UX vs IP Based Language

I start being sick of this epic fail and many famous website do this ... I am Italian, I am living in Germany, but my OS as every software or device I have is in English ( and I don't know German yet ) !

The Problem

If you live in your country and you have software in your own language, you probably never spotted what I am talking about. Actually, what you have probably appreciated instead, is the fact if you write in your url bar www.google.com you'll find directly the one translated and relative to your country ... how cool is it?
My tiny winy problem is that if I write the same right now, I am redirected to google.de .... most likely in German with all settings in German as well, even the confirm button, no matter if I managed somehow to reach that point and changed the language ...

How Difficult Is It

Every single fucking browser sends an Accept-Language header with 99.9% of the time the current browser language or, in the worst case scenario, the Operating System one.
If it's not about the server, we have the same behavior on the client via navigator.language ...
In both cases I am sending a bloody en-us string that cannot surely be confused with de-de one, isn't it? But it does not matter, in 2010 and its growing globalization, these "clever" websites still rely on IP address to define the spoken language, but how wrong is this?

Language IS Context Dependent

Let's imagine we are simply traveling ... OK? Good, We have hot spots services in the airport or we are having a coffee in some local chain with wireless connection ... OK? Now we try to visit websites we use to check from home, from our country, and never with a single problem, cookies or not .... we are in the cloud, the one we would like to use everywhere but being behind some other IP address, the cloud does not recognize us anymore ... still cool, uh?
In few words, if we are simply surfing the web there is no reason in this world to trust the current provider for our spoken language.

Location And Laws Context

There are mainly and only two reasons our IP address should be considered, a map application unable to use the W3C Geolocation API, so we are more into a fallback situation, or country laws for all those services that may works differently accordingly with current country (e.g. YouTube)

Everything Else Is UX

If the website we use on daily basis does not recognize us instantly we may feel that something went terribly wrong, isn't it? And how many could freak out the moment even few links around a search field are in a completely extraneous language?
Moreover, if I decided to use English software, rather than italian, it means I made a choice and surely I cannot really complain if websites are always in English even if I am in italy or Germany ... it's the other way round: I expect this, and I am instantly confused the moment this does not happen.

The Failing Google Chrome Attempt

The ridiculous part of this story is an evident UX conflicts inside Google teams, the search engine and the translation one.

In my case, if I start Google Chrome and I go to google.com I am:
  1. redirected into google.de, it does not matter if I explicitly typed .com
  2. the whole search engine in in German
  3. a top bar lazily informs me that the page is in German, would you like to translate?
Oh ... Really??? So the browser understands I am based on English but the server of the same company decided I am German ... how cool is it?
The company that more cares of performances is doing a redirect, a lazy navigator.language analysis, in order to help me with the wrong choice made by the server ... and guess what? The translation team is not brilliant, is everything else that looks dumb!
It must be said that at least I have a Google in English link easy to spot ... but many other sites don't!

User Agent Myths

A user agent should follow W3C standards and AFAIK all do, more or less. It is not about the browser, the platform, it is simply about the only thing that I do believe is consistent across every platform: the language. Of course it's easy to hack a userAgent in order to show a different language ... but who the hell gonna do it for daily browsing? Even the IP could be hacked via userAgent, the one that sends it, isn't it? So why on earth people adopted such silly strategy to define the user language?

The Internet Cafe Context

If we are still thinking about edge cases ... believe me, these are truly rare. Even an internet cafe, most of the time populated by foreigners, could simply create accounts and most used languages set for each account. As example, we could have the user English, the user Deutche, the user Italiano, etc etc ... and the moment we login with this user the OS, and hopefully the software, will be presented in the same language. At that point, every website that will present content based on IP language could be easily labeled as dumb, because in this world were everybody travels and therms as mobile are used on daily basis by marketing, companies behind the same marketing do not get it: it's NOT about the IP!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

ActionScript 2.0 to JavaScript Bridge

As discussed in my new year Ajaxian post , the Flash Player could provide some truly good info about the current user. I have tried before to create a sort of "perfect bridge" to actually drive ActionScript directly via JavaScript. Unfortunately, the layer added by the ExternalInterface is not light at all and things would move so slowly that it won't be worth it. While in my post comments I have showed an example about how it is possible to export info from ActionScript to JavaScript, what I am describing right now is a sort of "general purpose bridge" to bring, statically and stateless, whatever info we need/want from whatever ActionScript 2.0 file/library we like, starting from the root. Basic Example <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" /> <title>AS2Bridge
Read more

8 Things you should not be afraid of as a Developer

Change In Software Development there is no such thing as stagnancy. Everything you develop now is just another version of a component that will probably change in the future. Change is the most common thing in Software Development, and you're better of accepting it as a fact. Expect future changes to everything you develop, and therefor design your Code more modular. This makes changes more easy and increases the Quality at the same time. Adapt the concepts of DRY and YAGNI . You will often come to the Situation, where you look at your Code and imagine that you could have done that "better". Don't let this thought prevent you from sleeping. Take action immediately and Refactor ! If you don't do it now, you will probably never do it. The longer you wait, the harder and more costly it gets. And you slowly grow up a mess you cant deal with anymore. "Good code is code that is easy to change. Code tends to change until it is no longer easy to change. All code bec
Read more

News

So we just got back from a little Canadian weekend with Thee Oh Sees. We had a blast. There is a lot going on in our world at the moment so we've been a bit busy - sorry for the lack of updates here. We have a whole bunch of upcoming shows, check out the shows section to your right - these include shows with SEX CHURCH, a mini-tour with PYGMY SHREWS, a couple of shows with RUSSIAN CIRCLES, and a little European tour in December. If any of you euros cant make it to see us in December, we will be back in January for a little over a month, and we are very excited. We have a new LP done, it will be out in March on Sacred Bones Records and much touring in support of it shall follow. We have also been informed that Karmic Swamp Records is repressing the "Think" 7" that came out last year. There were only a handful of those pressed so hopefully people that missed out on getting them can grab one now. We will post here when it is available. Also, thanks to everyone who has o
Read more