More evidence: rest of world is really hard
// June 3rd, 2008 // Glocalisation
Austrians? Yes, Austrians. My reasons will become apparent.
Does it really matter how well you communicate on your new web startup? Will a few typos and spelling mistakes really make a difference? If you’re formal when you should be casual, or flippant when you should be serious, will it really affect your big metrics?
Oh, dear reader, it may indeed. Sit down, take a load off, recline. It’s time for another story from the dawn of the internet age…
How well I remember the many long, arduous nights spent poring through localisation strings when I was a young web producer at Yahoo!. It was frustratingly slow, complex and prone to mistakes. All I was trying to do was make the Australian version of, say, Yahoo! Groups read less like an American version, changing American English spellings to Australian English spellings. Yet sometimes it was as hard as decoding the Rosetta Stone and rather more frustrating.
Frustrating because inevitably, the next upgrade to the product would include new code that would push all our hard work (or worse, random chunks of it) into the web server trashcan rubbish bin and we’d have to start all over again. Worse: usually little un-editable snippets of interface that needed translating would persist, or would mysteriously appear in the interface for yet another language. Suddenly some of the UK English translations would appear in the Australian product, or the French translations would appear in the Australian product, or vise versa. Usually they’d be accompanied by other snippets of lost code that would largely screw–up that feature of the product until a clumsy, hurried patch was applied.
There never seemed to be much rhyme nor reason for it, but Yahoo! was a young company, in a fast-growing industry. We had a war to win and there was no time to stop and take prisoners, much less check to see what language they spoke. Besides, products like Yahoo! Groups were just “Social Media 0.5″ – early pointers towards what would become MySpace and FaceBook. Nobody’s life was in danger if the platform ran with a few bugs most of the time. Nobody lost any money.
So I’m faintly horrified when I see mature internet companies in slow-or-not-growing markets with large amounts of customers’ money at play making the same mistakes. Like… PayPal.
I’ve been trialling Freshbooks recently for invoicing with my consulting business and one of the features I most love is the ability to accept online payment via PayPal.
Freshbooks I love. PayPal? Not so much. First there’s the big transaction fee they slap on processing my invoice payment and no interest they pay me on my balance. Then there’s the impression I have that their Help section is only loosely connected to their business and offers a diverting but largely pointless tour of “where things used to be on previous versions of PayPal’s interface and what they used to be called.”
But of most concern is the regular reminder that whoever’s managing the ‘glocalization’ of PayPal’s platforms is doing a terrible job. Today, PayPal seems to have mistaken me for an Austrian user. Funny? Yeah, hilarious if PayPal was just a social media site and not shifting my money around between various bank accounts and currencies.
What if the laughing clowns running the glocalization of the interface are of the same calibre as the developers making sure my money lands in the right place and has the correct fees deducted the correct number of times? Do I need to start second-guessing PayPal and checking every transaction? Because if I do, even an old fashioned cheque books start to look a lot more attractive.
The take-away message here is simple: the more critical it is that you attract and retain every visitor to your web business, the more important it is that you address them with the language they expect, in the voice they expect.
The extra bonus point is: the more your users invest in your web business (whether that be their messages in a group or their actual money) the more important it is that they see you execute flawlessly. You wouldn’t entrust your savings with a bank manager who addressed you partially in a foreign language, who kept giving you forms to sign that had random checkboxes and information that led nowhere. PayPal shouldn’t expect us to be comfortable with that experience either.
Glocalization is hard, but critical to get right.
