Matt zamudio
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After developing a content strategy that defined our voice, tone, and the content-led initiatives we would need to undertake to achieve our business goals, we kicked off the design process for what I dubbed the "Community" feature.
This feature would allow the Translate community to help improve translation quality in their native language.
Another very fascinating and useful initative I designed with the Translate team was Listen Mode. This feature would allow users to turn on their microphone and receive live transcription to their native language. For example, one might choose to use this feature while listening to a lecture in a foregin language or while watching a movie without subtitles.
I coined this feature "Listen" Mode, and worked with UX designers to make the UI easy to use and understand.
Some of the other projects I worked on included a tap to translate module and concise error messages for saved translations.
Tap to translate is a feature that allows Android users to quickly translate text from their device's screen. This was made possible by a sticky Translate icon that anchored to the side of the user's screen. But users were confused about what would happen if they were to get rid of the icon or hide it.
My content solution (seen below) fixed this pain point.
Like most UX writers, I worked on many error messages during my time at Translate. But the saved translation error below stands out as a particularly interesting one.
This error had to do with a max character limit. When you perform a translation, often the translated text is much longer than the source text. But the issue was not that Translate couldn't show the whole translation. Rather, it was that we couldn't save the full translation in the users "Saved translations".
We experimented with a few different variations. As is often the case, the solution was much simpler than expected.
I suggested we disable the save button (a star) when the translation was too long to save. To support this, I included a short error message ("Translation is too long to be saved") explaining the situation.
As a result of the changes I introduced to Google Translate, we saw a high rate of adoption for newly introduced features as well as thousands of user submissions in our Community feature.
This meant we were able to improve our translation quality in hundreds of languages and dialects, improving the way people communicate with each other around the world.
What's more, due to our improved error messaging and UI text, we saw a reduction in support tickets, which meant happier users and a happier internal team.
Overall, the project was a great success for both Google and the users who use and rely on Translate.
- Google Translate supports new languages for the first time in four years, including Uyghur (The Verge)
- How Google is using emerging AI techniques to improve language translation quality (Venture Beat)
- Google Translate's real-time transcription feature is now out for Android (The Verge)
