International design
The aim of international design is to create experiences that are equally usable, relevant, and meaningful across the globe to amplify the voices of global users.
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Introduction#
There are roughly 200 countries and 6500 spoken languages in the world. Culture is deeply rooted in our thinking patterns, and it affects how users interact with and benefit from digital experiences. International design is a complex challenge that goes beyond translation. Acknowledging cultural characteristics and differences is the first step to create richer, world-ready digital experiences.
Here, you'll find recommendations and guardrails for how to start creating user experiences that are scalable globally, and concepts to better understand how varied our user landscape is. Designing for a global audience is not an exact science, but by acknowledging the following issues, we take an important first step to develop more empathy towards our international users and build globally relevant user interfaces.
Localization and text expansion#
One of the biggest challenges of designing for a global audience is to create interfaces that can efficiently adapt to different languages that have different writing and reading systems, different grammar rules, different typographic convention, and translating content leads to textual content that can differ drastically in length.
When translating content to different languages, the length of the translated text is likely going to be very different — sometimes up to 300% longer than the original one. Text expansion is one of the main challenges of designing effective global user interfaces.
IBM Globalization Guidelines reported an interesting correlation between the number of characters in a text field and the amount of text expansion. These experimental values clearly indicate that shorter text fields are more susceptible to text expansion, and these values can help us predict the effect on our user interfaces. To read further,
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Localization-ready design#
Localized content and text expansion have a substantial impact on how user interfaces look and perform across different countries. It’s vital to create layouts that can efficiently flow with the textual content of different length and nature. Checking the readiness of a design solution across multiple languages can be time-consuming, so tools like World Ready (XD Plugin) can help you automate some of the process.
Imagery#
As imagery is closely related to society, culture, beliefs, religion, and political values, it’s extremely important to be careful and intentional about picking pictures for each region or even country.
Colors#
As mentioned in the
Typography#
Adobe Clean is our standard system typeface. Developed specifically for Adobe's brand identity and user interface design, it provides extensive language support. Please refer to the
Content volume expectation#
Different cultures have varying expectations around volume of content. Japanese users generally prefer larger amounts of content and greater detail compared to North Americans, so content-heavy interface designers should consider the volume of content expected by these users. We recommend a modular design that allows for additional content. This is both for usability and user satisfaction of our products.