User Preferences

1. Locale related

• Territory
• Date Format
• Time Format
• Number Format
• Timezone
• Currency
• Language

Many of them are about displaying data.

Why are these important?  If a packaged system or software service is targeted to the global market, you need to consider users coming from different regions.

2. Accessibility

• Need to Use Screen Reader ?
• Color Contrast?
• Large Font

We call these ADA compliance.  It is required for selling software or service to the governments. 

3. Notification Preference

How do you want to interact with the system?

What is the difference between globalization and localization?

I am talking about their meanings in the software business.

Identifying the language used in the software

The software you uses may be used by people using other language. A software may be designed to support multiple languages.

One scenario is that the software may be designed to support multiple languages with different versions. You install the version of the software available in a language. If you want to use the software in a different language, you need to install a different version.

A software may allow different user who install it to use a different language, but while you are installing, you need to specify which language you are using. A variation to this scenario is that you can switch the language you want to use even after installation. However, you can only use one language at a time.

Some software allows multiple users and each user can have a different language preference. These users may store their own data in different languages. The software can display different language based on user preference and store the data in different languages. An extreme of this scenario is that the data created by a user can be stored in a language but can be displayed to another user in different language.

In all the above cases, one of the common requirement is to allow the user to specify a language.

How does the language is identified? How does the user tell the system which language they are using?