Content design to re-launch raft myanmar’s website
BACKGROUND
After redesigning and creating the website for non-profit organization RAFT Myanmar, the team wanted to conduct some testing to eliminate any issues in usability. RAFT Myanmar deals with conflict sensitive information, so it was important to make sure the translation was easy to toggle between English and Burmese (and accurate), and that users got a sense of RAFT's mission, values, and programs.
problem
How might we test the newly built RAFT website for ease of translation and overall user experience?
objective
Our goal was to understand whether the users ran into any issues with either the English or Burmese versions of the website. To answer this, we conducted usability testing on a group of bilingual individuals to make decisions on the content, design, and functionality of the two websites.
Conducted ux research: Remote moderated usability testing
Pre-tested with RAFT team to determine main issues and fix any bugs, and to refine the test for users.
5 participants:
Bilingual in English and Burmese Target user group age 25-50
Living and working in Myanmar
Familiar with peace-building context
Access and ability to use a computer
Tested translation, user flow, and content design
“The translation was not quite right for specific words like “social cohesion” and sometimes the characters appeared incorrectly (common with viewing Zawgyi font online).”
potential solutions
Based on the research we conducted, these were the recommended solutions:
Create a language subdomain and continue using translation service but manual deal with mistranslated copy
Create two different sites and link them
Stick with only an English version of the website, and test copy to optimize flow and user experience
what we did
We created a language subdomain page (mm.raftmyanmar.org) and continued using the translation service because it was correct 95% of the time. To mitigate risks, we tested buttons and other copy on the English site to ask users to excuse any translation errors.
the impact
Opting for the simple solution to redirect users with a subdomain alleviated the need to spend resources on another site. Refining the copy and testing different versions of “Please excuse any translation errors” allowed us to pinpoint the most effective ways to frame the architecture and user flow on both sites.