Companies – Global by Design

July 12, 2018

Welcome to the driver’s seat: Which automakers are doing the best job of welcoming female drivers in Saudi Arabia

It’s been a month since women have been legally allowed to drive in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and I wanted to get a sense for how this massive new audience of drivers was being welcomed by the world’s automakers.

I spent time visiting the Saudi Arabia websites of a number of automakers, all included in the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card.

And, so far, I’d say that most global automakers are treading slowly, too slowly, in welcoming their new customers.

There were two notable standouts, however, that I want to mention: Ford and Audio.

As a bit of background, more than half of the websites I benchmark for the annual Report Card now support Arabic. And most of the automakers studied support partially or largely localized websites for Saudi Arabia.

Now onto the two standout automakers…

Ford has the most striking home page, shown here:

In English, the headline reads: You Drive in Front. Welcome to the Driver’s Seat.

And when you click on the main link you’ll see this visual:

Audi also leads with a bold, welcoming message: Sometimes history is written. This time, it is driven.

Clicking on the main link takes you to a video that features a husband and wife leaving the house and getting into their Audi. But instead of the man getting into the driver’s seat, we see the woman taking the wheel. In most other regions of the world, this would not be an attention-grabbing video; but Saudi Arabia is not most other regions.

Audi also includes a link to a test drive request form, a very nice feature.

Beyond Ford and Audi, there are a handful of positive examples from other automakers responding to this doubling of potential drivers:

Volkswagen features a TV ad that focuses on female drivers, with one behind the driver’s seat.
Mercedes has a Mercedes She global promotional campaign that does a degree of localization for women in the Middle East, but not nearly enough in my opinion.
Subaru and Toyota have been active on social media in welcoming female drivers. Shown below are examples from Twitter and Instagram:

The automakers not mentioned here are not doing nearly enough to welcome their new customers (if anything at all) — and I suspect this is not going without notice. Web localization is about respect and respect is about languages, cultures, and people.

To learn more about website globalization best practices in the auto industry and beyond, check out the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card.

May 29, 2018

Deloitte: The best global professional services website of 2018

For the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 6 professional services websites:

Accenture
Capgemini
Deloitte
Ernst & Young
KPMG
PWC

Last year, Deloitte and KPMG tied for first place. This year, Deloitte pulled ahead of KPMG with the top score.

While KPMG may lead in languages, Deloitte leads in global navigation as well as depth and timeliness of local content.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

Professional services websites tend to reflect highly decentralized corporate structures, with support for locally generated content and social feeds. Nevertheless, the leaders demonstrate that even decentralized companies can successfully support global consistency.
At 38 languages, KPMG remains the language leader in this category.
Deloitte was the first professional services company to use a globe icon and, as I predicted last year, would not be the last. Another company has joined this trend, but it could still benefit from improvement in execution.
Over the past year, Capgemini unveiled a new global design that is a clear step forward. The new design is less than half the weight (2.3MB) of the previous design (5MB). Also significant, the mobile design maintains the global gateway in the header, as seen here:

PwC takes an interesting (and unfortunate) approach to its global gateway. PwC relies on the “location” icon, shown below for its global gateway:

This global gateway fails in several ways. First, the “location” icon is more traditionally used to “find location,” as in find a local store or office. Using this icon for selecting a country or region is not standard. Also, the use of a pull-down menu is not user friendly. As you can see, the list is alpha-sorted, which will not be intuitive from users from many other countries and who speak different languages. For example, where would a German resident first look — under G for Germany or under D for Deutschland? In this case, the only link to Germany is located under G, even though PWC does support German-language localization.

Accenture also does a poor job of managing expectations. For example, shown on the Spanish home page is the link to an article (headline in Spanish); clicking on the link takes the user to the UK website and an article in English.

Despite the high degree of global consistency and support for languages exhibited by a few of these websites, more improvements are needed before any of these companies break into the top 25.

For more information, check out the Web Globalization Report Card.

If you’d like a report that includes only the professional services benchmark profiles, please contact us.

May 21, 2018

Think you can succeed in India supporting English only? Think again.

#serveinmylanguage

It’s more than a hashtag; it’s a social movement. And it’s growing.

A movement among Indian consumers to force the vendors who depend on their business to actually support their native languages.

As this Times of India article notes: From ATMs to deposit slips, withdrawal challans and call centres, most public and private banks feel that service in Hindi and English should suffice their customer base –– Indians who converse in 22 major languages and 720 dialects.

This article is specific to the banking industry, but it’s safe to say that this is the beginning of something much bigger. Linguistically, India has been poorly served by websites.

