Saving translations is the first step for DeepL to enable people to give and get feedback on translations and it positions DeepL as more of a ‘place where people do work’ — instead of being a transaction in their journey.
Role: Sr. Product designer, Researcher
Team: 1 Product Manager, 1 Developer
Other collaborators:
2 Designers to create a vision for a new navigation and logged-in experience
4 PM’s to coordinate efforts and prioritization
1 User researcher to refine my research plans
In 2022, better translation quality was no longer good enough to drive the growth DeepL wanted. Now as a scale-up, DeepL needed to improve its offering as it shifted its focus to B2B customers. What can be built in addition to its core translation experience to add value for these customers?
With no clear path forward, I discovered new opportunities by running user interviews and drove this project to save translations and ultimately influenced product strategy — bottom-up.
“We’re struggling with version management”
“They’re getting it read through [by a native speaker] if [the communication] important or delicate”
“We’re using DeepL API to translate confluence pages and collaborate on writing
documents”
No matter how good machine translation can be, users still wanted the reassurance of being able to have a trusted friend or colleague to help review their text.
For others, their text was too long to create and refine in one sitting and they needed to work with others on it.
Specifically, users were trying to satisfy these 3 jobs:
Co-creating a document with others
Getting feedback and proofreading help from others
Preparing and understanding source material for translation (Not a good fit for DeepL)
This meant features like sharing, version history, live-editing, and commenting would all be useful extensions of the translation experience
Discover, and save a translation for the first time
Re-organize their saved documents
And finding the documents once again
Why was this opportunity valuable for other teams and the company as a whole?
Our MVP hit our initial adoption metrics, and we've continuously usability tested to tweak the initial design.
In the meantime, I continue work with two other designers to break this vision down this larger change into testable smaller parts. At the time of writing, collaboration is one of DeepL’s big bets and multiple teams are working towards this shared goal.