Why Non-Native Content Designers Improve Global UX
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A few years ago, I was in a design review at a fintech company, polishing the expense management flows. It was a routine session where we reviewed the logic behind content and design decisions.
While looking over the statuses for submitted expenses, I noticed a label saying ‘In approval’. I paused, re-read it again, and asked myself:
“Where is it? Are the results in? Where can I find them? Are they sending me to the app section called “Approval”?”
This tiny label made me question what was happening with my money, and this feeling of uncertainty was quite anxiety-inducing.
My team, all native English speakers, did not flinch, even for a second, and moved forward to discuss other parts of the flow. I was the only non-native speaker in the room, and while the label made perfect sense to them, it still felt off to me.
After a quick discussion, we landed on ‘Pending approval’ — the simplest and widely recognised option internationally. More importantly, this wording makes it clear that there’s an approval process, and it hasn’t taken place yet. There’s no need to go anywhere to do it.
Some might call it nitpicking, but that was exactly the moment I realised how invisible — yet powerful — the non-native speaker’s perspective can be.
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Those same confusions often lead to:
- Higher rate of customer service queries,
- Lower adoption rates,
- Higher churn,
- Distrust and confusion.
As A Native Speaker, You Don’t See The Whole Picture
Global products are often designed with English as their primary language. This seems logical, but here’s the catch:
Roughly 75% of English-speaking users are not native speakers, which means 3 out of every 4 users.
Native speakers often write on instinct, which works much like autopilot. This can often lead to overconfidence in content that, in reality, is too culturally specific, vague, or complex. And that content may not be understood by 3 in 4 people who read it.
If your team shares the same native language, content clarity remains assumed by default rather than proven through pressure testing.
The price for that is the accessibility of your product. A study by National Library of Medicine found that US adults who had proficiency in English but did not use it as their primary language were significantly less likely to be insured, even when provided with the same level of service as everyone else.
In other words, they did not finish the process of securing a healthcare provider — a process that’s vital to their well-being, in part, due to unclear or inaccessible communication.
If people abandon the process of getting something as vital as healthcare insurance, it’s easy to imagine them dropping out during checkout, account setup, or app onboarding.
Non-native content designers, by contrast, do not write on autopilot. Because of their experience learning English, they’re much more likely to tune into nuances, complexity, and cultural exclusions that natives often overlook. That’s the key to designing for everyone rather than 1 in 4.
Non-native Content Designers Make Your UX Global
Spotting The Clutter And Cognitive Load Issues
When a non-native speaker has to pause, re-read something, or question the meaning of what’s written, they quickly identify it as a friction point in the user experience.
Why it’s important: Every extra second users have to spend understanding your content makes them more likely to abandon the task. This is a high price that companies pay for not prioritising clarity.
Cognitive load is not just about complex sentences but also about the speed. There’s plenty of research confirming that non-native speakers read more slowly than native speakers. This is especially important when you work on the visibility of system status — time-sensitive content that the user needs to scan and understand quickly.
One example you can experience firsthand is an ATM displaying a number of updates and instructions. Even when they’re quite similar, it still overwhelms you when you realise that you missed one, not being able to finish reading.
This kind of rapid-fire updates can increase frustration and the chances of errors.
Always Advocating For Plain English
They tend to review and rewrite things more often to find the easiest way to communicate the message. What a native speaker may consider clear enough might be dense or difficult for a non-native to understand.
Why it’s important: Simple content better scales across countries, languages, and cultures.
Catching Culture-specific Assumptions And References
When things do not make sense, non-native speakers challenge them. Besides the idioms and other obvious traps, native speakers tend to fall into considering their life experience to be shared with most English-speaking users.
Cultural differences might even exist within one globally shared language. Have you tried saying ‘soccer’ instead of ‘football’ in a conversation with someone from the UK? These details may not only cause confusion but also upset people.
Why it’s important: Making sure your product is free from culture-specific references makes your product more inclusive and safeguards you from alienating your users.
They Have Another Level Of Empathy For The Global Audience
Being a non-native speaker themselves, they have experience with products that do not speak clearly to them. They’ve been in the global user’s shoes and know how it impacts the experience.
Why it’s important: Empathy is a key driver towards design decisions that take into account the diverse cultural and linguistic background of the users.
How Non-native Content Design Can Shape Your Approach To Design
Your product won’t become better overnight simply because you read an inspiring article telling you that you need to have a more diverse team. I get it. So here are concrete changes that you can make in your design workflows and hiring routines to make sure your content is accessible globally.
Run Copy Reviews With Non-native Readers
When you launch a new feature or product, it’s a standard practice to run QA sessions to review visuals and interactions. When your team does not include the non-native perspective, the content is usually overlooked and considered fine as long as it’s grammatically correct.
I know, having a dedicated localisation team to pressure-test your content for clarity is a privilege, but you can always start small.
At one of my previous companies, we established a ‘clarity heroes council’ — a small team of non-native English speakers with diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds. During our reviews, they often asked questions that surprised us and highlighted where clarity was missing:
- What’s a “grace period”?
- What will happen when I tap “settle the payment”?
These questions flag potential problems and help you save both money and reputation by avoiding thousands of customer service tickets.
Review Existing Flows For Clarity
Even if your product does not have major releases regularly, it accumulates small changes over time. They’re often plugged in as fixes or small improvements, and can be easily overlooked from a QA perspective.
A good start will be a regular look at the flows that are critical to your business metrics: onboarding, checkout, and so on. Fence off some time for your team quarterly or even annually, depending on your product size, to come together and check whether your key content pieces serve the global audience well.
