Web Design will encounter ten problems

This is actually a blog written by foreigners, but in the text detailed in his eyes because of cultural differences led to web development issues. "Feature" is not actually unique to China. It may be that as a designer in China, it also needs to take into account the characteristics of Indonesia and Singapore.

Who would like to be treated as a minority? Unless it is fortunate enough to be a member of "Rich Man or Rich," the "minority" will usually be discriminated against. Like social discrimination, technological discrimination is also derived from the neglect of certain factors, but people do not seem to be sufficiently aware of the dangers of doing so.

To a large extent, this problem should be due to cultural differences, but more specifically, it is actually a lack of cultural awareness. What I mean is that developers may themselves have a preconceived culture, but in a global context this may actually be wrong and often leads to neglect by some users.

In order to pursue a more harmonious online experience around the world, it is necessary to understand the 10 problems encountered in the development of web pages. Some may not be new issues for you, but you can not avoid them if you want to live in harmony with people of different cultures.

1, Firefox and Chrome occupy 91% of the market?

I'm not kidding, but seriously, to see this picture below:

The share of browsers in Indonesia is completely different from their global proportions

If you are in Indonesia, you can deeply appreciate this. This data comes from Internet traffic monitoring agency StatCounter. Although the data from different statistical agencies will be slightly different, the overall trend has been: IE is dead in Indonesia. 93% of people in this country use Windows 7 or Windows XP, so this is not a Mac or Unix bug, they simply do not use the system's default browser.

This is a typical example. From this we can see that the key to developing a website lies in knowing the target audience. Statistics on a global scale sometimes have no bearing on the overall situation. While Chrome may be a few percentage points ahead of IE globally, things are quite different in Indonesia. The background is everything.

2, August 7 is not always written as 8/7, sometimes with 7/8

I believe many people are aware of this, but often consciously or unconsciously ignore this issue - after all, not many places use the "day / month" expression. But in fact, if you use the "month / day," you are instead "a minority," and most likely Americans or Belizeans. Do not believe the following picture:

Different countries, the date of the expression format is completely different

Blue uses "dd / mm / yy" with a population of about 3.2 billion; Yellow uses "dd / yy" with a population of about 1.5 billion; Purple uses "dd / yyyy" with a population of about 310 million; / Month / year "or" month / day / year "with a population of about 120 million; green uses" year / month / day "or" day / month / year "with a population of about 110 million. Gray with about 30 million people using year / month / day, day / month / year and month / day / year; blue using year / month / day and month / day / year, The population is close to zero.

The question is not about which method to use to express the month and the date, which is ambiguous. If you only see "7/8", it can be understood as July 8, can also be understood as August 7. Even if it is a U.S. or Belize website, how do I know if it will automatically adjust settings based on information such as IP address or user profile?

This site, called 6speedonline.com, made a mistake:

What is the number?

Is it July or February? As long as there is no date beyond 12, or any other information that can help you make a judgment, you can only rely on it.

The Stack Overflow method is preferable:

Such a date is more specific

No matter what order you take, as long as the alphabet is used to indicate the month, it will not cause any ambiguity.

3, the surname "king" probability than the surname "Jones" the probability of 40 times larger

There are 238 million people named Jones in the United States. This is not a decimal number, but it is not worth mentioning when compared to the Chinese surnamed Wang, who has a total of 92.88 million. There are many other similar examples in other countries, but the key issue is that non-Roman letters are used in the names of a very large number of people.

For developers, it is important to recognize this trend and make the appropriate adjustments. Think about it, if you want to register for a website but you're disapproved because of "unqualified names," what an upsetting thing is that there is an apostrophe in the Irish descendants of the world, such as O'Sullivan, O 'Brien, O'Connor. But my dear Australian government did not allow this symbol to be used in the e-health portal recently.

As a developer, you need to pay special attention to the following two situations:

(1) Are there any white or black lists that limit this name? Irish names are often embarrassed.

(2) database can support multi-byte characters? Need to be careful when configuring the database.

However, not only does Chinese require multibyte character support, but Slavic does the same.

4, Windows XP still occupy 68% of the operating system market

That's right, Windows XP takes twice as much market share than the nearest competitor - but only in the most populous country in the world:

Yes, this is the most populous country in the world, with the largest share of XP, foreigners do not know the reason, but you know.

No matter what the reason is, XP is indeed very popular in China. In other words, 68% of Chinese basically did not use IE9. No IE9 means no HTML5, unless you do not use the system default browser. According to the current speed calculation, XP will continue to dominate the Chinese market around 2015, by which time the system will be in its teens.

5, $ may not always refer to the dollar

Did you buy a cup of coffee for $ 30? That sounds luxurious, but thousands in Hong Kong do it every day because in Hong Kong, the value of $ 1 is only about one eighth of that in Australia and the United States. In Singapore and New Zealand, the value of $ 1 will change again.

35 countries around the world use $ as their currency, so the exact value depends on the environment in which they are used. Every time you use $ directly without considering the background, it is possible to confuse the value of money.

For example, how much does "Ghost in the Wires" sell in Amazon?

How much does "Ghost in the Wires" sell in Amazon?

I know that Amazon is in the United States, but does that indicate that Amazon uses US dollars? To know that Amazon also supports automatic currency conversion function, how do I know it does not show the Australian dollar?

The currency unit has a set of global standards, namely ISO 4217, which can be used to represent country-specific currencies in AUD, HKD, NZD, USD, SGD. I am not saying that all $ should be replaced by three letters, but in some cases it really needs to be clearly stated in this way.