As I noted in the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, only 7% of the global websites studied support Hindi, followed by Urdu and Tamil. According to research conducted by Nielsen in 2017, 68% of Indian internet users consider local-language content to be more reliable than English. Facebook certainly understands this; Facebook supports more than half of India’s official languages. And it’s no surprise that Facebook now has more users in India than in the US.

Fortunately, some Indian banks are now becoming more multilingual. The Times of India article notes:

Private banks such as ICICI Bank, Axis Bank and Kotak Mahindra Bank are trying to be more multi-lingual in their digital banking strategy. “For instance, the Kotak Bharat app is aimed at financial inclusion. Users can transfer money, recharge their mobile, buy insurance, etc in Hindi, English, Gujarati, Marathi, Tamil or Kannada. We plan to expand the app to handle other regional languages,” says Deepak Sharma, chief digital officer at Kotak Mahindra Bank.

And as you can see by this excerpt from my newly updated IDN poster, India represents a significant diversity of languages and scripts:

Languages are more than a means to an end; they are a sign of respect.

And companies that invest in languages are not only investing in their customers but investing in their own future.

Source

April 16, 2018

BMW: The best global automotive website of 2018

For the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, we studied the following 16 automotive websites:

Audi
BMW
Chevrolet
Ford
Honda
Hyundai
Land Rover
Lexus
Mercedes
Mini
Nissan
Subaru
Tesla
Toyota
Volkswagen
Volvo Cars

This year, BMW unseated Nissan, reclaiming the top spot. Both BMW and Nissan made the 25 list of best global websites.

BMW deserves credit for an increased focus on local-language social content — as well as the promotion of this content on its local websites. It also made slight improvements to its global template over the past year.

Here are a few highlights from the report:

The automotive sector has long been a leader in languages. The average number of languages supported by these 16 websites is an impressive 41 languages.
Mercedes most recently added two new local websites (and languages) raising its language total to 44. The company has been slowly (perhaps too slowly) rolling out a responsive design.
When it comes to global navigation, no automotive website stands apart. Too many automotive websites either bury the global gateway in the footer or overlook it entirely. Technologies like geolocation and content negotiation are not utilized to the degree that they could be to improve the user experience.
What’s the best global website among American-based automotive companies? That would be Chevrolet. Among other best practices, Chevy does a good job of supporting Spanish for the US market. Note the bilingual toggle for US Spanish and English speakers:

Subaru was a new addition to the Report Card this year. With support for 39 languages, it holds its own with the other global auto brands.
Ford made a notable improvement to its global navigation over the past year. As shown below, the website added a globe icon in the header:

Currently, this gateway only allows toggling between Spanish and English (similar to other automotive websites). Ultimately, we believe its function will expand to enable better global navigation.

Automotive companies still have a long ways to go in improving global consistency and navigation. They decentralized structures have historically prevented them from working globally in this regard. And it’s easy to see how fragmented a site from Toyota or Chevrolet appears when compared with Tesla. Granted, Tesla supports a fraction of the number of models, but the architecture of the Tesla website ensures that it can scale better than the legacy sites of other automotive companies.
That said, even Tesla could improve its global navigation. Its gateway link is buried in the footer:

Tesla relies too heavily on flags for navigation. I believe it’s just a matter of time before this strategy shifts.

For more information, check out the Web Globalization Report Card.

If you’d like a report that includes only the automative benchmark profiles, you can purchase the Automotive Websites edition.

April 6, 2018April 6, 2018

Amazon Translate joins the machine translation crowd

Amazon announced earlier this week that it had made its home-grown Amazon Translate service generally available.

Like other Amazon Web Services (AWS), you can leverage the service across websites, apps, as well as text to speech. I should stress that this is a “neural” machine translation service — which has proven surprisingly effective at getting more natural sounding over time. Google and others are also investing heavily in neural MT.

And you can give it a free test drive; according to AWS, the “first The first 2 million characters in each monthly cycle will be free for the first 12 months starting the day you first use the service.”

The major limitation right now languages: It supports English into just six languages, which feels rather retro compared to MT services from SDL and Google. Google Translate, by comparison, is 12 years old and supports 100+ languages (of varying degrees of quality).

And more languages are coming. I can’t comment on the quality of the translation but would love to hear what others have experienced so far.

As I’ve noted in the 2018 Web Globalization Report Card, machine translation continues to gain fans among global brands — not just internally but externally. That is, visitors to websites can self-translate content themselves — a feature I have long recommended for a number of reasons.

So it’s great to see another machine translation service available at scale for organizations of all sizes.

PS: Interesting to see a recommendation from Lionbridge on the home page — a happy Amazon Translate client.