Website #FAILs.
Lately I’ve noticed a lot of websites make crazy assumptions about my location. I was thinking it was geolocation gone wrong, but it appears that in general they are doing something completely illogical: they are using my language preference list to guess where I am.
This amounts to assuming that all French speaking people are in France, that all English speaking people are in England and so on.
What does RFC 2616 have to say about this?
14.4 Accept-Language
The Accept-Language request-header field is similar to Accept, but
restricts the set of natural languages that are preferred as a
response to the request. Language tags are defined in section 3.10.
…
Nothing there about location? This is a classic assumption / layer violation in a design.
The worst offenders here are, by in large, financial institutions. When I visit ING Direct, they redirect me immediately to the Canadian login screen. Trouble is — I don’t have a Canadian account. Worse — there is no button to override their error the button to fix the problem is buried and two layers deep. Outsmarted by not too clever web developers.
Ouch. That hurts.
Wonder what would happen if I visited with a language preference set to en_DE or en_FR?
5 comments
TerryG says:
2009.11.18 at 08:25 (UTC -7 )
Are you sure it’s the language preference they’re keying off? I had always assumed it was being done of the IP address. (eg. http://www.ip2location.com/) If they really are guessing location from language, that really is a complete non sequitor.
Alan says:
2009.11.18 at 09:27 (UTC -7 )
I double checked and they are using language. I should likely send them a bug report.
even if they used geolocation there should be a button for overriding the guess. People travel. Fun stuff.
TerryG says:
2009.11.18 at 10:20 (UTC -7 )
Or switch banks. Any organization which struggles with such a simple idea may or may not be a good place to keep your money.
Loquitus says:
2009.11.29 at 18:20 (UTC -7 )
Amazing… I find that too — US sites in particular, making falser assumptions about where you are. I am in Canada and in fact need to use the US interface for many sites, but it is simply not possible to do so with a Canadian IP address, unless you proxy it or spoof it.
Arunas Salkauskas says:
2010.07.18 at 09:27 (UTC -7 )
We dealt with this over 10 years ago. Making a website for a Czech customer, with multiple languages (Czech, German, English). I suggested we could use some locale information to sort it out automatically.
My Czech partner was adamant that we shouldn’t do this because most people in the Czech republic apparently used US English versions of Internet Explorer.
A couple years later, I got a taste of why a language override button is mandatory first-hand when trying to log into my own Squirrel Mail server from an airport lounge in Frankfurt. Not only did I have to figure out how to type my password on a German keyboard, but I had to navigate a UI that had completely switched languages with no recourse to change.
It’s a classic case of meeting market demand: for 95% or more of the people such a behaviour wouldn’t even be noticed, it would be just exactly what they expected and wanted. The French speakers get the French website, etc. For the programmers, it’s easy and seems like the obvious and correct way to use the data available.