Clicks & Notes

mezzoblue - It’s a Canadian Thing

Question: the site you’re building requires support for multiple languages. Each needs equal prominence. How do you handle this?

• Dave Shea observes that websites for large retail stores in Canada typically rely on an opening splash page that does nothing more than ask the user to choose their language (i.e. English or French)
• however, this page typically does not appear on sites for companies in other industries
• Shea notes that the choice to use the splash page is politically motivated:
  

  If you provide an English page with a link to the French equivalent, or vice-versa, you risk alienating a potentially large percentage of your customer base. So by presenting both on equal ground and forcing the consumer to choose, you side-step the issue

• another use for the opening choice splash page:
  

  Incidentally, this also used to be a popular trick for retailers to force a choice between US and Canadian currency. By only providing one method of switching between currencies at the very beginning of the visit to the site, the customer would be far less liable to switch to another currency and compare.

The article includes links to the sites for Canadian Tire, Rogers Video, Blockbuster, FutureShop, Air Canada, CIBC, Telus, and HBC. A couple things I noticed about the sites after clicking through:

• regardless of the presence/absence of an opening “choose English or French” splash page, the sites all allowed the user to change languages from anywhere within the site via global navigation
  • most sites put the language “toggle” link in the top navigation, usually gravitating towards the top-right-hand corner of the page (the exception being Blockbuster, who puts it in the upper-left corner (in tiny type – not so good) next to their logo)
  • the sites that don’t put the link in the top navigation (Air Canada and Telus) put it in among the footer links at the bottom of the page
• on most sites, switching languages does not interrupt user flow – that is, if you drill down somewhere from the English homepage and then click “French", you wind up on the French version of the exact same page; this, most will agree, is preferable to returning the user back to the homepage in the other language
  • Air Canada is one of those sites that returns the user to the homepage; it’s notable that one of their “toggle” choices is to switch to the U.S. site, so sending the user to U.S. homepage will serve to prevent easy comparisons between Canadian and U.S. prices, as noted above
  • the other exception is Telus – upon clicking the “French” link from anywhere within Telus‘ English site, not only do you go back to the homepage in French, but to a new URL as well
  • of course, Air Canada and Telus are also the two sites who buried their “change language” links at the bottom of the page, so they’re definitely not encouraging users to readily switch back and forth after making an intial selection