[Sigia-l] International Interface Design?

[VanTol, Robert]

Concrete help? Don't imagine you can unravel the intricacies of thousands of years of civilisation with a few ethnographic techniques. You are not Margaret Mead and you don't have a few years or even six months to go study the alien cultures you want to include in your international site. You need localised contacts who understand the localised markets you want to address. And for good measure, you need to talk them in situ (go visit them), so that you are saturated in their otherness. 

Having a sensitivity to the questions raised by ethnographic techniques would be a good thing. They will give you some of the questions to ask, and make you understand the magnitude of the gap between your world and the other, even superficially similar, worlds. But don't try and do it yourself. You'll be distracted and overwhelmed.

So talk to local market experts to get some insights, do your thing, and then take it through in detail with them. You'll find it's the nuisances and details in the style of writing, in the graphic imagery - especially of people (extra especially women), and in the underlying motivations and cultural aspirations, that change in unexpected ways. And then keep in contact with your local experts. Otherwise you'll have no idea how to dress your UK homepage when the Queen Mother dies (drape it in a black banner? make a small announcement? do nothing? - you are not equipped to make that call, and no ethnographic technique will help you either, unless you come to England, buy a pretty little cottage in Yorkshire and go native - but that seems a rather large life investment for one website :-).

Also compare and contrast localised international offering, such as Amazon's (.com, .co.uk, fr, .de). 

Fundamentally you have to decide whether you are (a) an American site which will be of interest to (and so is accommodating to) a world-wide audience; or (b) a series of properly localised sites each offering a properly localised service (eg, compliance to local customer laws, localised CRM processes, localised advertising and marketing, localised products, the different seasons (southern hemisphere), and respect for local sensibilities). Neither is a trivial exercise, and involves the entire business model of the site, not just your bit of it.

PS: It's a bugger. Good luck.

Robert van Tol : Information Architect : Global Intranet Team : C&W : 
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t: +44 (0)207 528 3505  
e: robert.vantol at cw.com 
Cable & Wireless - Delivering the Internet Promise
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