 Or we'll give everyone a couple more seconds to see if anyone else is joining and then we'll probably kick it off That's a tweet, you know grab an extra five people from the hallway fill it in Take a picture share that on Twitter with your other co-workers or anything like that Or if you're in China by do a scene something like share it out Yeah, and I think with that we'd like to probably start and share a little bit of our experience for Building websites in the Asian market We'd like to kick off by introducing ourselves. Hi everyone. My name is Adriana. I'm a senior project manager at FFW I've been working with Drupal for about seven years or seven plus years now and I've been doing project management for about eight years or so And I'm Andrew Wilden director of strategy and solution architecture at FFW. I Have been doing Drupal since it was not fun to say you were doing Drupal if anyone remembers the era of Drupal 4 and no install screen you feel my pain but You know Over the last couple of years as we've grown we've actually noticed quite a bit of change in how Sites, you know evolve, you know, what are the requirements for building something? But most interesting is let's just say look at a regular map of the world, right? This is our usual. Here's our offices Ever were located If you resize and think about the world in terms of internet usage In 2011 the world looked quite different Right basically just resizing the entire map based on a number of internet users Pretty much you see a fairly heavy focus on You know East Asia in particular which makes sense given it is home to some four billion plus people But interestingly if you actually look at just growth in the last ten years Internet adoption throughout the region has doubled So this map is already massively out of dates and should be much bigger bubbles on like the right side of it As we've gone through and seen kind of the general trends One interesting complexity that's come up in a lot of the larger platform builds. We do is it's not simply enough to Translate content anymore Right back in Drupal 7. It was a great thing that you could install a couple modules. Your content was quasi multilingual We don't need to get into how hacky multilingual was in D7, but it was a thing Drupal 8 we ended up adopting multilingual and core that In some ways was just you know market demand, right? There was quite a lot of work being invested from the community just to get multilingual up and running But more generally speaking it actually proceeded a lot of trends that came a few years later That web experiences worldwide needed to be much more fine-tuned and local to the audience as they served As we've gone through and done, you know over the last few years going from two to three sites That had to focus on East Asia in particular Now we're up to you know 2030 and almost any major platform build This is a consideration that comes up and the question always occurs What exactly do you do differently? Is there anything fundamentally unique about doing, you know a site that's going to be based out of East Asia does it being in China make different than doing a site for Japan or Korea and While this could be a five-minute talk of make sure to check and make that it's localized Or a four-hour talk of every nuance We've just got you know three key points want to go over the next 20 minutes Just really easy takeaways for next time you have a project focusing on East Asia what you can focus on to start from So number one Just taken to account the context in what you're building if I'm being really general This is technically the Asian market, which is why our title of the presentation is a little misleading When you're dealing with over half the planet, there's not any one single market you can actually design for If we even get into some more detail, right? we're talking 48 countries over 2,300 languages and Every region is actually quite unique Even just the typical site you're doing for one country you can be encountering, you know five ten twenty different personas So trying to group all of this at the top level is next to impossible But still taking into account You know some general trends of how much scale we're looking at You know there can be quite a lot of gap from region to region so start there So for the exercises of what you know, we're gonna be talking through in more detail We're just gonna focus it down to China Japan Korea Vietnam, right? So going down from four some a billion to 1.6 Yeah, and when we're talking about all of these countries That's great, and there are a lot of things to cover, but at the end of the day We are building products for humans and at the core how we do things and how we act Realize a lot on the culture that we have So we want to take a step back and discuss a little bit about that which is not Necessarily related to technology first, but it is going to decide how you build technology for humans And how your products are actually going to be built. So there's a bunch researcher that spent a lot of time doing data analysis and how different cultures and countries perceive six key differentiations between countries and cultures at their core So we wanted to highlight those because they would be important in driving some of the decisions that you make for how you Position your product how you build your product and how you build these are experience around it so power distance is something very important because It helps understand how society perceived different hierarchy levels and how everything is constructed at the society level And what drives some of their decisions? Individualism is another key point how feminine or masculine the society is and how they build a culture of collaboration How Happy they are with ambiguity and uncertainty or are they scared about it that may Impact a lot how you do commerce or how they take some other decisions in regards to money and Other things going on with that and how they plan for the future for the long-term vision that they have and how Indulgent they are with different errors or mistakes or Returns that may they may need to make and other shipments that go with that So we want to emphasize one thing that this describes more the cultural Aspect of this and that it applies to broader audiences. It doesn't apply to individual people so it's important to keep that in mind and We did a very quick test There's a website where you can compare different countries in regards to these six key elements at the cultural level and Took here a comparison of China France and the United States so you can see how all of these countries Compared to one another and if you are a global brand you may want to position Yourselves and to have a present and all of these very different markets So it's important to understand that