USER RESEARCH | CONTENT DESIGN | MULTILINGUAL STRATEGY
We order food and book a vacation rental all within a few clicks. What if all government services were that easy to access, especially for non-native English speakers? By designing and executing the first human-centered design practice at the City of San Jose, we developed a Code for America fellowship report that describes 23 recommendations on how to improve barriers to accessing the San Jose 311 app for low-income and low-English proficient residents.
Our key finding demonstrated that usability and content design best practices is just as important as translation. This recommendation is now part of the City’s multilingual implementation plan, which is why the newest release contains various content design and accessibility improvements prior to translating the app later this year.
Here’s my shorter summary of why creating better user experiences in non-English languages means simplifying before translating.
