Going beyond the interface is key to providing value

Or: You don’t have to take the hammer approach

Problem

Most of Liferay’s customers support at least 2 languages, and some with large, public-facing websites often have a dozen or more languages.

While technically possible, translating at this scale requires a lot of error-prone manual work.

Role

As the team’s Product Designer, I worked with the Technical lead and PM to do end-to-end product design. From interviewing users to implementation QA.

Contributions

User Research
Workshop Facilitation
Product Strategy
Interaction Design
Prototyping
Usability Testing
Quality Assurance

Impact

Cost Reduction90^﹪

Many customers achieved significant vendor savings in addition to employee efficiencies

average hours saved per year550

Removing or reducing time-consuming process helped our customers save a lot of time

Solution

Through a design sprint, I helped the team ideate to a largely non-interface solution would provide the most value to our customers.

This was achieved in three ways:

Adding more granular permissions and dedicated roles for translators
Adding .xlf import/export features to the existing content editing interface
Exposing an API and providing endpoints for integration with translation services

Process

I conducted interviews with three user groups to better understand how people used the existing features:

End-users: Direct feedback from customers and internal teams focused on goals, processes, and pain points.
Customer Support: Gathered indirect user feedback and learned about the most common issues reported by customers.
Consulting Services: Customer requirements from common customizations made to the product.

Interface showing the manual process of choosing which language to translate to — To translate content, users chose a language at the page level, which meant translating 1 page at a time

Taking insights from customer interviews into a design sprint helped the team understand how people were using translation features and ideate solutions.

Two important insights from these interviews helped shape the solution:

Customer Insight No. 1

Larger customers often added vendors as users to their instance to translate content for them — this would often result in errors and was also cost-prohibitive.

By defining specific roles for translators this helped reduce the ability of vendors to inadvertently access, modify, or delete content — thus reducing costs and errors.

Customer Insight No. 2

Customers often used spreadsheets outside of Liferay to achieve their goals of translating content.

Adding the ability to export and import content as .xlf files eliminated the need for customers to use a spreadsheet to manage translations.

Going a step further, adding integrations for translation services so that customers were able to automatically translate content within Liferay, eliminating the need for other tools.

Outcomes & Learnings

While this wasn't an entirely UI-less solution, interactions followed conventional patterns.

I added value by understanding and explaining user pain, helping the team to ideate and prioritize effort through business outcomes. And made a few mockups and prototypes along the way. Because of all this, we were able to expend the same (or less) effort on implementing the right solution quickly.

By focusing on user problems we created a huge amount of value, eliminated thousands of hours of busywork, enabling our customers and their customers to spend their time doing more meaningful work.

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