Opensource.guide: UI / UX - Language option on footer

Created on 20 Jan 2019 · 6Comments · Source: github/opensource.guide

Hey everyone,
I'm new on trying to contribute here, so i'm sorry if this is not on the right place or something, i will happily accept advice on how to better contribute.
I'm a UX designer and, one thing i noticed could be an improvement would be to bring the language option on the front page from the footer to a more visible area, maybe even the header, i guess a user who doesn't understand the language will probably leave the page before reaching the footer
does anyone else agree?

Source

Victorsj

Most helpful comment

Maybe place the option in the top is a good idea.

Ones who will select their language first time when into the page.

codinggirl on 25 Jan 2019

👍2

All 6 comments

I know nothing about UX but what you say makes sense to me. I imagine this is a well studied topic. Can you point to best practices? I searched and found sites like http://www.flagsarenotlanguages.com/blog/best-practice-for-presenting-languages/ but kind of expected something more "authoritative" perhaps published by the UN, a government, the W3C...

mlinksva on 20 Jan 2019

👍1

Maybe place the option in the top is a good idea.

Ones who will select their language first time when into the page.

codinggirl on 25 Jan 2019

👍2

I also think that place the option in the top is a good idea.
I prefer place the option in the top right corner.

IDEAL-YANG on 31 Jan 2019

hey everyone,

i agree with @mlinksva that it would be nice to do this based on best pratices from trusted sources,
i found some at w3c
https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-navigation-select

i'm sharing this now but i'll still read up on this and give an opinion later.

also a small input from Jakob Nielsen, an author i really like
https://www.nngroup.com/articles/flag-problems/

and a video on the difference between translation and localization, maybe for future localization plans
https://www.nngroup.com/videos/translation-and-localization/

Victorsj on 1 Feb 2019

I agree the language selector should be visible at first sight. Imagine the following scenario: you have little or no hability to read long texts in english and you fall at a english website with no translation option visible, so you don't know exactly what is going on, and you'll have to guess that if there is a translation option, it may be at the bottom of the page. Entering one of the articles makes things even worse since the page height increases a lot. I wonder how many people have not read these articles because of that.
Also the translate select being at the lower left corner witch is, for left-to-right reading people, the less noticed area of a screen/page, is also a bad design practice.
All of this adds to the argument that the translate option should be at the top of the screen, it would be a simple but significant change on the interface.