I am currently in the Philippines for work and twice today I have been presented screens by Google that have utterly confused me. First I was trying to RSVP for an event and the form was hosted on Google Docs so I saw this:
When you look at that you may say “Huh, what does the button and everything else below it say?” and that’s what I said too. I assumed it meant submit or something like that since I knew that the form was trying to do.
Later in the day I was using my Gmail account as my OpenID to login to a StackExchange site and was shown this screen:
This is when I was really confused. I am using Google as my OpenID and I have previously authenticated with Google, proven by my email address being presented to me, so they know who I am and what my preferred language is and yet they are still showing me text in the native language of the country I am currently in. How is this helpful? I didn’t even get the “Translate this text” popup in Chrome like I get when I’m in the states viewing something in German meaning they assume since I am in the Philippines I understand Tagalog. Luckily I recently learning that “salamat” means thank you in Tagalog so I could guess that it meant “No, Thank You” or something like that.
Shouldn’t Google know who I am and what language I should be presented? I set the value in my Preferences for my account:
Even if you are going to show my the language of my current location couldn’t you also present a language option like you do on your home page?
I use Google almost everyday in my life for email, searching, RSS reading and tracking stocks/401k and was shocked to encounter these usability flaws while traveling. Guessing which button to click isn’t a major inconvenience if you have and idea of what the page should be doing but if you didn’t know the context you may do the wrong thing or just give up.
This brings up a question; how do you decide which language you present a new user when they first visit your site?
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