Take a look at eBay, the price tag of this product is very clear:

Well, this price is much better thing

Very clear, unambiguous, do not guess to guess. As long as the problems involved in money, should be like this.

6, the country's top-level domain can provide background information

If you are in Australia, you can use the .au TLD; in the UK you can use .uk; in the Netherlands you can use .nl.

One of the major roles of national TLDs is to provide background information. When you see this suffix, you can immediately understand the scope of the site's audience. However, not everyone is willing to work in accordance with the rules.

This is especially true in the United States, where many U.S. companies or agencies never use it, although .US countries have top-level domains available. For example, the following website:

Domain name problem

The name of the organization has shown that it serves the United States, but the domain name is not good, people mistakenly think they serve the world.

The same goes for a local restaurant:

Second domain name problem

Maybe they just want to prevent their own international top-level domains from being registered, and have also applied for the corresponding .us domain name. But unfortunately, there is no domain name mastrosrestaurants.us, but if you enter usoutdoor.us, it will go to another website:

Not registered their own country domain name situation

In theory, .com is internationally accepted, so feel free to apply whatever your scope of service - even for a local restaurant. However, according to the rules of the domain name agencies, .edu, .gov, .mil can only be used by U.S. education, government and military agencies. Why?

7, iPhone is not necessarily where the absolute leader

In Australia, the iPhone has the world:

This is the Australian characteristics: the iPhone have the world

From Australia's data, Apple is the absolute leader in the mobile market. Although Android made some progress this year, it does not matter.

Although only 15% of iPhone share in China, but after the end of 2009 was officially listed in China, not to mention there was no WiFi, so it is perfectly understandable. Moreover, there are many cottage iPhone cell phones in China. Take a look at Brazil, Nokia and Samsung account for two-thirds of the share. India is another story.

The key to discussing these data is the vastly different mobile market landscape around the world. The same phone in different countries release time is different, and some areas do not even release. In addition, the attitude of operators and the country's overall prosperity will also bring about differences in market structure.

Although StatCounter's data may be in doubt as to its accuracy, it is consistent with my observations.

8, the time zone is very important

Time is not the same as time, and it may be another time for you to be here at 4.30. Although most people know that the world is divided into 40 time zones, they are not necessarily strictly based on longitude. Details are as follows:

There should be an international perspective on the issue of time zone, especially for media websites

Each time corresponds to a specific time zone. Do not know the time zone, it will produce misunderstanding. For example, the following site in the end say what time:

"Important Notice" confusing time really crazy

Is it me at noon? Or is it America's noon, where am I morning? Or is Britain's noon, my night? This is an android development forum that attracts people from all over the world, so apparently need to pay attention to the time zone problem, otherwise It will be misunderstood.

Come back and see Stack Overflow, their time to do well:

Stack Overflow example

Although the user needs to take the initiative to hover the mouse over time, but at least provides the time zone information. There are sites that use coordinated time directly, which is what you see in UTC, rather than in a particular time zone.

In some sites, time plays an important role, at which time it is important to allow people to set their own time zones. Just like ASafaWeb:

Allow autonomy to set the time zone

These timezones come from the TimZoneInfo class in .NET and are easy to convert. But do not do the following:

Too complicated is meaningless

Although this is directly from the time zone database, it does not make sense for most people. Many countries do not have so-called "southern" or "western" time and no different time zones.

9, the same treatment for international users

Some sites are designed for people in a particular area. For example, a grocery site only targets nearby residents and therefore leads to preconceived notions, such as contact pages that only locals can understand:

For locals, such a call is no problem

If you call in the same country, there is no problem, business hours will not be misunderstood. But if IFTTT, for example, allows people everywhere to register for free, then there's a problem:

Do not distinguish between "local" and "non-local"

There are eight places in the time zone list above that are not in alphabetical order because they are all U.S. places. If IFTTT is a Web site open to Americans only, that does not matter, but it is not. For such a good service, this approach will lead to the user is divided into two categories: Americans and inferior non-Americans.

Of course, the web designer might say: "Our main users come from the United States." However, the following can be considered:

The order of subtitles will be more consistent

This pattern did not disrupt the alphabetical order, but highlighted some of the United States. This gives a much better feeling: while their primary target audience is Americans, foreign users are not subject to any cold reception.

10, do not forget 360 security browser

We are now abandoning Chrome and Firefox, switch to 360 secure browser it? Only two months, the browser's market share in China from less than 3% in May rose to 26%:

Highlights always in the end

If not Chinese, perhaps not quite understand this product, but you can first look at their Logo:

This familiar logo

Is not it familiar? Similar cottage Logo is very common in China.

To put aside this aside, 360 browser has indeed made remarkable achievements, some agencies even show that the data, the product has won China's share of 57% of the browser. Do not forget, this is a country with 512 million Internet users, more than the sum of the United States, India and Japan - the total number of Internet users in these three countries ranks second to fourth in the world.

For various reasons, Chinese netizens do not have much access to foreign websites, but as a developer, you have to ask yourself the question: "Is my website well compatible with this browser used by 250 million Internet users?"

Practical advice

To sum up, these are the main emphasis on the target audience. If you develop a website for Indonesians, it is certainly different from developing websites for Chinese people. But if you are not designing products for a single cultural context, you must be aware of the diversity of the Internet market today.

In many cases, a better global perspective does not have any impact on key users, but it can be convenient for users in other countries. Do you think writing a letter on the date will affect how the site is used? Does showing timezone damage the experience of U.S. users? Of course not, so try to be better for your users - especially for Chinese users.

This article is compiled from troyhunt.com

(Ding Hong)