This section discusses what to consider when designing products and applications for different markets.

When designing for a global audience, consider the cultural differences of your target nations and markets right from the start of your product design. Insufficient knowledge of cultural differences may be seen as offensive, which in return can lead to a profit loss or worse. In some cases, proper support for native language and even keyboard conventions is mandated by law.

Consider, for example, the means of input. The touch screen is an adaptable input device; For example, for Chinese language, handwriting recognition enables more efficient text input than typing in pinyin on a keypad.

Figure 1. Input language is a major cultural aspect in usability design.

Take time to learn about cultural differences of your target markets, and note that cultural differences are not only focused on preferences in graphics and vocabulary. While people may approach logical usability problems and goal-oriented tasks in much the same way throughout the world, core interactions such as text input or touchscreen swipes can be used and understood very differently.

When designing for culturally diverse user groups, consider the following development process steps:

• Identify the target cultures, and acknowledge their special characteristics.

• Design and develop a global model that takes localised designs into account.

• Design for alternative reading orders of text, to facilitate localisation and internationalisation.

• Bring in a culture-specific interface designer to revise the design.

• Conduct usability tests of culturally targeted versions with representatives of that culture.

Tools designed to help you optimise your applications are already available. Nokia supports the optimisation of web design by providing Nokia Mobile Web Templates that are W3C compliant. This means that they will work on almost any platform. What is best about the templates is that the developer is spared from unnecessary customisation due to multiple target platforms: the application is created and deployed only once, and voilà, it works on almost any device in the same product range.

Figure 2. A selection of Nokia Mobile Web Template components available on Nokia Developer

These templates are perfect for creative developers, as they can be easily customised. Developers are able to mix and match these components to create the perfect layout for a mobile website.

Another supporting asset that Nokia Developer provides is the Guarana UI component library for Nokia WRT. Nokia WRT is a development and delivery platform that allows the creation of applications (widgets) based on standard web technologies, such as HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and AJAX. The Nokia WRT Framework intends to offer developers a set of common components to create and deploy widgets in a friendly way.