Nethab Blog
Geo Targeting vs. Language Targeting and Usability
Posted by Nethab at 8:51 PM
Target languages first, because the visitor might want information about a country other than their own.
Had a meeting with our VP of Marketing today about making our website "international". He (along with the VP of Sales) were adamant about breaking out the website by country, then by language. So for example you would choose France, and your language choice would be Français, and all the information on that page/site would be related to France.
Why that doesn't work
On the one hand your company has information specific to a country (ie. product X is only available in France, Germany, and Spain).
On the other hand, your visitor(s) have a specific language preference (ie. s/he only speaks French).
Let's say the visitors' company has offices in France, Spain, and Italy; and needs information about which products are available in those countries. If the "Products available in Spain" is only available in Español, our hypothetical French speaking visitor will not be able to find the information they need (resulting in a potential lost sale).
Arguably this places an artificial barrier between you and a prime demographic: multi-national companies.
That's not all
In a perfect world all country specific information would be available in every language, but even if that were the case, when you take into account the user experience of forcing the visitor to navigate through 3 different country specific sites (clicking to the country selection page, and then re-navigating to the product information) you're talking about a minimum of 3x the clicks to find their information (more if your country sites have a lot of pages).
Instead, if you first organize your site around the language(s) spoken by your visitors, you can reduce the number of clicks required to find information on your site. If you also take into account the ability to auto-detect the language of your visitors (using the browsers "Accept-Language" header), you can reduce the number of clicks further still.
In other words, you never know what your visitors are looking for, so don't limit them by translating country specific information into just that countries language(s). Also, by organizing your site around your visitors language, you will decrease the time and effort required to research your products.
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