Local Design on a Global Scale: How Language Can Inform Human-centered Design

Track: What’s Next? | WN4 |   Everyone |
Thursday, November 7, 2019, 4:30pm – 5:15pm
Held in: Regency 2
Presenters:
Mercedes Krimme - Spotify 
Camela Logan - Facebook
Host: Terence Maikels

Internationalization is central to ensuring that users around the world understand how and why they might use digital products. These efforts are often automated and scaled to meet international companies’ wide-ranging communication goals. But what happens when design teams must develop bespoke products for users from regions other than their own? In this session we will present how to improve a product’s cross-cultural communication strategy through in-field, foreign language testing. By sharing learnings from tests that we ran across three markets, we’ll show how focusing on written language as part of product design can yield insights on comprehension, tone/voice, cultural context and discoverability.

Takeaways: Attendees will be inspired to think more proactively about how translations facilitate a user’s journey through the products, they will be challenged to consider the tradeoffs of applying a customized approach to translations amidst industrial, standardized practices at scale and they will be motivated to seek collaboration opportunities with their design partners and teams.