In today’s increasingly global and interconnected world, having a digitally accessible product is no longer just an option, it’s a necessity. With 4.5 billion people around the world now online, businesses simply cannot afford to ignore huge swaths of the global market if they want their digital products to succeed.
But designing and developing a digital product that can seamlessly reach users across different countries, languages, and cultures takes forethought, planning, and concerted effort. You need to consider factors like localization, inclusive design, diverse user research and testing, and agile iterative development.
Follow the comprehensive guide below to learn the key steps and best practices to make your digital product accessible and engaging for users across the globe.
Conduct Extensive Global User Research
The first and most crucial step to creating an accessible digital product is to intimately understand your diverse global users and their needs. Develop user personas and research usage contexts across different demographics spanning various countries, languages, cultures, abilities, access to technology, prior familiarity with your product domain, and more.
Some important aspects to research for your target global users:
- Language Proficiencies: What languages and proficiency levels will your product need to support? Prioritize languages by market size.
- Literacy Levels: What are the general reading comprehension levels? How much textual content can you include?
- Cultural Preferences: What colors, imagery, and messaging resonate? What cultural sensitivities need to be avoided?
- Technical Access: What devices, browsers, networks (bandwidths) will they be using? Offline access?
- Legal Compliance: What regional laws and regulations need accommodation (e.g. GDPR)?
- Disabilities: What types of disabilities need accommodation (e.g. screen readers for blind users)?
- UI Expectations: What UI patterns do they expect? How much help text do they need?
Conducting global user research often requires partnering with international usability professionals for cost-effective in-person user studies abroad. But you can also utilize remote moderated testing tools to screen share and record video/audio of overseas test sessions.
Design for Internationalization from the Start
Often overlooked, planning for global reach during the design process is essential for creating an accessible, internationally scalable product.
Follow platform-agnostic design standards to ensure the product’s core user experience and interactions work across any device. Rely on common UI/UX conventions and patterns familiar to users everywhere (e.g. hamburger menus, search bars, carousels). Utilize universally understood iconography.
Add expandable containers throughout the interface to house translated text and locale-specific components in the future. Accommodate potential growth of text size for translation needs. Avoid hardcoded text within images. Design with global flexibility and adaptability in mind first.
Incorporate accessibility best practices like color contrast ratios and ARIA tags to support disabled users worldwide. Enable user customization for things like font sizes and color schemes.
Use responsive design to gracefully scale across different screen sizes, orientations, and resolutions. Optimize mobile design and interactions for smartphones critical in many developing countries.
Ensure your product works well across slow internet connections and legacy browsers still popular abroad. Don’t make broadband a prerequisite.
Testing your designs with international users across diverse devices is highly recommended before product launch.
Build a Localization Strategy
Localization is vital for making your digital product linguistically and culturally appropriate across global target markets. It goes far beyond mere translation, including adapting:
- Language: Translation to local vocabularies, tone and sentence structures
- Currency: Appropriate currency, number formatting, etc.
- Units: Converting units like date, time, addresses, temperature, etc.
- Imagery: Images reflecting local culture and diversity
- Colors: Choices appropriate and meaningful locally
- Legal: Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, etc. compliant locally
- Holistic Experience: Overall look, feel and flow per local expectations
Since full localization is expensive, pursue a tiered strategy. Launch with full support for 1-2 languages for your largest markets first. Provide minimum viable localization for the next biggest markets. Then expand localization more completely over time based on traffic and revenue.
Offer community translation tools to let users optionally localize text and interface elements into their own languages. This enables “long tail” niche languages and spreads cost to users. But quality control their contributions.
Tightly integrate localization efforts with product development. Localization engineers should work closely with the product team and have direct access to make live product changes for agile international iteration.
Architect for Technical Accessibility
Making your digital product technically accessible to a worldwide audience requires some thoughtful architecture decisions throughout the technology stack:
- Cloud Infrastructure: Use globally distributed cloud providers like AWS to host infrastructure close to users across regions.
