| The unprecedented international exposure afforded by the Web increases the site designer's responsibility for ensuring international usability. International use is not a new phenomenon: Most computer companies and many large corporations have a significant percentage of their sales overseas.
The report contains a total of 19 design guidelines, based on usability testing of 20 English-language (mainly American) e-commerce sites with European users. When we analyzed 20 other big sites we found that the average site complied with 23% of these guidelines. In other words, the internationalization aspects of these sites violated 15 of the design guidelines on average. Smaller sites typically have even more usability mistakes in their ways of dealing with overseas users.
We discovered many differences in users' behavior, relative to our studies of American users shopping at the same sites. Most of these differences would be relatively easy to fix, and sites are losing much overseas business because of issues that could have been resolved quickly. Of course, there are also bigger, cultural issues at play, but anybody can start with getting the basics right.
47 pages. Richly illustrated with 24 color screenshots from many different websites, showing usability problems we found in our testing as well as examples of design that does work across borders.
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This document is a part of Nielsen Norman Group's series of design guidelines for e-commerce user experience.
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