Post by habiba123820 on Nov 6, 2024 5:27:10 GMT -5
It's 4:42 PM on a Wednesday. We're scheduled to launch globally on Monday, but one of my support engineers has opened critical bugs regarding translation quality in one of my product's languages. It's like a code red.
Alarms going off, automatic doors closing. This is important!
But before we go into full-on emergency mode, here are a few tips that can help you assess the linguistic impact in product launch scenarios with clarity, so you can better decide what your next steps should be:
1 ) Step 1: Let's analyze the actual merit of the claims in detail
More often than not, people will not be wordpress web design agency consistent in how they assess language quality. We’ve seen people mark a grammar error as a critical bug. The same goes for terminology and spelling. When we look at the bugs that have been raised, what are they really? How do they ultimately impact the User Experience?
With language, the same thing that may be unacceptable and wrong to one person may be understandable but incorrect to another. Both may see the problem as a mistake, but to different degrees. Maybe it was an inconsistency. Whatever it is, the fact is that every human product has flaws, no matter how good it is. That’s what it means to be human—to be imperfect. So before you jump to conclusions based on how one person categorized these issues, ask two or three other language experts to look at these mistakes from a user experience perspective and answer these questions:
Will this prevent me from using the app?
Will this irreparably damage the way I view the credibility of this brand?
If the answer to any of these questions is unanimously yes, then you really do have a serious problem that needs to be addressed before launch. If not, then this can and should be addressed post-launch. The main lesson here is to analyze the linguistic claims in very detailed detail to really understand how they were classified and what is actually happening.
2 ) How do I know if I can launch without addressing these issues?
In addition to the bugs that have been raised, as people use the app, it is almost certain that other issues, including language issues, will be raised. They may include the same issues already raised, or they may be completely new.
The fact is that launch is always a surprise, and sometimes making a big deal about language is just an easy outlet for people to use to project their general insecurity about how a product will perform. It’s such an easy target. Even when reviewing the source copy of any application, we can always find room for improvement, and sometimes some potentially harmful ambiguities, inconsistencies, and other things that need to be addressed as well. But again the question is, what is good enough for launch?
What kinds of mistakes can we tolerate and work around without causing damage to the product or the brand? A lack of care will sink a product. But an overabundance of caution or, even worse, an overemphasis on things that aren’t absolutely crucial to the User Experience can cause an entire product team to lose track of what’s centrally important to an application.
3 ) Keep things in perspective: People want the app, product, or website to do things. They’re not looking at it from the perspective of a stakeholder or product manager.
It’s hard. Months of working on something and you lose perspective on what matters. Soon, everything matters. Everything is critical. Everything is do or die. Losing perspective can ruin a product launch like nothing else. An entire team starts working on something that isn’t critical as urgent because someone higher up thinks it’s important.
Now things that are truly critical will be missed and become insignificant. To make matters worse, in the process of dealing with these non-critical bugs late in the game, you now introduce the risk of having the product misbehave or break in new and unexpected ways. So the bottom line is that late in the game, before launch, everyone gets scared and perspective is the first thing to go. Be the clear-headed one to see through the turbulence.
Alarms going off, automatic doors closing. This is important!
But before we go into full-on emergency mode, here are a few tips that can help you assess the linguistic impact in product launch scenarios with clarity, so you can better decide what your next steps should be:
1 ) Step 1: Let's analyze the actual merit of the claims in detail
More often than not, people will not be wordpress web design agency consistent in how they assess language quality. We’ve seen people mark a grammar error as a critical bug. The same goes for terminology and spelling. When we look at the bugs that have been raised, what are they really? How do they ultimately impact the User Experience?
With language, the same thing that may be unacceptable and wrong to one person may be understandable but incorrect to another. Both may see the problem as a mistake, but to different degrees. Maybe it was an inconsistency. Whatever it is, the fact is that every human product has flaws, no matter how good it is. That’s what it means to be human—to be imperfect. So before you jump to conclusions based on how one person categorized these issues, ask two or three other language experts to look at these mistakes from a user experience perspective and answer these questions:
Will this prevent me from using the app?
Will this irreparably damage the way I view the credibility of this brand?
If the answer to any of these questions is unanimously yes, then you really do have a serious problem that needs to be addressed before launch. If not, then this can and should be addressed post-launch. The main lesson here is to analyze the linguistic claims in very detailed detail to really understand how they were classified and what is actually happening.
2 ) How do I know if I can launch without addressing these issues?
In addition to the bugs that have been raised, as people use the app, it is almost certain that other issues, including language issues, will be raised. They may include the same issues already raised, or they may be completely new.
The fact is that launch is always a surprise, and sometimes making a big deal about language is just an easy outlet for people to use to project their general insecurity about how a product will perform. It’s such an easy target. Even when reviewing the source copy of any application, we can always find room for improvement, and sometimes some potentially harmful ambiguities, inconsistencies, and other things that need to be addressed as well. But again the question is, what is good enough for launch?
What kinds of mistakes can we tolerate and work around without causing damage to the product or the brand? A lack of care will sink a product. But an overabundance of caution or, even worse, an overemphasis on things that aren’t absolutely crucial to the User Experience can cause an entire product team to lose track of what’s centrally important to an application.
3 ) Keep things in perspective: People want the app, product, or website to do things. They’re not looking at it from the perspective of a stakeholder or product manager.
It’s hard. Months of working on something and you lose perspective on what matters. Soon, everything matters. Everything is critical. Everything is do or die. Losing perspective can ruin a product launch like nothing else. An entire team starts working on something that isn’t critical as urgent because someone higher up thinks it’s important.
Now things that are truly critical will be missed and become insignificant. To make matters worse, in the process of dealing with these non-critical bugs late in the game, you now introduce the risk of having the product misbehave or break in new and unexpected ways. So the bottom line is that late in the game, before launch, everyone gets scared and perspective is the first thing to go. Be the clear-headed one to see through the turbulence.