how you do that is going to be driven by some of these cultural Differences that you have which are at the core level of a nation So that drives us Into a conversation point about experience and you may ask yourselves How exactly some of those key elements could impact? What you design on a website or what or how you do the design in a product and we wanted to highlight a couple of Aspects and elements that we thought about so one of them is logos Some countries may want to have an emphasis on how big the logo is and how preeminent Something is when you go on a website Another important point could be the usage of colors There may be Countries or cultures where you need to have a very high contrast between the colors or there may be Situations when you need to have a very subtle Complementary look to them the content strategy is also going to be very important because how you deliver the messages and The perception that your visitors have about it is going to Drive the elements on the page and how everything is built around that some people or The message delivered in some of the areas needs to be short Whereas in other areas it needs to be very long and explicative so that it builds more trust and more Connection with the brand another thing is called to actions which are very important and how you drive your business and how you Figure out that you have a conversion or other you know actions to take regarding that Should they be subtle on the pages? Should they be very preeminent on the pages? Those are important details that are going to be very different from one country to another Even though we look at the Asian market as a whole Right and what's interesting is this is nothing new for most of us, right? Just quite a quick survey from the audience how many people here are You know either in a development agency or freelance doing you know Drupal raise of hands How many people are in you know larger-scale multinational business? Okay, so overlap nice little Venn diagram there The idea that your audiences actually understand the visual cues differently That can change from persona to persona on any given websites. It becomes a lot trickier when we're dealing with let's say Four or five different regions that each have their own set of stakeholders on some recent projects We've encountered this has actually become a bit of a sticking point, right? Who makes the ultimate decision? Are we looking at you know in market decision of you know How the customers are interacting with the product? Are we looking at executive stakeholders? Who may be in one region or another but are trying to enforce in a some sense of brand compliance? One way to walk back from that is actually to simply give a framework like this out It's like okay, let's actually prioritize piece by piece how we want to make a decision, right? What are areas where local market context may matter more than you know executive sign-off or more than you know Even some certain elements of brand compliance where the brand was not originally suited to extend to that direction one interesting example where this actually can work in reverse is Previous to coming back to the US and coming to FFW. I was working in open-source adoption for the Chinese government so This is a former life of mine Chinese Academy of Sciences in Kunming far Southwest China over by Tibet Thailand Vietnam When I had first joined they had solely a Chinese website It was very much geared around What was translated as you know like public science outreach Right the goal was to showcase the government's work in the area promoting biodiversity genomics research HIV AIDS research and you know new drug testing Consequently they handed me you know just you know here's the website. We need to make something in English and The first conversation was why is the logo so big? The response was the logo is big because it's important That should be the first thing that someone sees that had gone through rounds and rounds of sign-off between Beijing and the local Institute that I worked at And they their interesting question that I posed them was so where do someone actually find what the research is? That apparently was not a key factor They figured the scientific audience abroad would be more likely to actually download the paper from a peer review journal So it didn't really matter. It was on the website Going through this, you know two-year UX process with them on making an English site We took all the original Chinese content, but walked through the idea that Logo and affiliation matters much more to just showcase and give some very subtle context to the content But the content is actually far more impactful So we ended up with a much more tiled layout where the research is very prominently featured right within two or three clicks You can get to you know the major funding all the major projects and Just kind of a little more detail right they had a huge recruitment drive How do we get people who are from abroad to come and join right in particular? They were targeting researchers from Africa other East Asian countries and Southeast Asia as well So very simple join us give them a very prominent call to action that anyone can see and understand We talked about folding this back in to the original Chinese site and the response was no No, the current site is great. It meets all functional needs. The logo is very big There's dedicated links off to more content that are elsewhere, but the main focus needs to stay here and That actually worked really well Aside from it looking a little bit dated. This was a very successful web project in the terms of uptake of Usage internationally was quite high Even usage within mainland China have gone up substantially once we'd reshape some of the content and just balanced out the colors and tone a little bit And really this kind of led when Adriana we're talking about this to this presentation That it's a who are you building for right a scientific audience out of Southwestern China is very different than Global multinational company out of the US or Europe having a separate office set up in China So Just three quick things when you're thinking about who you're building for right just take some time to know the audience Actually go through those very basic UX exercises of who it is this for Check out, you know any trends in this case for China rights the average age for someone using by do is a search engine is 25 if we're looking by comparison the average age of a search engine user in North America is You know an entire 10 years in advance of that in Europe even higher And funny enough this actually bears out quite a bit in terms of the interaction patterns You know average Researchers or sorry searchers excuse me on mobile and body will spend up to 55 seconds on the page before deciding