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Don’t geolocate me – it’s bad UX!

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Software publishers, webmasters, listen up, and listen up carefully!

The fact that I happen to be in Finland doesn’t mean I need my software or web pages installed or served up in Finnish. That would be true even if I were Finnish. Many Finns speak Swedish as their native language, and the Saami people have their own languages, many of them endangered.

Just because I happen to be in Spain doesn’t mean I need my software or web pages installed or served up in Spanish. That would be true even if I were Spanish. People in Spain also have Catalan, Gallego, or Euskadi for native languages.

I live part of my life in Catalonia, and I speak both Spanish and Catalan, but English is my first language, and I prefer to read material written in English in the original version. All my computers but one have English operating systems installed, but many programmes and web sites insist on giving me the language of my IP address or GPS coordinates, or of the regional settings that I have installed on my system (in my case, French keyboard, date and time formats, currency, etc. – I also live part of my life in France). Worse, some of them don’t let you change even after the fact.

Get it? I’m an international person. My computer And I speak and use many languages. In many places. But we most like to function in English, except when the information is originally in a language I know or is culturally specific.

Here’s a real life experience with a web service many of us use, Survey Monkey. I set up an account using the English interface. If I type the general URL for the site in Barcelona, the interface comes up in Spanish. This is not necessarily bad usability, most people with IP addresses in Spain will prefer that language – except if they are in Catalonia. Except if they are in the Basque country. Except if they are in Galicia. OK, so I type in my user ID and password, but guess what? It doesn’t know me. Now what? Well, one of the things I do is look for a language selection. But would most users know to do that? Anyway, finding it on Survey Monkey’s login page is no easy feat. It’s way at the bottom. I changed the language to English, eventually, and tried again. Success this time, I got in.

Next time I went to Survey Monkey I was on the same (laptop) computer, but in France. Surprise, the French interface comes up, and it doesn’t know me! Change to English, success.

Frustrated, I searched the settings for a language preference. There is none. Come on, guys,
even Google lets you pick your interface language and set it, and they know who you are in any language. And they speak a lot more of them than you do.

In a fit of pique, I treated Survey Monkey to an email with my opinion. I got a terse reply from a French representative telling me that most people in France prefer to speak French and that I could switch languages. Thanks.

Oddly, another offender is Canon printers. If you install their software from a CD it gives you a nice language choice screen. But if you download their drivers or other software, you get what they give you, which is the language of your regional settings. Even from the English download site!

These are clearly examples of poor thinking, leading to poor user experience.

Just because we know how to geolocate someone doesn’t mean we should. I would rather you looked at what language my system is in. It seems to me, this gives you a better guess about what language I want to use.

What do you think?


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