A perspective missed from the above replies is when you are designing
an application where a CMS system will be used to localize all the
content. In these cases, you need to understand how the CMS system
will handle run-time data. e.g. In an e-commerce application, the
total price for your purchase, the date the item will be shipped, or
the number of items to be shipped are all examples of run-time data.
We need to understand this because this will change our design. In
the following examples, the text between { and } is the run-time
data.
Example 1:
The {3} items you have ordered will be sent in {1} box.
In this example, we have grammar dependent phrases. This increases
the work to maintain the content of the application%u2026 even more
so if you need to support many languages. As the designer, you need
to determine if it is worth this extra work or if you can rework the
content to communicate the same message to the user, but with less
work to maintain and deploy across the world.
Example 2:
Expect the item to arrive on {Mon Dec 29, 2008}.
This is a run-time data, but it also needs to be localized. To
localize, a mask is created where the order of the month, day, year,
day of week can be changed as well as the use of numbers, full
spelling, etc%u2026 can be defined.
Most languages support a small handful of localized date and time
formats. These standard localized formats might work for a simple
application, but you may need to have other format due to space
constraints or business rules.
As the designer of the system, you need to decide how many date and
time formats you wish to support%u2026 I%u2019ve not worked through
all the possible permutations, but on one recent audit I saw a site
that wished to be localized have over 35 different formats. This is
too much to support for very little value to the user. We where able
to get this down to 9 formats.
I will go into more detail on this and other design documentation
issues during my talk at Interaction 09 | Vancouver.
http://tiny.cc/hMpRw
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Posted from the new ixda.org
http://www.ixda.org/discuss?post=36653
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