Using WalkMe to Scope WalkMe - Multi-Language

Here's how I used WalkMe Insights recently to save a client a TON of time and money:

We had an app that was external facing with thousands of users globally. We were interested to see if we should take advantage of WalkMe's multi-language capabilities.

But before launching into this, we needed to gather some data. Do we need to translate? If so, into which languages?  The app had a native translation feature (only English to French) that wasn't getting used much. We wondered or suspected to what extent users in Mexico / China were translating into their language via browser-level translate.

If there were a way to get the language as an attribute of the user in WalkMe Insights, I knew we'd be in good shape.  But what data to use and could we even do that?

Inspecting the HTML

Let's inspect a web page. First, this is what you'll see if a page is in English:

This is what you'll see if it's in French:

Now, you can use a Google Chrome translate feature to translate just about any language to any other language.  In this case, I have preferences set that if a web page is in French, translate to English:

And if it has been translated, this is how it will appear:

You'll see the lang goes back to en and we have an additional class.

NOTE, there is another variable called Window.lang. Don't use this one. This will STAY in fr even if the user has translated to another language.

OK so after some investigation, we knew that html lang was what we were after.

Turning an Element into an Analytics Property

The next big discovery was that WalkMe can take an HTML element and turn it into a variable that can be assigned to a user in Insights.

This is not the "Data Collection" accessible via Settings.  This is called the "Parser" -- talk to support or your CSM if this is something you need to take advantage of.

Currently it needs to be setup by a Solution Engineer.

In our case, we were able to take html lang and turn it into a variable called site_language.

Then we went into the Editor settings and assigned site language into the "role" placeholder of insights.

And then like magic, we were able to see this in Insights:

The Results 

OK, how awesome is this?  Rather than having no idea if the multi-language was going to be a requirement, I now KNOW across 2000+ users what language they are using to view the site.

What did we do next?  Give it a few weeks to have a decent user population.  Take all the users, their country, their language, export to Excel and do a quick pivot table.

In our case, here's what we found:

Despite having users all over the globe: China, Japan, Mexico, Europe, Brazil...  99.8% of the user sessions were in English.

OK, this was surprising.  And a clear answer to the client's question.

We decided to forego the multi-language translation and proceed with the content in English. 

Take-Aways

• Talk to your WalkMe Enablement / CSM / Solution Engineers.  WalkMe has back-end features that make it even more capable than you know.
• Gather data!  You never know what you'll find unless you measure.