Barclays Cycle Hire language selection

Officially known as Barclays Cycle Hire, Transport for London’s blue hire bikes are a ubiquitous sight around London. Hiring a bike is fairly straightforward using the interactive kiosks located next to docking stations around the city.

The kiosks support seventeen languages: along with English, the system is localised in German, Spanish, French, Italian, Arabic, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Chinese, Polish, Punjabi, Tamil, Turkish, Urdu, Vietnamese and Japanese.

The icon for language selection is a British flag:

However, this is the only flag used for language, as shown on the language selection screen below:

The use of the British flag is an interesting choice. While the system doesn’t explicitly use flags to represent languages, it does use a flag to show availability of languages.

It would be very interesting to see stats on how many users actually find and use localised versions of the kiosk. By using the British flag alone, could the system possibly miscommunicate itself?

London’s official promotional organisation London & Partners provides visitor statistics to London by nationality. The top three nations are the USA, France and Italy. This allows us to begin to understand the types of users who would be using the system.

Currency?

Looking at the top three types of visitors, could users mistake the British flag for a currency icon rather than a language icon? Payment is only available in the Great British Pound — visitors from the US may want to use US dollars or visitors from the EU may want to use the euro. (This may be either cancelled out or confused even further by the pound icon next to ‘balance’ on the home screen in the top right.)

Probably not a major issue — but it does suggest the language selection proposition represented by the British flag is not as strong as it could be.

Exclusivity?

As a visitor or new immigrant, does the British flag suggest it could be exclusively for British citizens only? By virtue of the flag being isolated here, again this is a possibility. Ironically the presence of other flags would probably negate this.

Improvement through prioritisation

Obviously the majority of visitors from United States would not need translated content. Many French, German and Italian users may have a good enough grasp of English to navigate the system without translation — so users from those countries might not use the translations as much as users from perhaps Asia or South America.

The most effective strategy for presenting translation options would be to find the balance between the group of language speakers that would benefit most from translation versus the group of language speakers that comprise the largest number of users.

Once establishing this, language selection can be based on this priority.

The new design above shows a more generic speech bubble icon instead of a flag to represent language. It also displays five languages on the home screen and a button alluding to further languages being available.

Would the above screen work better at showing language options? Potentially — of course the only true way to know would be to test this with real users.

Bab.la: flag overload?

Bab.la is an excellent online language resource with online translation as one of its core services — in an impressive 22 languages.

The site makes heavy use of flags as iconography, with some interesting flag choices: Arabic is represented by the Egyptian flag, Swahili by the Kenyan flag and Hindi by the Indian flag.

Arabic is an official language in 24 countries other than Egypt (however, Egypt is by far the largest by population) and Swahili is an official language in four countries. While Hindi is the most widely spoken language in India, there are 22 official languages in India.

Furthermore, English is represented by the Union Jack; however it is an official language in over 50 countries. Also, the United States which has many more English-speakers than the United Kingdom. (The same argument can be applied to the use of Spanish and Portuguese flags for those languages in relation to Mexico and Brazil respectively).

Regardless of whether flags are appropriate in this situation, another question can be posed: do the flags actually aid in legibility of the translation menu? Or are they actually distracting?

Consider the Google Translate interface that supports 65 languages:

Arguably the Google Translate is easier to read and far more compact on screen: and it achieves this in part by not using flags to represent languages.

The Metropolitan Police: 16 languages, 12 flags

The Metropolitan Police website provides language content in 16 languages other than English: Arabic, Bengali, Chinese, French, Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Somali, Spanish, Turkish, Urdu and Vietnamese. That’s quite a diverse range of content.

Met Police

From the homepage, a neat and attractive row of 12 flags links through to a landing page listing 16 languages.

12 flags, 16 languages: are some flags missing from the homepage?

Let’s follow the link and go to the next page:

The Metropolitan Police

Starting with the positive, each language is displayed in its native name and script (and also repeated in English).

But other than that, this is all wrong. It’s probably the single best example of why using flags for languages is so fundamentally flawed.

The biggest problem on this page is the use of the Indian flag three times for Hindi, Gujarati and Punjabi. With the former, it’s worth noting that there are actually over double the amount of Punjabi speakers in Pakistan (60 million speakers) than in India (27 millon speakers).

Saudi Arabia’s flag has been chosen for Arabic on this page, yet on the homepage the flag of the Arab League has been used.

Arab League
Arab League
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia

Arab League or Saudi flag — is either an appropriate representation of the Arabic language?

Consistency aside, obviously there’s been some trepidation here about how to represent the Arab language with a flag. More reason, of course, to avoid using any flag for language representation.

A final gripe: the homepage flags, for their inherent flaws, do look rather nice. However, the quality of the flags on the landing page is simply awful (not to mention the poor legibility of the native language names). Give flags some respect and please save them with an appropriate level of quality!