Five years ago, a Web site that supported more than 10 languages was in rare company. Today, 10 languages is well below average.

Read more in his blog.

How much autonomy do you give partners in a global collaborative effort? How much direct control do you need? What about trust? How do you account for differences in culture?

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It is exactly this latter question that this blog aims to explore. These issues affect not only global managers; anyone involved with designing and deploying artifacts on the web is a participant in a global conversation and must take cultural differences into consideration.

It has been known for a while that Facebook is working on translating the site into a few new key languages. However, beyond this initial step, Facebook is planning an aggressive “crowdsourcing” approach to translate the site into dozens (if not hundreds) of languages around the world by harnessing the collective volunteer power of its user base.

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Facebook is always one of the examples I use to describe the cross-cultural challenges faced by global sites. I’m intrigued by the suggested approach: it’s one thing to translate the labels in links and titles, something that can be probably be done using community power. It’s more difficult, however, to cater to different cultural expectations regarding things like privacy. I assume that Facebook would still be employing a US-centric model for these deeper issues, especially whenever US law requires it. (I wonder if this level of cross-cultural customization is even possible to achieve in a site like Facebook.)

Peter is one of the folks that knows the most about global information architecture; this presentation should be very valuable. (I’m sorry I’ll miss it — hopefully he’ll give it again at some other conference.)

It’s important to note that the new design is for the iGoogle homepage — not the traditional Google homepage most visitors see. (iGoogle allows the user to customize their homepage by adding widgets that summarize news, email, etc.) Google’s traditional homepage for Taiwan and Hong Kong remains similar to the standard US version. Also, the animated widget being discussed is not exclusive to the Chinese sites; it is also available to users of the US version. (However, it is not installed by default like it seems to be in the Chinese sites.) So in many respects, this discussion is a case of “much ado about nothing”.

However, it raises an interesting question: does brand consistency trump efficient communication across cultures? In other words, if it happens that 1) Google’s minimalism is an essential part of its branding message, and 2) some cultures do not react as positively to minimalism as others, which should have the upper hand when Google enters a new market?

Let’s look at the second question first: is a preference for minimalistic UIs culturally conditioned (as opposed to universal)? Research suggests it is. Elizabeth Würtz has published an examination of website design across different cultures using the framework proposed by anthropologist Edward Hall. Würtz hypothesizes that designs produced by “High Context” (HC) cultures will tend to feature more imagery (including animations and other effects) — and less text — than those aimed at “Low Context” (LC) cultures. She also proposes that HC websites tend to have more diversity in their layout and color schemes, what users in LC cultures may perceive as “clutter”. Asia and North America happen to sit on opposite ends of that HC-LC axis; this may explain Google’s use of animations in their Hong Kong / Taiwan homepage. From this perspective, it seems that minimalistic UIs may not be the most effective everywhere. (I’ve written an article for Boxes and Arrows that looks into Hall’s framework and other implications it has for IA.)

Now onto the first question: is minimalism — as represented in Google’s UIs — an essential part of their branding message? In other words, does Google stop being Google if it foregoes minimalism? Google’s UIs seem designed to support their stated mission to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” The first part of that mission — organizing the world’s information — doesn’t seem to have immediate user-facing UI implications. The second part — making this information accessible and useful — implies that the Google UIs should strive to provide the shortest, easiest possible path to information. This seems to suggest that they need to be minimalistic.

However, if we consider the implications of Würtz’s paper, we can argue that this shortest path can be best achieved with a direct, minimal, no-fuss UI in cultures conditioned to LC communications. Because Google’s culture of origin is LC (the US), their original UI is minimal and sparse; it is designed to support their stated mission in their culture of origin. The flipside: we can hypothesize that if 1) some cultures communicate better with non-minimal UIs, and 2) Google’s UI strategy and branding should support their corporate mission (and not the other way around), then for “Google to be Google” it behooves them to explore less minimal UIs when entering markets with HC cultures.

It will be interesting to see what happens as the major brands of the western LC countries start to enter HC markets like Asia (and vice-versa). Dominance in one market does not guarantee dominance in all, especially when moving across wide cultural divides. I suspect that in order to communicate effectively, established brands like Google will need to explore UIs strategies that may seem jarring to the folks back home.

There really is no alternative, for two reasons. It’s foolish to believe today that the smartest people are in one nation. The second is sourcing, at least if you are a big company. If you are smaller, and have a team of 100 or 200 engineers you can stay in one country and try to attract the best guys. But if you are a big company, you need to tap into the global talent pool. In Germany, we now have this big public debate about there being a shortage of engineers in the country. Well, I don’t care, or at least not as the chief executive of SAP.

This second problem is one that many companies run into, especially those (like my own) that are based in smaller communities. How do you grow when you’ve hired the most qualified people you can in your community?

One solution is to train folks; work with the universities to establish solid programs, offer seminars and outreach courses, etc. This benefits the community as a whole, and the industry in particular. The obvious downside is that training requires that the company spend considerable amounts of time and energy in activities that are only indirectly contributing to its bottom line.

Another alternative is to look for resources elsewhere. In theory the internet makes this easy, particularly when developing web projects. However, the practice is more complicated: for small teams, hiring outside of their own country implies communication and project management challenges that are much harder than those posed by local resources. Paying remote folks can also be difficult: many global freelancers don’t accept payment via credit cards; they usually require bank transfers or visits to the local Western Union office.

Having a small local talent pool ought not to be an impediment to developing and growing a world-class company. But it is more difficult than doing so in a locale with more available resources. I suspect that having to deal with these issues upfront will force small-community based companies to become more adept at the managing the challenges of operating with a global workforce than their large-community based competitors. In a globalized world, this is a distinct advantage.

Design for eastern cultures should take more notice of the contextual elements that work together to build the design. Design for western cultures should acknowledge that a central object will be the focus of attention, and make sure that object is fully realized.