I am frequently asked to analyze what a development group can do to improve the interface for its software application. The first thing I usually ask is, “Who are you designing for?”

Does your application have a clearly defined user profile? Demographic characteristics to consider in designing a user interface include age, nationality and language, level of technical skill, and content expertise. If you’ve identified these accurately and identified the tasks the user will perform, you have a good chance of success with your software product.

But sometimes, developers have drawn only a partial picture of the user. If the user profile is too narrowly drawn, you can miss part of your market — putting your product at a disadvantage. Moreover, markets change. Sometimes target audiences change. So it’s essential to continually refresh your user profile by periodically reexamining who exactly can, should or could use your application.

Let’s take a look at two demographics that can increase the audience for your application: age range and language.

Can You Read This? The Bottom Line on Visual Usability

A colleague recently approached me with a beta version of his company’s software product, looking for input on how he could improve it. The product, which was a business-to-business software application, was the result of considerable thought and effort, and it had some compelling functionality to monitor and visualize different kinds of business activity. However, the user interface had a number of issues, the most concerning of which was the size of some of the screen elements. Main navigational buttons were extremely small and close together, and the fonts were small and hard to read.

I suggested a number of enhancements he could make short-term. I was relieved to see later that he had taken my advice and enlarged the sizes of the buttons considerably. With a few small changes, he had made his application more usable and expanded his target base of people who could easily use it.

I’m not advocating that all applications have huge buttons and fonts, but as my generation of boomers age, I find myself increasingly aware of the barriers presented by overly small text or visual elements.

Older users aren’t a market that can be ignored — the percentage of older Americans (50+) is currently growing — in the U.S. as well as abroad. As the current boomer generation ages (the “Silver Tsunami” phenomenon), they are making demands on the marketplace for products oriented toward their needs. Keep in mind, an older population of people is also an older population of software users.

If you want to maximize the investment in your software development effort, it’s a good idea to analyze the total range of users — not just the primary ones. This is not to say that all applications must be designed for the lowest common denominator (such as every member of the public, including non-PC literate folks), but keep age range in mind during design.

And building in universal access features early on in application development efforts will maximize your investment by saving you money on later redesign efforts — change is more expensive than planning.

Web Standards

For Web-applications, the standards from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) are a good starting point to make content accessible to older users, many of whom require some level of visual flexibility in the design. Web developers can use the following techniques to ensure a range of users can easily use their Web-based applications:

• Use universal fonts, which will scale up or down in a browser
• Use flexible column widths, to best accommodate sizable fonts
• Because many users (of all ages) are colorblind, don’t rely on color to convey meaning within your application.

When you test your application prior to release, be sure to include a range of ages and types of users, including a good percentage of middle-aged or older users. If you only test with young users, you’ll miss some critical usability issues.

For traditional software applications, accommodating viewing preferences may mean adding “zoom” capabilities, type size controls or a preference setup to let users view your application at the size comfortable for them.

For more information about universal access, see the World Wide Web Consortium recommendations at www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/

¿Habla Español?

Another great way to expand the market for your application is to build in multi-lingual support. This may mean expanding your markets to other countries, but in some cases you also can service foreign-language users in the U.S. An example of an online application where this makes sound business sense is online banking. Banking applications can mirror the functioning of ATMs by letting a user first choose a language, thus increasing their comfort level in making a financial transaction.

Your choice of language(s) to expand your market will, of course, depend on your application. A logical choice for U.S.-based companies is Spanish. Consider these facts:

• The U.S. has the fifth largest Hispanic population in the world, with 30 million Spanish speakers nationwide.
• Worldwide, there are as many Spanish-only speakers as there are English-only speaking people: 322 million each.
• Spanish is the fourth largest language in the Internet community (behind English, Japanese, and German).

Whatever your language choice is, there are several user interface design issues to keep in mind when transforming a single-language application into a multi-lingual one:

Format

Screen design must accommodate variable lengths of text of different languages (translations are also generally longer than the original text).

Screens or pages need to accommodate text in different character sets and display formats. Text or character sets may run left-to-right (European languages), right-to-left (Hebrew and Arabic languages), top-to-bottom (East Asian), and various combinations of each.

Localization

If the application is for foreign markets, application content such as colloquial phrases or jargon, contact information, and other information must be checked for relevance and appropriateness to the local market. Additionally, any legal content (copyright regulations, privacy information and the like) should be provided by a lawyer or your organization’s legal department because of variations in international regulations.

Other interface elements that will need localization include:

• Time, date and currency formats
• Address formats (Postal code instead of ZIP, etc.)
• Keyboard shortcut variations (which vary by language)
• Culturally-specific variations (such as icons or use of color)

Design Process

Running multiple language versions will change your process. It’s beyond the scope of this column to discuss approaches to multi-lingual development techniques, and there are many good reference books on the topic. But the design process also will require additional levels of planning, documentation and testing, and invariably the inclusion of one or more translators throughout the process and at every update, to help test.

One good general resource for multi-lingual software development is Project Open Web site on localization: www.project-open.com/whitepapers/localization/

Consider the Benefits

Is it worth the expense of redesigning an application for an expanded user base? That’s a business call. The markets are there. Enabling applications for older users or for non-English language speakers are just two of the ways in which the markets for your application can be increased — perhaps exponentially.

Meryl Enerson is president and founder of Enervision Media, specialists in user-focused research and design. Enervision has helped software firms as well as Fortune 1000 companies design or improve the interface of consumer, business-to-business and enterprise applications for a variety of users. She can be reached at meryl@enervisionmedia.com.