Expanding products and services into global markets enables businesses to reach new frontiers in terms of customers, sales, and revenues. To successfully reach these customers, however, businesses need to work with strategic localization partners and adopt innovative solutions that help them deliver products that truly resonate worldwide.

Usability testing is one such solution that plays a critical role in ensuring that the products being delivered to diverse, global audiences are effective, intuitive, and engaging. To undertake this, businesses can partner with language service providers (LSPs) in testing their products, services, and content for new markets, leveraging the linguistic, cultural, and technical expertise of LSPs to enhance the overall resonance and usability of their products in a global context.

This is crucial because a study by Forrester Research found that businesses investing in usability testing can realize a return on investment of up to 665% within three years, as well as a 140% increase in annual customer spend and a 60% boost in online conversion rates.

In this blog, we’ll explore why LSPs are ideal partners for usability testing. We’ll also highlight the benefits of their localization expertise, operational efficiency, and integration capabilities and spotlight some innovative tools from Clearly Local that will empower your business to thrive in global markets.

Why usability testing is critical for localization and global expansion

In localization, usability testing is the process of evaluating how effectively and efficiently localized products and services meet the needs and expectations of users in a specific target market or language. It has become indispensable for localization for the following reasons:

• Ensures cultural relevance: It ensures that content, design, and functionality align with local user expectations, as different cultures perceive and interpret language, design elements, symbols, colors, and navigation patterns uniquely. This is important when you consider that 60% of users prioritize content in their preferred language over price when making online purchasing decisions.

• Improves user experience (UX): It identifies UX issues that impact the usability of localized products such as websites, software, apps, or content. Testing localized versions enables businesses to pinpoint and resolve pain points that may hinder user adoption, thereby encouraging ongoing user experience optimization.

• Boosts market success: Enhanced user satisfaction boosts adoption of products or services in target markets, as successfully localized products that are customized to local user preferences and behaviors achieve higher adoption rates, the fostering of brand loyalty, and in turn, greater revenues. 

Minimizes risks and costly errors: Usability testing is able to detect problems before launch, thus reducing the need for post-launch fixes, which can be incredibly harmful to brand reputation and expensive. Research shows that investing in UX during the concept stage can help companies reduce development cycles by 33–50%.

Why LSPs are strategic partners in usability testing

As businesses extend their global footprints, they will need to have a keen insight into user behavior, cultural nuances, as well as the specific needs and expectations of each market to resonate with the diverse range of consumers.

Language service providers offer district expertise that makes them invaluable partners to companies looking to strengthen their market entry and penetration through usability testing. Here are the top ones:

1. Localization testing expertise

Because LSPs specialize in translating and adapting content for diverse languages and cultures, they have a unique skill set that is crucial when testing global products.

LSPs are equipped to recognize cultural nuances and ensure that a product’s language, visuals, and functionality are culturally aligned with the target audience. In instances where a business is deploying chatbots in different markets, the LSP would ensure that the AI used is trained on region-specific slang, idioms, and user preferences to ensure that the chatbot’s interactions feel natural and engaging for local users.

LSPs also assess whether the localized versions of products or content integrate seamlessly into the product’s design, in particular the user interface (UI) components such as text length, character encoding, and layout or navigation. These are quality assurance aspects that mere translation would not be able to pick up and address.

2. Real-world user testing across multiple regions

Language service providers leverage their global networks and recruit a diverse set of usability testers from target regions to meticulously check for linguistic issues, cultural alignment, and functional issues that affect the usability of the tested products.

These distributed testing teams maintained across multiple regions have deep, on-the-ground understanding of the context and nuances of different local markets. They are also adept at making UI evaluations using the advanced tools and platforms used during testing processes, including virtual testing environments and AI-powered localization platforms.

Testing is done in local languages and under conditions that mirror real-world usage. Through this, LSPs are able to provide brands with valuable usability feedback gleaned through realistic testing environments.

3. Consistency across languages

Because LSPs are typically adept at working with multiple languages, they are usually also capable of ensuring a consistent user experience across these multiple languages. This is because LSPs work with unified design guidelines that help to maintain consistent terminology, tone, and UI components.

Good LSPs use innovative multilingual platforms and localization software that enable them to centralize and manage large terminology databases or digital brand assets. Translation tools such as translation memory can deliver companies cost savings of 30–70%. By using these tools, LSPs guarantee that all language versions provide the same meaning, functionality, and user experience and that brand familiarity is maintained across regions.

For instance, if the flow of button design, layout, or navigation changes dramatically between the English and French versions of a certain e-commerce website, users may become confused or frustrated, leading to abandoned carts and lost sales.

4. Global regulatory and standards compliance

Localization and compliance go hand in hand because LSPs are capable of working across various regions to ensure that products meet the cultural expectations, functional requirements, and legal compliance of specific regions.

A business venturing into a new market would certainly need a partner that is able to test to ensure products meet the standards set by the various local governments to avoid violation of local regulations or cultural taboos.

LSPs work with experts who understand regional laws and guidelines and have industry-specific knowledge, making them capable of advising on standards, such as HIPAA in the U.S., GDPR in Europe, or accessibility guidelines like WCAG.

5. Cost and time efficiency

By integrating localization and usability testing, LSPs are able to help businesses eliminate redundancies due to optimized workflows. Their ability to identify and reduce issues early on helps businesses avoid costly post-launch fixes.

Companies can also benefit from optimized resource allocation, as they would not need to hire multiple vendors for the various localization and global compliance tasks they may require.

Lastly, because of their global network, LSPs are able to quickly gather feedback from a wide range of users for their clients. This fast feedback loop is valuable in iterative usability testing processes because it enables teams to refine their products continuously both before and after launch.

Learn more about our User Testing Services and easyLT localization testing platform. 

To find out how Clearly Local can help your business reach global markets effectively and efficiently, email us at info@clearlyloc.com or leave us a message, and we’ll help you get started.