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We are in the middle of a i18n process for a product. On a dashboard we have a Widget with news in the German language. Now we also offer our dashboard in English. Problem is: the news are a RSS Feed that we have no control of. The news are only available in German. What can I do? Should I leave the German news there inside the widget when the person switches to English? Or should I remove the News / give the information that the news are not available in english? Any other options?

Insei
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1 Answers1

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3 types of language users:

  1. Doesn't speak german and therefor switches to english.
  2. User knows german but prefers english for a UI.
  3. Is german, prefers german.

Number 3 isn't the problem.

Number 1 doesn't have any use for the newsfeed at all and therefor probably doesnt want to have something in his view that he can't understand anyway.

Number 2 does want to read it sometimes. I can imagine it's a small percentage of the users though.

Option A)

It's hard to distinguish between user 1 and 2, therefor having the user in control to hide/display it could be a good option. You could explain the user in a small tooltip / message that the feed is not available in his language and ask if he wants to hide it.

Option B)

If the percentage of number 2 users is really low I would just hide it. If something is available for me but I can't benefit/use it why show it? Plus I wouldn't want to give the user the feeling that something is 'incomplete'. I can't speak Chinese so for me it wouldn't make sense to display a feed in Chinese on my dashboard. A user can't tell if something is not even there but a user can tell if something is "not working".

Depending how important you think the feed information is I would go for option A or B. I'm leaning towards option B though

Alesis
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  • I would prefer Option A. I would always give option to customize the dashboard, e.g hide/show widgets or select only the widgets the user need. – rhauger Jul 12 '19 at 14:04
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    Usually I would prefer option A as well, but thats in scenarios where its really unpredictable wether a feature is being used yes or no. I.e. some users think its useful, some do not. The more a feature leans towards the 'not usefull', the higher the chance I would disable it completely. This could be a scenario like that – Alesis Jul 12 '19 at 16:01
  • However, removing the widget completely could give the user the impression of an incomplete user interface. So you should at least inform why something is missing. – rhauger Jul 12 '19 at 18:57
  • Thanks a lot for the answer! I had the same thoughts and I didn’t want to remove the widget just because the user switches the language. I think the tooltip and the option to hide it sounds best. – Insei Jul 13 '19 at 10:20