We are real people here at myGengo. You, our readers, are real people too. Our customers are real people and so are our translators. myGengo delivers translations that haven’t been warped and mangled by robotz. We deliver quality content by bringing on quality translators. To lift the curtain behind our website, we want to introduce you to our smart, living, breathing human translators who care about language, communication and high quality translation.
Translators Winnie and Ben (left), our new friends, visited the Tokyo office to chat with us about our current system and talk about some tools and ideas we have in the works. This process also often leads to insights about the kinds of features and services we can make for our translators in the future. It helps us discover all kinds of pain points and desires that quantitative data doesn’t always uncover.
Another friend of myGengo and a diligent Senior Translator, Bailey (above), also swung by our Tokyo office to hang and chat with us. She picked up a short job and let me watch her do a translation and ask mountains of questions. In the User Experience (UX) design community, we call this a user test. It helps us find out if features are broken, confusing, frustrating...or awesome.
We are improving the communication with our translator team and seeking feedback from them in our offices, over email, by testing prototypes with translators all over the world and sometimes over coffee. I learned a lot about the nuances of language from one of our first Arabic to English translators, Majid (left), in Bloomington, Indiana.
But Winnie, Ben, Bailey and Majid are more than just users, they are real people. Working with them helps us improve our translation tools. Great tools means happier translators, better content and satisfied customers and more information accessible to more people.
Thanks to myGengo translators all over the world (shoutout!) who have been sending feedback, testing our prototypes and answering surveys, we have some exciting new translator tools in the works. Stay tuned!
But, until then, a little insight on how we make products for humans.
Tips on designing for real people
- Talk to people. Ask lots of questions.
- Be humble, listen to the answer.
- Keep your company’s goals and mission in focus. You cannot (and should not) deliver everything people ask for.
- Always be learning about who these people are and what they value.
- Have an organized process to manage what you learn.
- Pursue both quantitative and qualitative data.
- Share what you learn with your team.