where to go next I Actually was a little confused when I read this research that in the US. It's 8 to 10 seconds But try spending a minute on a Google search result screen. It feels painfully long If you haven't found something within that first, you know 10 to 20 seconds, it's the interaction just doesn't make a lot of sense And then even this is blood over I looked at a colleague of mine who works over at Muji large e-commerce brand out of Japan The sites between you know Japan Korea and China look very similar But in reality the content is radically shifted from site to site the call to actions are quite different Some products are given lists in one region. They're given tiles in another At the end of the day even just saying this is the East Asian brand for Muji doesn't make a lot of sense because market to market the variations are quite stark and Actually, there's a great story behind why differences can be so stark Adriana. Go ahead To tell the funny story about it last week in New York. I was doing a presentation about building multi-platform for one of our clients and We had a multi-site installation targeting various Countries in Asia and it was pointed to us that one of the countries that we were targeting Didn't have a language switcher although all of the other websites from the area had it so they asked us why is that and the answer to that would be because Based on our usability tested testing and based on the local market needs This was actually a feature It was intended to be like that because we were trying to serve the local market and we want to make a very important point here because Even after you do all of your research And you do the mock-ups you do the prototype of having something to be rolled out on the market before you actually take a step and start doing the implementation and Rolling out everything that you have it's important to do the usability testing get a Target group of users that represents your key personas that are going to interact on the website in the future and Test with them how everything is perceived. How do they interact with all the elements? Do they understand the function and the meaning behind all of them? Do they feel comfortable with it? Are they going to get back on your website or on your product or on your app to do that? It really is going to provide you very valuable feedback in regards to the future success of your platform so we wanted to make that key point because If you do this at the early stages, it's going to save up a lot of time in the future and a lot of money In some it actually is a feature not a bug. I always look forward to when I can say that because it's not often enough But in the case Adriana was speaking about Right in Japan. It was very important for like this particular platform to look like a fully native Japanese company right it couldn't appear to be a multinational and Every little element of any other language was scrubbed out. All the regionalization was removed There was no way to access like the higher brand And funny enough this plays out in a lot of you know, large brand house companies, right? How often do you want that top-level brand exposed? Do we all really want to know that the same 10 companies own everything we buy? Generally no And I know we've only got you know a couple minutes left But we do want to keep it on some key pieces of like the tech stack just because it's Drupal con So Yeah, so there's also a couple of important Aspects to think about when targeting the Asian market and one of them is of course hosting So you may want to have a decision of hosting in the area or not. It's not exactly necessary depending on The type of business that you're doing so in some cases you have may have Legal compliances that you need to follow. It's very important to do your research to actually understand if that is a requirement Or if that is a preference And then if you have a platform of choice for hosting, you know, maybe you want to use that for the future Even if you don't host in a specific country We always recommend to use a CDN just to make sure that everything is going to be served fast and You know very nicely for everyone in different countries Ideally, you may want to choose a CDN service that has as many global points as possible Especially in the areas where you are targeting to get more visitors from and that will ensure a better performance as always We recommend our clients to do performance testing before launching their products that will help understand what the numbers are going to look like once you go live and Make sure that when you do this testing you use Tools that allow you to test from that country specifically because the data is going to reflect a more accurate situation right and kind of a Interesting side point there is when we do, you know load and performance testing in the US, right? We don't just say oh, we're gonna test in Omaha We usually try, you know, what is New York going to load like? What is San Francisco going to load like? You don't get a much better view of the country I've seen countless times where I get a load testing report on a site and the stakeholders are wondering Well, why is it feel slow? Well, you're testing in a city that's a solid 2,000 miles away I'm sure the internet and access point there is fantastic, but there's a bit of lag Considering that you are in some place quite distant So when you're choosing a CDN not all CDNs are made equally go through and actually double check What is your core? You know geographic persona, right? Are you looking at people in center of a country coasts? You know farther inland and also do you need to actually do some optimization work to make sure those load speeds are accurate to where you're trying to serve? Simply just going through that usually can result in you know picking a better CDN and you know 50 60% performance increase One thing we couldn't build into this presentation because of time is that nice Study that keeps coming out that you lose what 15% of visitors for every 900 milliseconds that you don't load faster When this looks at you know global scale, it's a little bit different Certain regions expect four to five seconds other areas, you know less than one But that's a whole separate presentation that we can get into on another day The other point we would like to discuss about is domains again depending on the business nature And what you're trying to achieve you may want to use a more global domain Or you may want to use a local one Probably that's going to have an impact on the SEO in some cases as well because when you're targeting local markets That is going to be a key indicator in how you show up in results So keep that in mind if that is an important thing for you And we want to take a moment to also discuss a little bit