UX and Localization in one of the Biggest European Bus Ticket App by Ferma Digital

The app we are currently working under is an online travel agency that sells so many tickets every day that you can fill more than 300 buses and 30 trains. It’s a ticket search and itinerary app. They have a very user-friendly web app, a partnership with Bookings, and quality customer service.

What are we doing there?

Our developers are doing A/B testing. Developed and continued to curate the localization feature. Now new attractions are shown to the user more accurately, by region.
How did the app team know it was time to localize the app? In a number of countries the app can offer to visit interesting places (tours, museums, parks), but it is not adapted for each city — in Paris a person receives several pages of offers, and in a provincial town — 0, despite the fact that interesting attractions can be very close. For the customers of the service this is, of course, a disadvantage.

UX in localization: why do you need it?

UX or «User experience» is in fact what determines the success or failure of an application. If the user finds something uncomfortable or incomprehensible, he will delete it. And then all your investment, days of writing and testing will be a waste of time.
As a rule, poor localization of an application looks like this:

1.  When translated, the text does not fit the layout (longer or shorter);
2. A lot of grammatical mistakes and the language from Google Translate of the tome of 2007. Users with a philological education will definitely                 not get it.
3. Fuck ups with the font size.

But there are more complicated problems. When visually everything looks ok: fonts, texts, layouts, but the obvious user request (»what can I visit in Munich»), is ignored. At a minimum, you need to include a lot of departments and teams. A team management system (e.g. Wrike, Azure Devops, Jira) can help with this, by the way. So, all these specialists have to add (or create, if you have not localization yet) a product, where the regional specifics (in our case — local attractions) will be put in separate blocks, that will be loaded by selecting one or another region/country.

What UX localization gives (technically):


What are the reputational and financial benefits?


1.The files you need for a locale are prepared in advance, they are easy to track, upgrade and create new ones for other locales.
2.When the task is to add a new localization, you just need to load the data for the region/country and add it to the application.
3. the initial size of the application is smaller with this approach.
4. If you find bugs during localization testing, they are related to the localization, not to the application itself.
 
In simple words: the customer does not use what he is uncomfortable with. This is easily traced back to the language localization of the product: according to a CSA study, 75% of respondents said that when choosing between two similar products, they would choose the one available in their native language. And a report from Applead shows that localizing the application page on Google Play and the AppStore increases conversion to installation by 25-30%.
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