E243: The Language Your Product Speaks Is A Part of Your Product's Design
An interview with Alexander Murauski, CEO @ Alconost
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Who is Alexander Murauski?
Alexander Murauski is an expert in all things related to product localisation and the CEO of Alconost, a platform that aims to help product teams unlock global growth through AI-enhanced localisation.
In my career, I’ve worked on a large number of localisation initiatives, including more than one where we’ve had to rip apart entire apps to put them back together again. It’s a common pain point, and sometimes you have to ask yourself why people don’t start as they mean to go on. It’s not even that hard to set up! But, many people skip it a the beginning and pay the price later. I was glad to chat to Alexander about some of these very common themes. I hope you enjoy it.
Episode highlights:
1. Language is design, not just decoration
The text choices you make in your product are a fundamental part of the user experience, not a nice-to-have. We’ve all seen terribly translated manuals from overseas products, and it makes us feel that no one has taken any care. If it’s a dirt-cheap or free product, maybe users will be OK with it, but people generally have high standards and deserve an app with thoughtful, culturally-appropriate language choices.
2. Start with localisation from day one
Yes, it is a little bit more work to put the right frameworks in place at the beginning, and it prevents you from taking those hacky shortcuts that you might want to use to get to market quickly, but it’s going to come back and bite you eventually. Pulling everything apart to localise it in a couple of year’s time when you start to scale internationally is a nightmare project that no one enjoys, and a little bit of effort upfront can help prevent this from the start.
3. Good localisation is more than just translation
Avoid the temptation to Google Translate everything, unless you’re just using it as a placeholder. True localisation includes understanding cultural nuances and being conscious of tone of voice, date and number formats, appropriate colours, humour and even the names we give our products. It’s important to move beyond just swapping words out and saying “Ship it!” and make it feel like a comfortable experience for overseas users.
4. But, you can take an iterative approach if you need to
Localising your entire product portfolio can feel like a daunting task, especially if you didn’t set up to allow it in the first place. That said, while you want to end up with an excellent experience, it’s not always all or nothing. You can build a localisation plan that takes account of the importance of the application pages, concentrates on high-traffic areas or marketing campaigns, and you can iteratively fix the rest as you start to roll out.
Find Alexander
Find Alexander on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amurauski/ or check out his company, Alconost, at https://alconost.com/en.
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