It’s our job as marketers, designers, and strategists to develop and design inclusive web experiences and user interfaces. These experiences must aim to accommodate and benefit different audience needs based on their geographical location, culture, ethnicity, race, gender, age, language, sexual orientation, and so on, without seeing these factors as an obstacle to overcome in the strategy and design process. We must think from a global-to-global first perspective and connect our marketing strategy to understanding specific audiences for well-rounded inclusive website design.
Why Global Inclusive Design is Important
Designing to be globally inclusive means rethinking what you typically default to with reaching your target audiences. Instead, it means acknowledging that your target audience is not one-size-fits-all and different global audiences have different sets of needs, challenges, and means of accessing and interpreting information. To make a direct impact on your digital efforts, you may need to hyperfocus on how to best target and reach each specific audience based on individual factors.
Strategy and Design: Who Should Be in the Room?
Marketing strategy typically aligns with the 80/20 rule. A satisfactory goal is to reach and activate 80% of your intended audience with the hope the remaining 20% will at least hear your message. While you still want to gain all 80%, it has become more prevalent to reach and satisfy the needs of the 20% as well. Shifting perspective to reaching and catering to a more global and diverse audience includes hyperfocusing and tailoring the digital experience to fit the marketing and cultural needs of each audience type.
Building Out Global Infrastructure for Audiences
It is important that your organization has a strategic and in-depth understanding of each different target audience from the beginning of any digital effort. Creating personas representing different racial, ethnic, national, regional, age, or gender audiences will help you to better target and increase your reach. To do this, you have to start by thinking like the consumer from these groups, identifying if there are issues or nuances to consider from the start as you develop strategy and design for your website.
Not only is it important to have these goals in mind when reaching global audiences, but it also assists with building out your global website infrastructure more efficiently from the ground up. With an understanding of whom you are targeting and what message you want them to receive, you will be better positioned to draft that messaging in the most accommodating and beneficial manner. Creating a narrative that fits multiple sets of diverse audience expectations is what will make your website more successful.
Content, Imagery, and Language Requirements
Once you have established your target audiences and built out your website’s infrastructure, it is crucial to tailor the content, imagery, and language to your key audiences. Different cultures can interpret information differently based on context, phrasing, imagery, and so on. Language and illustration can often play a large part in how other cultures interpret the content’s meaning or what narrative is told throughout the website. In a Journal of Engineering and Technology Management study, “research show[s] that the perceived usability increases when the website was originally conceived in the native language of the user. Thus, translation, even though of excellent quality, creates a cultural distance which impacts on the web users’ evaluation of the site.”
Importance of Device Type
Globally, over 50% of all web traffic is via mobile. India, for example, is the second-largest region in the world of smartphone users. Device type now plays a huge factor in reaching and targeting your global audience, and it is important to know if your audience is more desktop or mobile-oriented, and your business must design a web experience that is responsive across all devices to fit the needs and convenience of different audiences.
Globally Tailoring Your Web Design is Necessary
Understanding the needs and perspectives of your business’ global audience base is key to creating effective and successful digital experiences. Hyperfocusing your marketing strategy and tailoring your website design to each global audience member can leave a lasting impact on the relationship your consumers have with your business. To learn more about creating a web and user experience strategy that accommodates your global target audience, contact our experience design experts today.
Love the focus on audience in this post – well done!