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I love to nurture growth, in myself and others. This project was done earlier in my career, and I’ve chosen to leave it here to illustrate career advancement and expansion of project depth/scope over time.

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Role

Mobile Product Designer

I primarily worked with a Product Manager and two Engineering Leads on this project.

I utilized my Design colleagues for feedback throughout the process and Account Managers for inside expertise and historical context the topic.

Context

Company

moovel's mission was to help transform cities by providing the most convenient and sustainable mobility software solutions.

I primarily designed for moovel's white label application — a native mobile app that is sold to public transit agencies, uniquely rebranded, and injected with each city's complex transit fare catalog so that they can offer a mobile ticketing solution for their riders.

Problem

International folks were being excluded from the app experience 🌍. We're talking about native device translation. We needed to localize the app so that when a user changed the Preferred Language in their device's settings to Spanish, or Chinese, the app would translate for them and be usable in that language.

The first piece to this problem was around the technical ability to translate based on native device settings on the backend, but the second part to this problem was more social and experiential.

The bus driver, who often only speaks English, also needed to be able to decipher the user’s fare in order to confirm that it is valid - all within a split second during the bus boarding process. There were two user groups in this moment, both with different needs.

Image description: Birds eye view of a customer journey and major problem area

Approach to a Solution

As soon as I wrapped my head around the problem and researched translation feature standards in web design, I instinctually started sketching out experiences where a user might quickly toggle their app back and forth between English and their preferred language. But there was a problem with jumping in the ideation phase so soon.

Image description: Iterations of toggle components

The toggle concept still relied on a common understanding between the user and the bus driver - be it through verbal or nonverbal cues - that the user needed to tap to translate for the driver.