Multi Lingual Filtering

Question

I am working on a multilingual content streaming website. By multilingual I mean we have multilingual content. The whole website is however in English.

And we have multiple categories (TV, Movies, News etc.)

We don't have all the languages in all of the categories. For ex: Content from Language A might be available in TV/Movies but not in News.

We wanted to remember the language preference of each user so that we don't show him content which are not from the his set of languages.

The present implementation just looks like a bunch of links, its not multi-select and we don't remember his choice either.

This is what we are thinking of doing :-

Multi Select look :-

We are going to display all the languages on each page so that the user has easy access to his selected languages. And also that the language bar looks constant throughout the website.

How should I make it obvious to the user that the some of the languages are not available in the present page ?

Answer 1

My first instinct would be to simply not show buttons for sections that don't have content available in that language.

If, however, you plan to update those sections some time in the short-to-medium term to have content in those languages, you could hint that to the user by showing the language button but dimmed or otherwise obviously disabled.

^{download bmml source – Wireframes created with Balsamiq Mockups}

RESPONSE: @MarutiBorker I think, in terms of UX, "consistency" in a language bar does not mean that it contains all of the same buttons, it means that you consistently show what's available. Showing buttons for languages that are not available, and thereby having to disable them, is arguably a much poorer user experience.

Answer 2

I like your idea of keeping the language bar consistent for all the pages, this shows that even if you don't have their desired language for one type of content, you might have it for another. You should just gray out the boxes for languages that are not available for a specific type of content.

Also, if you are going to save language preferences for a user, perhaps you should allow them to select a secondary language for when they are viewing content that is not available in their desired language or perhaps just default to "all".