The Mr. Potato Head global gateway

by

I was happy to discover recently that a toy that I loved as a child — Mr. Potato Head — is still alive and well.

Not only that, but Mr. Potato Head is the star attraction on the Hasbro global gateway:

Hasbro’s global gateway is not all fun and games. It’s actually quite effective.

For starters, the languages are properly presented in their native languages. This may seem obvious to regular readers of this blog, but there are still many companies out there that don’t get this practice correct.

The sort order of the languages may seem curious — Russian and Greek falling near the end of the list; these are non-Latin scripts, which are often sorted after the A-Z sort. This is not necessarily a best practice, but it is a fairly consistent practice — something I delve into more in my book.

As for the map, normally, I like maps to be clickable — as that’s what users often do when they see a map. But the overlay of my good friend Mr. Potato Head makes it clear that this map is only decorative.

To get to this global gateway page, users must select a global gateway link. Fortunately, Hasbro is wise enough to position this link in the upper right corner of most web pages, as shown below:

You’ll also notice the use of a globe icon, which makes the global gateway easy to find regardless of the user’s native language.

So if you’re meeting resistance within your company when it comes to improving your global gateway, tell everyone to spend a minute or two with Mr. Potato Head. Perhaps he’ll set them straight.

 

 

(Visited 99 times, 1 visits today)
John Yunker

John Yunker

John is co-founder of Byte Level Research and author of Think Outside the Country as well as 19 editions of The Web Globalization Report Card.
Tweet
Share