http://www.designacrosscultures.com Notes on global information architecture and cross-cultural web design Thu, 28 Feb 2008 12:46:26 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en John Yunker has published the "2008 Web Globalization Report Card":report, his yearly assessment of most global-friendly websites. His overall findings indicate that companies are taking their global presence ever more seriously: bq. Five years ago, a Web site that supported more than 10 languages was in rare company. Today, 10 languages ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2008/02/28/the-best-global-web-sites-of-2008/ BusinessWeek's Bruce Nussbaum on questions raised by the most recent delay of the Boeing Dreamliner project: bq. 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? [ Link ] It is ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2008/01/16/boeings-dreamliner-delayed-because-of-cultural-differences/ According to independent blog "Inside Facebook":http://www.insidefacebook.com/, the social networking site is planning to leverage its community to help translate parts of its UI: bq. 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 ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2008/01/10/facebook-planning-to-use-crowdsourcing-for-cross-cultural-translation/ Over the past few months, professional and personal commitments have put some distance between me and my research into cross-cultural design. This is still a topic that fascinates me, and I plan to keep working on it. However, I have little time to devote to it in the short term. ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/12/17/on-hiatus/ Peter Van Dijck will be giving a talk at the upcoming Euro IA Summit entitled _Organizing Global Websites_. He's given us a "preview of his slides":slides. 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 ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/09/19/peter-van-dijck-organizing-global-websites/ There was a recent discussion on the "SIGIA mailing list":sigia about Google's "testing of a new homepage design for Taiwan and Hong Kong":test that features animated icons. Some folks in the list seemed surprised that Google would forego its traditionally minimalist UI — an important brand differentiator — in ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/07/31/does-brand-consistency-trump-efficient-communication-across-cultures/ The W3C has launched "Planet I18n":pi, an aggregator of posts about web internationalization. [pi]http://www.w3.org/International/planet/ http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/07/03/planet-i18n/ The NY Times has "an interview":nytimes [free registration required] with Henning Kagermann, CEO of German software-maker SAP. They ask him why SAP had to globalize its workforce: bq. There really is no alternative, for two reasons. It’s foolish to believe today that the smartest people are in one nation. The second ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/06/09/tapping-into-global-talent/ Affective Design asks: "How does culture affect what we focus on?":ad Some interesting recommendations... bq. 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 ... http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/06/06/culture-and-focus/ Digital Thread has a comprehensive listing of "international web design firms":listing. [listing]http://digitalthread.com/designcompanies/international_firms/ http://www.designacrosscultures.com/2007/06/03/international-design-firms/