I’ve just read the article Creating a great user experience for the whole world by Tammy Gur (which I found via the UX Australia Conference blog) and took a few notes:

This article provides an overview of focus areas of the design process that were used during the BBC World Service’s recent re-designs of the BBC Persian and BBC Brasil web sites. The design process also considered the upcoming 2009 re-launches for their other sites across 33 languages. The key considerations were:

• The script - understanding the user requirements and expectations in the presentation of text in their language such as flow, spacing, and size.
• Editorial design - understanding the user expectations on content layout and construction while providing flexibility to handle the variety of content.
• Navigation - ensuring that the navigation mechanism is ordered and easy to use for the language content.
• Interaction design - user, survey, statistical and competitor research to understand the target markets acceptance of certain interaction methods.

The solution involved finding common elements and creating a “repository of building blocks” allowing them to be arranged in specific ways for each language service.

An interesting part of the article for me is the “Competitor analysis” diagram that displays a way of breaking down content from competitor sites in to the most simple blocks for comparison, learning and decision making.