Your website loads in less than 3 seconds and includes strategically placed feature buttons, but you are losing a significant portion of your audience. You are not alone. For example, the older Hispanic people in the United States are less likely to have received influenza vaccinations compared to their English-speaking counterparts. The reason is that the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website’s information is often delayed, contains translation errors, and lacks culturally appropriate content.
In today’s competitive digital world, merely a “nice-to-have” look won’t translate as intended. What you truly need is an inclusive design and multilingual interface.
What Is Inclusive Design?
Today, accessibility in UX design plays a critical role. One way to achieve this is to adopt inclusive design. Inclusive design is an approach that offers accessible digital experiences that consider a wide range of human diversity and are accessible to everyone, regardless of their needs, physical abilities, or backgrounds. Such designs comply with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) and the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).
What Is Multilingual UX Design?
Multilingual UX Design is an approach to designing websites that can communicate with users in multiple languages. This involves implementing Internationalization (I18N), which provides the flexibility required for successful UX localization.
How Inclusive & Localized Design Unlocks New Markets?
Inclusive and UX localization have become key strategies for connecting with diverse user personas. These global UX strategies focus on tailored solutions that align with individual needs, enabling everyone to access products and services without additional adaptation. For businesses, this is the key to local market adoption in underserved sectors.
UX Design For Elderly & Differently Abled Demographics
For years, many websites have been designed without considering the special needs of elderly and specially abled people. By adopting this “design for everyone” approach, businesses can now reach underserved audiences.
For example, an aesthetic-only design may not be accessible to people with visual impairments. This issue can be overcome with inclusive design. That is, adding screen reader support, ARIA landmarks, and descriptive alt text for all images, which can help visually impaired people navigate through the site easily.
UX Design For Linguistic & Cultural Barriers
Localization and cross-cultural user experience design enable businesses to reach people from diverse cultural backgrounds and linguistic groups.
Localization is more than translating the content into regional languages; it’s about meeting the regional UX preferences. For example, Western languages read from Left To Right (LTR), but few languages, such as Arabic, Persian, & Hebrew, follow a Right-To-Left (RTL) format. Since reading direction affects user interfaces and screen navigation, businesses must consider demographics before finalizing the placement of menus.
Similarly, when localizing for Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) languages, it is essential to consider font size, increased line spacing, and whitespace to improve readability and reduce cognitive load.
Culturally adaptive designs must meet the needs of cultural norms (imagery, colors, symbols, and time & date formats) and technology. For example, in China, white color is considered unlucky and is associated with funerals, whereas in the USA, white is associated with weddings & purity. Ignoring such deeply rooted factors can offend customers, resulting in a negative impact on business.
The Rise Of Inclusive Product Development
Factors such as fueling innovation, changing demographics, increased market reach, customer loyalty, and brand recognition are contributing to the growing development of inclusive products. Some of the popular inclusive products include:
Google Voice Assistants
Google Voice Assistants are evolving continuously. These platforms are designed to support and adapt to the region-specific languages and various global accents. While Google’s Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems support over 125 languages, the “Voice Match” feature for Google Assistant allows the system to learn a user’s speaking style phrases to improve its accuracy.
For users with low vision or blindness, Google Assistant is fully compatible with screen readers. The platforms use TalkBack, the Android screen reader, and VoiceOver on iOS devices. The TalkBack lets users use the phone through voice and gestures. It also reads aloud the text, buttons, icons, and other elements navigated to on the screen. The low-vision accessibility feature in Google Assistant allows users to adjust font size, high-contrast color, color correction, etc., to improve readability.
Apple Voice Assistant
Apple’s Voice Assistant, Siri, is designed to adapt and respond to users in their specific accents. Siri can also sound natural and remember previous conversations to provide personalized responses.
Siri can seamlessly work with Apple’s built-in screen reader, VoiceOver. The VoiceOver is an accessibility feature for users who are blind or have low vision. It can read the text and interface elements for users and help them navigate through their device. VoiceOver includes customization options such as selecting a custom voice, adjusting the speaking rate, and personalizing the rotor.
In addition to the magnifier and display adjust settings, Apple offers Braille Access in its devices. The Braille Access is integrated with the VoiceOver. It allows users to take notes in Braille format, perform calculations, and use Live Captions features.
Beyond tech giants, service providers like InApp excel at providing scalable and tailored UX solutions by incorporating a global UX strategy.
InApp’s UI/UX Development Solutions
InApp’s software localization services focus on adaptation and development of UI/UX for global users. The team leverages advanced technologies to create a scalable design while prioritizing inclusive, multilingual product design requirements. The team designs page layouts to accommodate reading direction (i.e., Left To Right (LTR) & Right-To-Left (RTL)) and other language requirements based on the specific region. The InApp design team conducts deep research into cultural norms to ensure the colors, symbols, date, and currency formats feel native to the regions and sectors.
InApp adheres to global standards such as WCAG to make sure the interface is accessible to people with disabilities. Additionally, the team emphasizes responsive and adaptive layouts to suit global screen sizes, resolutions, and orientations. Furthermore, the interface is tailored to deliver a smooth digital experience even on devices that are old or run on slower internet speeds.
Why Should You Embrace Accessibility & UX Localization?
Today, going global isn’t limited to direct translations but requires localization and accessibility. These strategic approaches not just eliminate the roadblocks to connecting with underserved audiences & markets, but also help build a sense of value in users, resulting in increased customer trust and loyalty, customer retention, brand reputation, and business growth.
As per a case study, Tesco invested £35,000 to revamp its website, while prioritizing accessibility. This resulted in £13 million in annual revenue growth.
Final Thought: Roadmap To Better Business
Treating inclusive and multilingual UX design merely as a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) checkbox is a major strategic error a business can make. These approaches are, in fact, powerful strategies that can make or break your business by turning ignored audiences into fuel for growth.
