Showing posts with label UI. Show all posts
Showing posts with label UI. Show all posts

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Hey, Google, Pay Attention to Africa!

To any Google representatives or robots:

1) Liberian IP addresses do not originate from an Arabic speaking country. Despite choosing "lb" as their country suffix--a suffix I'm sure that Lebanon or Libya engaged much earlier--Liberia continues to be an English speaking country. Making Google and its affiliates load, automatically, into Arabic effectively prevents Google products from reaching this increasingly technologically capable country.

It might be worth doing a quick check of other African country suffixes to see if this same issue is happening in any other unlikely places. It is a small but crippling obstacle to accessing Google products.

2) Why not make an obvious way to escape a presumptuously translated UI? A simple array of flags to indicate other language options would be way easier than assuming that your average users have figured out what "language" looks like in Arabic, Amharic, Kiswahili, etc.

3) Googledocs is too heavy to load on slow connections (even if they are fast enough to host gchat). Is there a basic html toggle option to help your dedicated googledocs users access their materials when they are in the developing world?

If anyone knows how to more effectively bring these issues to the attention of Google's powerful strata, please let me know. These issues are affecting millions of switched on computer users.