- Responsive Design: Website and apps must use responsive frameworks like Bootstrap to fluidly adapt designs across all screen sizes and devices popular internationally.
- Progressive Enhancement: Core app features should work in legacy browsers with graceful enhancement in modern browsers. Don’t require the latest browser capabilities.
- Offline Access: For developing countries, offline access is critical. Use service workers for basic functionality without connectivity. Sync data when connections resume.
- Performance Optimization: Optimize page loads, routing, images, third-party scripts, etc. to minimize size and maximize speed on slow networks.
- Accessibility Tools: Use right-to-left layouts, color contrast checking, ARIA attributes, screen reader testing tools. Integrate accessibility throughout the dev lifecycle.
- Internationalization Tools: Utilize i18n frameworks like React Intl and ngx-translate to surface strings and enable dynamic translation.
- Continuous Monitoring: Actively monitor app performance across geographic regions to address issues specific to network conditions and devices used locally.
Avoid geoblocking and overly strict geofencing. Make your app as widely available worldwide as possible. Solve business problems without excluding users.
Plan an Agile Iteration Cadence
Designing and developing for global audiences requires agile iteration to continuously test new locales and refine the user experience over time. Use feature flags, controlled rollouts and experiment frameworks to deploy and test new languages, markets and features safely without site-wide impact.
Establish an agile planning cadence that interleaves localization with product work:
- Quarterly Planning: Select new markets and languages to target each quarter based on business priorities, willing localization resources and community contributions.
- Monthly Releases: Actual localization work happens in monthly sprints alongside standard product development. This enables regular international releases.
- Biweekly Retrospectives: Review latest global KPIs like unique users, transactions, revenue, engagement, drop-off per locale. Adjust priority markets accordingly.
- Weekly Coordination: Localization resources must coordinate at least weekly with devs on integration work, testing and targeting release timelines.
This agile Internationalization cadence lets you continuously enhance both localization quality and overall global product experience each month. Support more languages, adapt the UI, improve conversions internationally, fix issues specific to certain markets, and regularly expand reach.
Continuously Test and Iterate
With a globally accessible product, continuous iterative testing is imperative to refinement. Thoroughly test key user journeys in each fully localized language and locale before launch. Fix blocking defects first, then methodically address other usability issues through multiple iterations.
Establish a feedback loop to collect learnings from real international users after launch. Monitor community forums for issues raised across languages. Conduct NPS surveys globally. Run free trials in new markets to gather feedback. This enables ongoing enhancement of both localization and overall universal design.
Regularly test the responsive experience across entry-level smartphones and legacy browsers common just in developing countries. As internet use spreads to more remote areas, keep lowering the bar for technical requirements over time.
Don’t neglect human quality assurance. Maintain native speakers on staff for each supported language to verify translated strings and site content. Have them proactively use and test localized versions daily.
The international user experience is never “done”. Continuously gather data on global engagement, conversions, drop-offs, issues per locale. Persistently refine and optimize.
Conclusion
Launching a digital product for worldwide accessibility presents challenges but delivers immense rewards. You gain market share and brand presence across the globe. Drive more diverse traffic and revenue. You provide an inclusive user experience and avoid excluding people unintentionally.
Following the recommendations outlined in this guide will set you on the right path for global reach. Conduct extensive international user research. Design for localization flexibility from the start. Build technical accessibility into your architecture. Localize strategically for target markets. Work localization into your agile release cadence. Then keep learning and optimizing through rigorous international testing and data analysis.
While daunting at first, businesses often find that designing properly for global audiences ultimately improves their product universally. Features and workflows crafted for accessibility internationally end up benefiting all users everywhere.
In our increasingly interconnected world, global digital reach is now an imperative. Follow the best practices outlined here to thoughtfully grow your digital product’s worldwide user base and market share.
