Most digital products are developed in English, but the majority of the world does not speak English as their primary language.
That gap between where products are made and where they go is one of the least-examined problems in product design. Teams take months perfecting copy. Then they ship to the world and wonder why they’re getting less engagement from it, support tickets are spiking in certain regions, and churn in certain countries is higher than others.
The answer is often right there and is in plain sight. The product was designed for one kind of user: fluent, confident, and comfortable with the conventions of English. For everybody else, navigating it is an additional amount of cognitive work for every step.
Designing for non-native speakers of English is not a localisation task that you give off at the end. It is a philosophy of design that influences vocabulary, layout, error messages, and all the microcopy. When done well, it makes products better for every user, not just those outside Anglophone markets.
There are about 1.5 billion people in the world who speak English. Of those, some 400 million are native speakers. For the vast majority, English is a second language – used functionally, not fluently.
These users do not make up one profile. They include a factory supervisor in Vietnam using a logistics app, a nurse in Poland on a clinical tool, and a business owner in Nigeria managing invoices through a SaaS platform. They are at different levels of proficiency, have different relationships with technology, and different cultural frameworks for interpreting visual and verbal cues.
What they do have in common: if a product uses idiomatic language or structures information naturally only for people who are natives of the language, the experience is made difficult. Not impossible, harder. In products where users carry task stress, harder to distinguish between completion and abandonment.
The instinct with thoughts of non-native speakers is to reach for translation. Translate the product, so the thinking goes, and the problem is solved.
Translation is necessary. It is not sufficient.
Many language problems that non-native speakers experience are structural, that is, they are present in the original English upon which translation is based, and they are often preserved in the translation.
Idioms do not translate well. “Hit the ground running,” “drill down” are natural to native speakers, confusing to many others, and often untranslatable.
Complex sentence structure causes increased cognitive load. “Your file was uploaded successfully.” needs to be parsed. “Upload complete” gives instant communication. That is not a difference of style.
Dense microcopy generates additional work. For a person who is reading something in a second language, every single word in a lengthy label equals one more decision.
The fix: to simplify the English before it is ever translated. Plain language is not dumb-down language. It is the ultimate in clarity, and it is beneficial to all users.
Language is just a part of the challenge. Cultural conventions in UX patterns pose just as important barriers.
Reading direction matters. Arabic, Hebrew, and Urdu are read from right to left. Users who primarily read these scripts may have different spatial expectations of where this information should appear, and left-to-right layouts can be disorientating.
Colour associations vary. White has associations of mourning in several East Asian cultures. A red error signal in Western interfaces has significant positive associations in China.
Iconography is not universal, as designers believe. A mailbox icon for email is immediately intelligible to a person who grew up with that shape of post box. In much of the world, it does not have any intuitive meaning.
Date formatting conventions vary. Whether 03/04/2024 is March 4th or April 3rd is of little importance. For someone on the phone making a financial decision or booking a critical appointment, this is not the case.
The gap between products that work around the world and those that do not is usually down to five decisions.
Use simple, direct language. Every sentence should be as short as possible, understandable, and present the meaning. Active voice, frequently used words, no idioms.
Design for translation from the beginning. English text increases in German or Finnish by 30 to 40 percent. Layouts that are only designed for English will break. Build in flexibility.
Use icons with labels. Universal icons are rare. The combination of icons with short text labels eliminates ambiguity for those users who do not share the cultural reference.
Avoid culture-specific references. Examples that mention American sports or British cultural events indicate to global users that this product was not developed for them.
Test with International users directly. Only testing with English-speaking people gives us English-speaking insights. If the product is for global markets, the research must involve users from the global markets.
Most teams treat localisation, translation plus regional formatting as the end of the global product work. It is the minimum viable version that is not the goal.
Localisation is adapting an existing product to a specific market. Global design creates one that will service the various markets well from the beginning, cutting down on the cost and rework localisation generally reveals. The two are complementary, but global design comes first.
The difference is important: localisation often brings to light structural issues in the original design which are now costly to remedy. The benefit of global design is that it lowers the cost by anticipating diverse user needs before beginning adaptation.
According to CSA Research, 75% of consumers like to purchase in their native language, and 60% don’t purchase much, if at all, from English-only websites. These numbers are an argument for day one designing for global users.
Where UX Service Design Fits Into This Challenge
This challenge is not so much a translation problem, not so much a front-end development problem. It is a systems problem, and it requires systems-level thinking.
This is where ux service design becomes necessary. When the complete user journey is mapped along the lines of contexts, norms of language, and processes of operations, language and cultural gaps can be seen at a level that surface-level, UI work cannot reach.
Teams working with the best ux design firms take language and cultural accessibility as not a post-designing check box list, but inputs into the research. To understand how various user populations interpret the same interface, the same level of inquiry is needed to tackle any major UX problem: research, testing, iteration, and true representation of users.
Good intentions do not ensure good results. Measurement matters.
According to Unbabel’s Global Multilingual CX Report, businesses that localized their UX for non-English-speaking markets experienced a 26% boost in customer satisfaction scores compared to businesses with English-only interfaces.
The metrics that matter – task completion by region, volume of support by market, drop-off rates for different user groups, and so on. Aggregate measures conceal regional disparities. A product that works well on average can at the same time break down for specific populations and regional breakdowns form that.
The question is not whether or not your product will reach non-native English speakers. If it is on the internet and solves a real problem, then it already does.
The real question is whether those users – the majority of the world’s digitally connected population – can actually use what you built. Whether words make sense. Whether error messages help, instead of confusing.
That does not mean one needs a separate product for each language. It demands the default of clarity, the ordinary of simplicity, and the research of voices from the world in the first place.
Products built with that mindset work better for everyone, native English speakers included. Clarity is not a regional preference. It is universal.
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No. is not necessary, but not sufficient. Many barriers non-native speakers face exist in the original English form of complex sentence structures, idioms with no equivalent, and culture-specific iconography. Fixing those at the source results in better English and better translations at the same time.
Localisation involves the adaptation of an existing product to a particular market. Global design creates one that addresses diverse markets well from the beginning, and it reduces the cost and rework that localisation usually reveals. The two are complementary, but global design comes first.
Using idiomatic language, creating layouts without space for text expansion in other languages, using culturally specific icons without text labels, and using date or number formats without consideration of regional conventions. Most are quite easily repaired once identified.
Yes, if the product will serve those markets. Testing only using English speakers yields results that reflect English-speaker assumptions. Fixing the global UX issues means the need for research with the actual users who are having the problem.
Track task completion rates, support ticket volume, and satisfaction scores separately by region. Aggregate measures obfuscate regional performance differences. A product that works well on average can break for particular groups of users; at the same time they are regional breakdowns that reveal that.
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