RTL consultancy - Hebrew Adaptation of Workhuman Product offering

Work.

As part of the kick-off, we had to find appropriate times to have our scrum ceremonies as the team was distributed and some team members were split across another project that piece had to be the first one to get aligned on. Next, all team members researched what RTL support means and looks like from dev efforts, Q.A and design. As part of my support, I created RTL guidelines in confluence. These guidelines were designed to help the developers understand the broad logic of how RTL works. My primary effort went into text and punctuation clarification, content mirroring principles and proving examples of UI to support this. As a follow up to this I took the primary 3 features that we decided to start working on and made them RTL compatible.

In the scope of this project, we managed to convert 90% of the application RTL friendly. As a team, we also created a broader set of guidelines that the rest of the scrum teams can follow so that all the code that is done from that point onwards will be RTL friendly. To ensure that other teams were able to carry out the work as well, we ran training sessions with developers and product team members. Before we launched our beta version we contacted Teva and asked the client to take part in usability testing to help us ensure that our Beta version is release ready.

Research method

To gain a deeper understanding of the problem at hand, we needed to understand how the employees are currently doing their job. What problems are they experiencing? What are their most important tasks? What makes them feel successful?

The method I chose to unearth this was 1-1 interviews combined with observation of a total of 8 user interviews.

Observations

Main observations:

• We found issues with the platform not being fully RTL compatible yet. 

• The features that were RTL compatible worked as expected

• We found translation issues. the translation company provided us with some translations that didn't work well with the tone of voice that Teva was using with their employees. 

Outcomes

Once we finished the tests we were able to work with Teva and the translation company to improve the language and tone of voice. We fixed minor bugs found with animations during the tests. considering that this was a Beta we were happy to release knowing that there were issues with the experience when transitioning from RTL pages to regular LTR this was a temporary situation.

Project outcomes.

The beta version was launched at the beginning of 2019 in Israel, and we immediately saw a spike in nominations for awards (the core nature of our product). 11% of Teva employees are Hebrew speakers and within in one month of launching we saw that 8.4% of these employees switched to user the Hebrew language - This was great initial uptake! 

One of our company’s core values is to build products that are accessible and inclusive for all humans, so improving our platform to support RTL was an important step in the right direction. Through inclusive design, this project opened our product up to a new market and lead to increased revenue, so there were many benefits! 

Reflections.

In the scope of this process, I got to dig deep into the RTL language structure and the implications of the development that needs to be done to support it. I got to collaborate with a big client on the creation of this and overall enjoyed working through the challenges of project scope and tight timelines. This has been one of the smoothest projects I worked on. Reflecting back, it looks like creating a set of clear guidelines was the most significant part as that gave the developers and designers the required understanding of what we were trying to achieve.