What are the best practices for a language selector?
It might be easier to forego the flags altogether. There are some standard best practices that you should adhere to when designing a website language selector: Always use the local format and spelling of the language. It needs to be recognizable instantly to native speakers. For example, German should be listed as Deutsch.
How to use language selectors in web design?
Let m e start with an approach that seems smart and might come to most designers’ mind when working on a product that’s offered in multiple languages: automatic redirect based on browser language. Imagine that you’re designing a website in both German and English. The rules seem to be pretty straightforward:
What does the standard language selection icon look like?
The standard language selection icon looks like this: But have you ever seen that icon on one of your favorite websites or applications? I haven’t. And our user tests showed that people won’t recognize this icon as an option for selecting languages. It seems that the standardized language icon isn’t widely used.
How to select the most common language on a website?
Most common first and then the rest: One of the intriguing examples we observed was how one of the websites listed most common languages for their company such as Chinese, French, Spanish, and German by displaying small flags at the top right and then displaying a “Select Language” dropdown list for all of their supported languages.
Which is the best way to select a language on a website?
Flag Plus Language Name: The websites that displayed flag of the country plus the language name is one of the best approaches that we’ve seen. It speaks clearly to the visitor when it comes to selecting the desired language. See below screenshot for example.
Which is the best way to use a language switcher?
Language Switcher as part of the Main Navigation. Text links are a great way to offer your website or app in other languages. By embedding the language switcher in your main navigation, users will easily find the option to change languages. Trello, for example, embedded the language switch in the app settings.
What happens when you use language selector in chrome?
Using the shortened written name (initials) of the languages can result in gibberish when the website is translated, for example, with Chrome’s Translate webpages feature. Be extremely careful when using just an icon to access the language selector — people might not understand what it stands for.
Why do I have to default to English on my website?
What if you have a website visitor from the U.K., and they’re shopping on your U.K. site, but would prefer to browse in their native language, German? Defaulting them to English forces an experience they might not want. And that’s where the problem lies: users still need the option to choose the language they prefer.