Akatombo Web Log
Thursday, May 13, 2004
Icons that mean English
Some of the pages in the CEATEC JAPAN 2004 website for languages other than Japanese and English will not be translated and will instead appear in English. For this reason it is our task to let the user know as intuitively as possible, which links will lead them to English pages. On last year’s website, we indicated this with a red asterisk and a legend in the header explaining what it meant, but aside from being ugly this strikes us as being rather unintuitive.
We have been trying to come up with an icon that will intuitively convey that these links point to English pages, and it has proven to be a very interesting and difficult challenge.
First we came up with an ‘e’ icon (
) which we like the look of, but doesn’t inherintly do much in the way of expressing the nature of the link.
Our second effort was a blend of the national flags of the United States and the United Kingdom (
) . We think this does a slightly better job of conveying the message, but would still require some explanation on our part, which is what we would like to avoid.
What are your thoughts on this? What type of icon would effectively convey that the link it marks points at an English page? Is it better to place an explanation of the icon’s meaning on every page? Is the header the most appropriate place for such an explanation or do you think you would tend to skip over it?
We look forward to your comments!
UPDATE: We have a solution that we are not totally happy with, but is the best we came up with in a few days of brainstorming. We’ll do a followup post when the committee has approved it.
- Posted by Kristen
Rather than doing an icon, why not just put the navigation in English? On last years’ site you’ve got Visiteurs* but you could do Visitors instead.
However, that is ambiguous for navigation words that are the same in both languages.
To avoid possible confusion, you could adjust the color of the navigation. Black for native language and a subtly lighter dark grey for English pages. Or change the weight of the font…
May 13th, 2004 07:38 AM - Posted by Kristen
Oops, I realise I might not have been entirely clear… I mean for the English-only pages, put the navigation in English. The translated pages should have their navigation in the proper language.
May 13th, 2004 07:40 AM - Posted by UltraBob
Hi Kristen,
Thank you for your ideas. These are generally good principles but for a few things:
Using English for English links: as you mentioned, there tend to be a lot of links with the same or very similar names in different languages
Using a darker color, this would probably be a good addition, but seems to us to communicate that the links are English even less clearly than with the use of either of those icons.
Pages that are in English will have English navigation, but this is something that you would pick up on after clicking through. Also as we mentioned, due to language similarities this would not, we think, be immediately clear.
There will be a fairly major usability problem on the site realted to English language pages. That is, these links will point to pages in the English site structure (meaning that all navigation on the English page will point to other English pages and not back at the user’s chosen language) This is nearly an unforgivable problem for us, but unfortunately due to factors beyond our control, we have to do that.
Thanks again for your ideas, I hope you have some more!
May 13th, 2004 08:22 AM - Posted by mj
What English are you using? Which spelling? Where is the website located - what country is the company based?
All these factors whould play a role when choosing a “flag” for language. Combination flags are way too confusing.
Definately more keen on having the language written out.
May 13th, 2004 09:55 AM - Posted by UltraBob
The spelling is U.S. English, but the goal of mixing flags was to try to avoid using any one country as a representative for the English language, and also avoid people thinking that it points at a U.S. website or something.
The exhibition is located in Japan.
By having the language written out do you mean writing out English on the links that are in English? I think space issues would prevent that, though we also liked the idea of a little stamp that says ENGLISH. Hmmm, we’ll look into that.
Thanks for your comment!
May 13th, 2004 10:20 AM - Posted by Takeshi
I think putting those icons to all the buttons to English pages is not a nice solution. Since the icon contains a lot of RED color, plus if I see several icons in a page, that grabs too much attention eventhough leading to English pages from other languages is not quite important.
I suggest that to make the icon less outstanding (in terms of color and size).
or
some better way to go??...mmm let me think.
May 13th, 2004 10:48 AM - Posted by UltraBob
Good point Takeshi! In fact I had meant to write that if we DID use the icons I’d have to find a way to reduce the contrast. I like mj’s English stamp idea though, so we’ll play with that and see how it goes.
May 13th, 2004 11:12 AM