The issue there is that "being in country X" and "wanting to see the site in language Y" is going to be against some users' preferences. Examples:
- Canadians from Quebec may prefer the site in french (but use CAD as a currency and see Canada's taxes where relevant).
- Expats in Thailand very much prefer to use the site in English.
- I'm in Spain and my browser is setup to reflect my preferences (Catalan first, English if that's not available, Spanish last). I prefer English to Spanish because international companies either have a strong presence here (and will probably have Catalan as an option) or their Spanish translation will be worse than the original language in English which I understand better than low effort translations.
Frame.work is going for a locale selector but they don't even support all the official locales of the regions they already operate in (e.g.: they don't support fr_CA). Even if they did, there are always users that would prefer a "non-official" localization (en_TH, en_ES following my examples above).
In the end they would be much better off letting users pick the language, region and currency separately. It's less effort from their part and a better solution for the users.
In that case, flags for languages are bad and flags for regions are fine but can still rub against some users' feelings. Example: pro-independence Scots having to pick the UK flag. Is it really that terrible to have auto-complete and/or select fields for these 3 things?
What it should offer is two separate options: One for the store location, one for the language. This becomes especially important in Europe because you have so many people who live in a country where they don't speak the associated language natively.
This is such a basic UX rule that I'm a bit surprised to see them fumble on it...
- Canadians from Quebec may prefer the site in french (but use CAD as a currency and see Canada's taxes where relevant).
- Expats in Thailand very much prefer to use the site in English.
- I'm in Spain and my browser is setup to reflect my preferences (Catalan first, English if that's not available, Spanish last). I prefer English to Spanish because international companies either have a strong presence here (and will probably have Catalan as an option) or their Spanish translation will be worse than the original language in English which I understand better than low effort translations.
Frame.work is going for a locale selector but they don't even support all the official locales of the regions they already operate in (e.g.: they don't support fr_CA). Even if they did, there are always users that would prefer a "non-official" localization (en_TH, en_ES following my examples above).
In the end they would be much better off letting users pick the language, region and currency separately. It's less effort from their part and a better solution for the users.
In that case, flags for languages are bad and flags for regions are fine but can still rub against some users' feelings. Example: pro-independence Scots having to pick the UK flag. Is it really that terrible to have auto-complete and/or select fields for these 3 things?