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I'm looking at potentially designing a site which will have 'mirrors' in multiple sites around the world. I am experimenting with the best method to help users change both their country and language of the site. (I don't want to combine the two, as they may wish to view the Italian site in an English language, or change the language of the UK site from English to Spanish, for example). Therefore I would like to have 2 seperate selectors: one for Country and one for Language. The Country selector is the area I am ideally looking for guidance on.

Of the available options the following are the most likely (although any other suggestions are welcome).

1.Choosing country from Dropdown: straightforward to implement and can sort countries alphabetically, but this will suffer hugely from standard dropdown issues (lots of content - all countries in the world!- in a long list is hard to navigate and use).

2.Choosing a country from a Map: More intuitive, but selecting small areas of the map would be tricky (how do you pinpoint Ecuador exactly on a global map?) This would require a list of countries alphabetically too, which therefore takes up a lot of screen space.

3.Free Text entry field. I have not seen this approach on country selection before, presumable because of the difficulties in interpreting user entries efficiently.

Has anyone else had this issue before, and if so, which method of Country selection was found to be preferable to users?

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7 Answers

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The best interface is no interface at all!

Have your site detect visitors' counties by their IP address. You can do this to 99.5% accuracy for free.

Pete

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While this is certainly a decision I would like to make, it doesn't allow for the option to change country / language. You're just locking them into the choice you have determined for them. I would like to use a combination of auto-detection, but with the option to change the country / language at a different time if needed. – Jon W May 17 at 7:47
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 you can still offer them a dropdown to change the automated detection. (The dropdown is ok, it will be rarely used - 0.5% :) ) – Adrian May 17 at 11:34
Additionally you can select the browser language to determine the language for multilingual countries (like switzerland). For the case that somebody wants to choose another country or language I'd go with Adrian's suggestion and use dropdowns (I guess it's more than 0.5% because sometimes you don't want to use the country you're at). Also i would set a cookie if somebody changes the language or the country. – Phil May 28 at 18:25
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If you don't need to have a small selector on every page, than maybe you can do something like this?

http://www.apple.com/choose-your-country/

Anyway, this layout can be on a rather small div which appears in the new layer above the page when a small button (or link) is pressed.

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Yes, I am happy to take the user to a seperate selection page or modal panel when selecting a 'Change Country' icon. Apple's approach isn't a bad idea, provided we could change the order of the countries so that it is still alphabetic when presented in different languages. It's not as intuitive as a map, but it does get around the problem of having to select small areas on a little map diagram. – Jon W May 14 at 15:36
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For international Websites I always propose the zero-click interface (as Pete has described). The browser's accepted language and IP address may result in a top 5 list of countries which can be at the head of an otherwise lenghty country selection page.

It is good practice to list each country/language in English as well as their native language, e.g "German/Deutsch" or "Japanese/日本語" (beware to use UTF-8 on your Web pages). If it is clear that the original page is in English, I would expect the English alphabetical order. For countries like Switzerland I would add all possible pairs (Schweiz/Deutsch, Suisse/Francais, Svizzera/Italiano).

Also be careful about using good maps: they can be politically tricky... esp. for Eastern Europe, China, or other areas. Which source do you want to use? When sober I usually know where I am and don't need a world map to find my home country, but I am happy to use them to find countries of which I am more ignorant.

From my observations users choose their native language or country and stick with their choice. They may switch to the primary language/country if they look for further or missing information. But they usually don't treasure hunt in other languages. However, that also depends on the content: Web analytics will show you how frequent users switch languages.

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I agree with the map issues - certain countries may not take kindly to being shown so close to others. It's just a choice between a visual selection (map) versus a purely textual one (country list). A map would (in most cases) provide quick access to the desired location, rather than trawling through a long textual list of countries. However, I will not be going with the map idea, partly because of the issues you outlined, but also from an actual request from the client - which is probably more important! ;-) – Jon W May 17 at 7:53
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Checkout www.3M.com. They do a nice job incorporating a lot of the methods described here. They show a list of countries by major regions. However, they also high-lite the country found based on the users IP address.

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That is a nice find, thanks! It's quite a nice approach really. Perhaps if it chose that selection by default without the need to confirm, and it just displayed this pre-highlighted selection page if you decided to change country, that'd be the ideal mix. – Jon W May 28 at 15:28
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Free text entry fields are difficult as there are so many variations of country names (e.g. Great Britain, United Kingdom, UK, GB, England etc as well as language options Germany/Deutchland or Hungary/Magyar), then of course there are the spelling mistakes.

But it has been used effectively on many travel sites. Have a look of at Trip Advisor (http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk) that allows you to enter any CITY in the world. Using Ajax Live Search functionality could recognise all the different country names and at the same time handle errors in spelling.

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You could try first to narrow by the continent, then provide a list of countries for that continent. Dropdowns can be hard to navigate with big chunks of data, but splitting them up can make it faster.

Another option is to try and identify the users country then offer an option to select another. A good example of this is www.aircanada.com

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1 
 Helping to 'funnel' them down to their desired country by selecting a Continent first isn't a bad shout, although the tradeoff here is in the amount of clicks needed to get to the required destination. I'd look to ideally detect their country initially, and store it as a cookie for whenever the return, so the process shouldn't need to be repeated by the same user very often. – Jon W May 14 at 16:04
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I don't think I have ever seen anyone have a problem with a country drop-down list. Do you not know where most of your audience comes from? You could just include the countries the majority of your audience came from if you knew that.

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I'm afraid that wouldn't really be ideal in this case, as there is a good chance this site would be used as a template worldwide, so choosing only a few countries for the list would not really fit with the situation. – Jon W May 14 at 15:32

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