The annoying thing about localis(z)ed spelling

Scenario: You have done a survey and you want to get a quick understanding of the words participants used to answer an open response question.

Solution: A perfect way to do this is to make a word cloud – a visual way to understand the frequency of words; where words with a higher frequency are larger, and words with a lower frequency are smaller.

Problem: The English language has two main spelling systems – the British system and the American system. Read more about the differences at Wikipedia.

Implication: The two spelling systems result in a lower overall frequency for essentially the same word, as they are considered 2 words, and therefore a smaller size in a word cloud.

For example, localise and localize are the same word.  If each are used 5 times by participants, the two words would be smaller than if they were combined to have a frequency of 10 using the spelling of your preference.

To show the impact this has on a word cloud, I selected a group of words with different spelling and put them into a spreadsheet. To create a frequency, I used a formula to count the number of characters in the word [In Excel this is LEN(text)].

Word	Frequency	Word	Frequency
aluminium	9	aluminum	8
artefact	8	artifact	8
color	5	colour	6
disc	4	disk	4
flavor	6	flavour	7
honor	5	honour	6
labor	5	labour	6
neighbor	8	neighbour	9
organise	8	organize	8
program	7	programme	9
realise	7	realize	7
recognise	9	recognize	9
rumor	5	rumour	6
speciality	10	specialty	9

Most word cloud software only allows you to paste in a group of words or upload a file of words, before generating the cloud. You can sometimes automatically merge similar words (for example when there is the word, the plural, and end with ‘ing’ they will merge to be one word with the combined frequency). I haven’t found one, other than CloudMaker, that allows you to personally merge similar words, enabling you to handle the problem of British and American English.

Below, the first word cloud is all the words and to the second word cloud is the merged list.

Fewer words makes it easier to understand but also changes the priorities.

All the words

Merged words

Impact: When words with British and American spelling are mixed with words spelt the same in both systems, the first impression views could be inaccurate.

For example, if there was a single spelt word, such as: national, with the frequency of 10 and one of the dual spelt words, such as: localise with the frequency of 7, then also localize with a frequency of 5, merging localise and localize results in a frequency of 12, which is greater than the single spelt word, national, with a frequency of 10.

This could change your thinking about how the question was answered as localise is more frequent than national.

If the question was: What should our regional focus be? Then merging the British and American systems would result in a different first view, than looking at a word cloud without merging – because localise would be greater than national rather than the reverse when not merged.

Visualising rating question feedback

Asking for rating feedback can give you great insights, but only if you look at the data in a few different ways.

Two examples of rating feedback are:

1. Please rate your level of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 7
2. How likely are you to recommend us on a scale of 0-10?

The average can be similar over time or between aspects that you want feedback. So how can you gain greater insights from the data, if you are not asking other questions at the same time, allowing you to compare the results to other groups, such as demographics?

In the video below we look at the data from 4 time periods when customers were asked, how likely are you to recommend us on a scale of 0-10. There was only 1 batch that had a lower average, making the average result fairly meaningless. However, when the data was put into CloudMaker the results told a different story. Watch the video to see the story…

Read more about CloudMaker, or visit its home on Tribal Tool-Kit.

Register for one of our workshops that will help you understand customer feedback, member feedback, using data in your business, or how to start a tribe, and all show ways to use CloudMaker to grow your organisation.