about the great firewall and some of the details That would be important to mention for that If you want to do things in china, there's a couple of aspects you should be aware of if you want to host there You will need an icp license which is usually requiring a lot of paperwork and a business entity that you need to have in china So that is something that you definitely need to be aware of If you go to any hosting providers there, they will not grant you hosting without having an icp license And then you have to include that information To be present on your website to display that you have the authority to actually be present on the market Now if you do not want to host in china, it doesn't necessarily mean that you cannot host anywhere else And that your website is not going to be accessible from china It's just a difference in how you target the local market and how everything is Considered from that perspective And more generalized I would say to always double check with vehicle compliance for any region that you're actually trying to launch something in Because there can be a lot of things that are either suggestions versus requirements depending on where you're at Even getting into small things like you know your top level domains Is dot edu different than dot edu dot cn is that different than dot cn? What are the different factors to consider and even applying for one of those? This can take weeks and weeks or months to resolve. So definitely probably plan out relatively early on what your goal is But do not leave that to the end because a lot of lovely projects I've seen over the years, especially when I was working in china Ended up getting launched and then not launched because someone forgot to do some paperwork a few months ago And another quick comment on the slide before Just before we wrap up Check check the documentation and the legal paperwork that you need to actually buy domains in different countries you may need to follow different regulations for that too and Based on our experience if you use an international or the cn domain For a site that is hosted outside of china You may want to double check that your dns records Are applying for the inland china as well as outside of china because otherwise your website might not be Accessed by various people unless they use a vpn And I should kind of last on an axis there is make sure that for whatever region you're in the appropriate tools can be logging the activity and be accessible Right. This would be a whole separate presentation on its own But you know go through make sure if you're trying to track all of your like top level business goals and google analytics That they actually flow and that you don't need an alternative Same for you know paid search organic search. Make sure you're targeting the appropriate engines that are accessible in region Yeah, and the other thing we want to Mention here is also when using different social media sharing functionalities or Ways to present media on the website. You need to adapt the local market as well because The chinese audience may not have access to youtube or vmail or tools like that So you may want to use tools that are accessible in their countries things like Tencent videos yoko or some other platforms that are available there For social tools. They use a lot of wechat And there's a lot of things integrated there So you want to make sure that you tailor the experience of your platform to the local audience from the area that you're targeting And with that we have now summed up the four hour exercise of launching in east asia into 20 minutes any questions Come to the mic just with this recording. Thank you Thanks, my organization is launching a website for japan and in my research in Constructing the paths or the urls. I was got conflicting information about using You know japanese characters In paths or you know mandarin characters in the chinese site So you have any best practices that you know So one kind of general note is back to like, you know where you're targeting traffic Baidu actually ranks chinese character strings heavier than you know transliteration strings So for that particular market because it has its own search engine that can be a much larger factor But in terms of japan atriana Based on our experience we use mostly transliterate functionality Because that has been easier to work with Yeah, and also make sure that if you're going to do that you need to have all the paths So you're entering in the right unicode and nothing's getting corrupted and you're getting you know long long strings that don't actually render But i'd say like the question of using a different language set outside of like the latin character group It's most important if you're doing a site within china That you want to try ranking within baidu I think we have time for looks like one more question question We chat china Being told that There's a lot of emphasis on using that and integrating with it. Well, do you have any recommendations about how to Bring your business bring your business into we chat mean not knowing much about it yet, but uh Yeah, um, so actually huge ink does an incredible guide to a day in the life of a You know chinese mobile user that actually walks you through from the time you wake up to the time you go to sleep Everything you use we chat for It's a great, you know, three to four page guide. So, you know pretty advertising for huge Um But generally speaking we chat is kind of like the app to end all apps, right everything kind of integrates to it Depending on if you want to do commerce. That's a very different type of integration than if you're trying to build more social traffic Or if you're trying to integrate to another related service that already has like a core we chat function built in Um building micro apps within we chat is a whole exercise into itself It's very rarely worth the effort. Um, but we've played around with it a few times Yeah, and it's really you want to make sure that your organization has a strategy for how to do that as well Because actually building out the strategy is going to take more time than implementing it So make sure everyone is aligned regarding that Right, and I think on a previous case we'd encounter the idea that you know We chat since it acts out like facebook in some ways is Advertising within people who already know about you Versus trying to push traffic out and garner that Um Well, I know we're out of time. So thank you everyone. Uh, feel free to come grab us if you have any additional questions Um, we want to remind you to join the contributions You have the schedule here for when they will be happening and where Uh, and please provide feedback on how we did on the presentation and everything else you are experiencing here Thank you. Thanks everyone I'm on my car