’s say it was a hotel booking service where I have other choices and I can go to another service, I wouldn’t bother finding the language option. I say “it’s not easy” but I don’t say “impossible” because in this situation I went for the dropdown (on the bottom left) instinctively and I found it. We as users can not find the language option easily. Can I switch the language manually? Can you tell? Yesssss! There is the problem. Google is an international web service and I know that they have an English version of this page. Again, nothing wrong with that and actually it is encouraged to do so for a lot of services. And I am in Bangkok, so probably Google is fetching my location from the IP address and it switches to the Thai language. Do you see the problem? The fact that I can’t read Thai is my problem I guess.
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