Retooling Usability for the Spanish Onslaught
During the World Series last night, I saw a Chevy advertisement that was 100% Spanish. It really caught my attention. I know a few words in Chinese and French, but that’s about it. I know they were talking about a Chevy truck, but I had no idea what they were talking about beyond that.
I smell a change coming in the United States: This year, there’s a good chance the 300 millionth American has already walked across the border from Mexico.
What does this mean for usability? Usability warriors such as Daniel Szuc are driving changes in China. There are heroes in many European countries too, as well as Australia. However, I’m not sure how many spanish-speaking usability practitioners are out there. My guess is that this is an under served market. Stated another way, this is an opportunity for savvy usability practitioners.
Is the new face of usability someone like Jorge Arango or Juan Leal? Have you heard of Cadius? What happens next? Are you planning to retool and embrace this change as an opportunity?
October 25th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
This is indeed a serious problem. I live in Europe, and apart from England, everyone has to learn english in order to understand our websites.
And, Spainish may be a concern for USA, but I am more concerned about Asia’s languages. The rise of technology here coupled with an gazillion people, who do not speak english very well, has the potential to change the technology world altogether.
A few interesting links:
http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html
http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/cs/blogs/mfle/archive/2006/05/01/660.aspx
Too me the biggest problem in terms of usability is not the language, but culture. We have a wildly different way of doing things than people in Asia, the Middle East and to a lesser extend in South America.
The perfectly usable workflow that we use, might be perfectly annoying in Asia. The insanly useful and compact AJAX application, will in the Middle East be bloated and confusing (in this case because everything is left-to-right, and since Arabic languages fonts are much larger).
We need to better cultural understand, because the advice western usability practisioners give, might not apply to non-western practitioners.
October 26th, 2006 at 3:10 am
Fascinating numbers on those sites– I had no idea that Japanese already outnumbers English as far as blog and discussion sites. Hindi is slowly growing but has a long way to go. Mandarin Chinese will soon be the dominant language of the Internet.
I don’t know about usability issues abroad, but here in California and the Southwest we’ve already been dealing with that as far as Spanish. In this region, remember, Spanish has coequal status with English in the public as well as the private sphere– a long series of treatises and laws since about 140 years has established that and so professional web designers and, obviously, businesspeople in this region really do need to provide for competent Spanish rendering to run their businesses on the Web and stay in business. So as a result, a large industry in California and Arizona has grown up to provide Spanish-language usability services. Even in back office usability centers abroad such as India, Spanish fluency (and French and German to a lesser extent) are is rapidly increasing.
December 1st, 2006 at 7:26 pm
This should certainly be a concern particularly in the US. In South America, specifically in Chile, where I live, we have a small, but growing market for usability. And a small comunity of practitioners.
A couple of weeks ago we had an Information Architecture retreat organized by Javier Velasco. Jorge Arango was here, among 10 Brazilian people, Peter Morville, Peter Merholz and Gene Smith, plus 20-something Chileans. Certainly we all do AI, usability, interaction design, but this is what we can do in our market, you know, jack of all trades. But I got the feeling that this is growing and becoming more attractive as a business. As our guests from the neighborhood said, we are somewhat ahead in terms of the development of a community and the professional level.
My 2 pesos.
December 3rd, 2006 at 1:51 pm
[…] Retooling Usability for the Spanish Onslaught (Part I) […]
September 29th, 2007 at 1:17 pm
It really does look like America might be in need of some Spanish classes by reading some of these comments. Good post.