Usually, a proper review is conducted by a team: a product designer, a content designer, an engineer, a product manager, and a researcher. The idea is to go over the flows, research insights, and customer feedback together. For that, having a non-native speaker on the audit task force will be essential.
If you’ve never done an audit before, try this template as it covers everything you need to start.
Make Sure Your Content Guidelines Are Global-ready
If you haven’t done it already, make sure your voice & tone documentation includes details about the level of English your company is catering to.
This might mean working with the brand team to find ways to make sure your brand voice comes through to all users without sacrificing clarity and comprehension. Use examples and showcase the difference between sounding smart or playful vs sounding clear.
Leaning too much towards brand personality is where cultural differences usually shine through. As a user, you might’ve seen it many times. Here’s a banking app that wanted to seem relaxed and relatable by introducing ‘Dang it’ as the only call-to-action on the screen.
However, users with different linguistic backgrounds might not be familiar with this expression. Worse, they might see it as an action, leaving them unsure of what will actually happen after tapping it.
Considering how much content is generated with AI today, your guidelines have to account for both tone and clarity. This way, when you feed these requirements to the AI, you’ll see the output that will not just be grammatically correct but also easy to understand.
Incorporate Global English Heuristics Into Your Definition Of Success
Basic heuristic principles are often documented as a part of overarching guidelines to help UX teams do a better job. The Nielsen Norman Group usability heuristics cover the essential ones, but it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t introduce your own. To complement this list, add this principle:
Aim for global understanding: Content and design should communicate clearly to any user regardless of cultural or language background.
You can suggest criteria to ensure it’s clear how to evaluate this:
- Action transparency: Is it clear what happens next when the user proceeds to the next screen or page?
- Minimal ambiguity: Is the content open to multiple interpretations?
- International clarity: Does this content work in a non-Western context?
Bring A Non-native Perspective To Your Research, Too
This one is often overlooked, but collaboration between the research team and non-native speaking writers is super helpful. If your research involves a survey or interview, they can help you double-check whether there is complex or ambiguous language used in the questions unintentionally.
In a study by the Journal of Usability Studies, 37% of non-native speakers did not manage to answer the question that included a word they did not recognise or could not recall the meaning of. The question was whether they found the system to be “cumbersome to use”, and the consequences of getting unreliable data and measurements on this would have a negative impact on the UX of your product.
Another study by UX Journal of User Experience highlights how important clarity is in surveys. While most people in their study interpreted the question “How do you feel about … ?” as “What’s your opinion on …?”, some took it literally and proceeded to describe their emotions instead.
This means that even familiar terms can be misinterpreted. To get precise research results, it’s worth defining key terms and concepts to ensure common understanding with participants.
Globalise Your Glossary
At Klarna, we often ran into a challenge of inconsistent translation for key terms. A well-defined English term could end up having from three to five different versions in Italian or German. Sometimes, even the same features or app sections could be referred to differently depending on the market — this led to user confusion.
To address this, we introduced a shared term base — a controlled vocabulary that included:
- English term,
- Definition,
- Approved translations for all markets,
- Approved and forbidden synonyms.
Importantly, the term selection was dictated by user research, not by assumption or personal preferences of the team.
If you’re unsure where to begin, use this product content vocabulary template for Notion. Duplicate it for free and start adding your terms.
We used a similar setup. Our new glossary was shared internally across teams, from product to customer service. Results? Reducing the support tickets related to unclear language used in UI (or directions in the user journey) by 18%. This included tasks like finding instructions on how to make a payment (especially with the least popular payment methods like bank transfer), where the late fee details are located, or whether it’s possible to postpone the payment. And yes, all of these features were available, and the team believed they were quite easy to find.
A glossary like this can live as an add-on to your guidelines. This way, you will be able to quickly get up to speed new joiners, keep product copy ready for localisation, and defend your decisions with stakeholders.
Approach Your Team Growth With An Open Mind
‘Looking for a native speaker’ still remains a part of the job listing for UX Writers and content designers. There’s no point in assuming it’s intentional discrimination. It’s just a misunderstanding that stems from not fully accepting that our job is more about building the user experience than writing texts that are grammatically correct.
Here are a few tips to make sure you hire the best talent and treat your applicants fairly:
- Remove the ‘native speaker’ and ‘fluency’ requirement.
Instead, focus on the core part of our job: add ‘clear communicator’, ‘ability to simplify’, or ‘experience writing for a global audience’.
- Judge the work, not the accent.
Over the years, there have been plenty of studies confirming that the accent bias is real — people having an unusual or foreign accent are considered less hirable. While some may argue that it can have an impact on the efficiency of internal communications, it’s not enough to justify the reason to overlook the good work of the applicant.
My personal experience with the accent is that it mostly depends on the situation you’re in. When I’m in a friendly environment and do not feel anxiety, my English flows much better as I do not overthink how I sound. Ironically, sometimes when I’m in a room with my team full of British native speakers, I sometimes default to my Slavic accent. The question is: does it make my content design expertise or writing any worse? Not in the slightest.
Therefore, make sure you judge the portfolios, the ideas behind the interview answers, and whiteboard challenge presentations, instead of focusing on whether the candidate’s accent implies that they might not be good writers.
Good Global Products Need Great Non-native Content Design
Non-native content designers do not have a negative impact on your team’s writing. They sharpen it by helping you look at your content through the lens of your real user base. In the globalised world, linguistic purity no longer benefits your product’s user experience.
Try these practical steps and leverage the non-native speaking lens of your content designers to design better international products.
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