Author Archives: John Yunker

One person’s workday is another person’s holiday

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I was fresh out of college and living in Australia when I first experienced Boxing Day.

I was clueless. I thought the Aussies were unusually eager fans of, well, boxing.

If only I had Wikipedia back then.

Now, Boxing Day simply reminds me that one person’s workday is another person’s holiday.

Apple is celebrating Boxing Week in selected markets, another sign of how global Apple has become over the past few years.

As for me, I’ll be celebrating Boxing Week by watching some very American sports (but no boxing).

 

Learning from the world’s leading travel websites

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I wrote an article for UX Magazine (based on my research for Lionbridge) that highlights global best practices in the travel industry.

Travelers want websites that travel with them
In the travel industry, your customers are mobile. If you greet them with a “select country” pull-down menu, they might wonder if you’re asking for their home country, departing country, or destination country. Which means you need to invest a great deal of planning into your global gateway.

More important, you need to offer users a consistent language experience across any device they may be using. It’s a mystery to me why a company will localize its website into 30 languages and only localize its mobile app into five or six languages (I’ve seen many instances of this).The irony here is that mobile apps, if developed properly, can be localized more cost effectively than websites.

The linguistic “syncing” of websites, mobile sites, and apps is a hot topic among many of the companies I’ve spoken with this year — across all industries. Given the rise of Internet usage on mobile devices, it’s fair to say that all Internet users want websites that travel with them.

Be Kind: It’s not easy creating a global brand name

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From The Wall Street Journal interview with the founder of KIND Snacks:

WSJ: Kind recently became the subject of a trademark battle with Italy’s Ferrero SpA, a $10 billion candy giant, whose brands include Kinder. What happened and what did you learn from that?

Mr. Lubetzky: It was a minor incident and we worked it out. [As a result of an out-of-court agreement], we’re Kind in the U.S. and in non-English speaking countries, we’re Be Kind. If you have a brand that has global aspirations, you need to make sure you integrate international considerations into your thinking about brand choices.