A friend tweeted: How to book a flight from Jakarta to Bali if the airline’s web page is in Bahasa?
My quick reply was to “Use #Google #Chrome and see if it can translate the page.”
However, curiosity got the better of me and I just had to try it myself. Unfortunately, although chrome was able to translate some items, there were some fields that were left of as Indonesian. Take a quick peak at the screenshot below or visit Merpati’s site yourself, and let me know what you would have done with this site.
Click to zoom
After a more focused look, that’s when I noticed the flags on the top right. I clicked on the British flag and voila, the English version of the page was displayed.
So what went wrong here? Here are some things I think that the tester should have noticed and asked:
- When in Bahasa mode, should the text really be “Bahasa” or should it say “Language”? Because if you understood Bahasa, you would not need to know what that field/link is all about anyway
- Which leads me to a second point, the text “Bahasa” had the same look as a link, so it was easily dismissed as a link (and useless to the translation period at hand) instead of a label
Of course one can argue that the flags might have been a dead giveaway. However, at first glance it did not stand out. Compare it to this Japanese site, and see how much easier it was to spot what needs to be done. I would argue that this may be a better way to go about it.
Update:
While checking this note, I decided to visit the site again and noticed some more issues:
- Web Check in link does NOT work
- Menu have mismatched URL names (I know this is confusing so I’ll give samples
- Menu > Promotion > Hot Deals point to http://www.merpati.co.id/content/promo_deal
- Menu > Promotion > Promo Deals point to http://www.merpati.co.id/en/content/hot_deal
Yes, trivial but fixes are too simple (an assumption) to ignore.