Why I release English Support for the freee HR App on iOS
The original post is here, this is translated by ChatGPT.
Hello, I’m Hal, a manager in the Global Design Team. I usually work with the global development team on the development of new products for accountants in English. Today, I’ll talk about the recent release of English support for the freee HR app.
In this article, I would like to introduce why I planned, implemented, and eventually released the multilingual function for the mobile app of another team, freee HR, and the journey we undertook.
Article Summary:
- I planned multilingual support for the sake of realizing freee’s mission and the future of the global development team.
- After a year of grassroots activities with Vivi, the originator of the multilingual movement and a business planner from China, we were able to implement it during a company event called a development camp.
- On May 18, 2023, we released the English version of the iOS app.
What is Multilingual Support for freee HR?
At freee, we have set our vision as “An integrated management platform where anyone can manage freely.” We develop and provide an “integrated management platform” to create an environment where anyone can manage freely and naturally. Regardless of language, we aim to make our services accessible to all users, starting with the “freee HR” application that many employees use.
In this version of the iOS mobile app, administrators can register and verify attendance and salary information without the need for translation. We also plan to release an Android version soon.
Please refer to our help page for more details on the features.
Why did we decide to start this multilingual support?
My interest in multilingual support was sparked by the global team I currently work with. Working with foreign nationals in the current global team, I have received a lot of stimulation and feel the joy of working together.
On the other hand, I often hear about the difficulties of working in Japan due to being foreign. For example, struggling with the process to obtain a residency status, dealing with financial institutions, moving into rental properties, and various other areas.
In freee HR, which we provide, when registering attendance or confirming salaries, I’ve heard that some people use machine translation because it’s only written in Japanese.
As creators, we don’t want to release a service that is inaccessible to people around us. freee’s vision is “An integrated management platform where anyone can manage freely.” We want a broader range of people to use freee.
To aim for a state where freee can be used regardless of the language spoken, my desire to take on multilingualism grew stronger. I decided to move forward with Vivi, who is an employee of foreign nationality (from China) and had started working on the multilingual movement earlier.
Until the Implementation of English Support for freee HR
Although Vivi and I decided to undertake multilingual support together, at first we were unsure what to do specifically and spent our days searching for answers. Looking back at our meeting minutes, we conducted surveys on the need for multilingual support within the company, held user interviews with companies that employ foreign nationals, and researched cases where multilingual support was attempted within the company.
Before we knew it, we had been working together for nearly half a year. There were times we felt disheartened, but we continued our biweekly meetings, sometimes ending with casual chats, but always discussing how to make freee multilingual.
Things took a positive turn when Yumi, an external director who usually resides in San Francisco, visited Japan. I had a chance to talk with her in the freee office, so I decided to casually consult her about our situation.
Hal: “Actually, I want to implement multilingual support in freee, but I’m not sure how to plan it because the existing products are too big.”
Yumi: “Have you thought about starting with the app? For instance, iOS should be easy to localize.”
Yumi: “It’s also important to start small and test things out. If you can validate and achieve results there, it should be easier to turn it into a project within the company.”
I had thought it would make a bigger impact to implement multilingual support in the web version of freee HR or freee Accounting, where all features are available, so I had not considered multilingual support for mobile apps at all. But it might be worth starting with the mobile app, where implementation costs would be relatively low. With this in mind, we started working on multilingual support for the HR mobile app.
Fortunately, the engineering leader of the Global team (which I belong to) used to be the engineering leader of the mobile team, so he knew the ins and outs of iOS development and gave us a rough estimate of the costs involved in multilingual support. As Yumi had predicted, we found that we could handle it without a large-scale development project.
Based on this information, I proposed to the product manager of the mobile team that we could develop multilingual support. Although I received positive feedback on the idea of implementing multilingual support, I was told that it would be difficult to do so within the immediate development plan…
As expected, it was difficult to insert into the development plan on such short notice. However, freee has a period where one can step away from regular work (such as OKRs) and focus on a project they want to undertake. This is called the “Development Camp”.
The Development Camp is a period when one can focus on a project they want to undertake, away from regular work (such as OKRs). You work on the development project for two full days, either individually or as part of a team (a team formed through discussions, not the usual work team).
We decided to utilize the freee system and take on the multilingual support for the freee HR app during the Development Camp!
Implementation and Release during the Development Camp
The Development Camp starts with declaring what you want to do and gathering colleagues. As I usually work on global development, I reached out to my colleagues and proposed to tackle multilingual support. As a result, two people from our Philippines branch and four of us, including myself, from the global team in Japan decided to participate. We then split into the iOS team and the Android team for development.
Although I’m usually a designer, I took on iOS development with the support of our engineers. The engineer leader from the global team who had previously estimated the development cost of multilingual support also participated in this project. With his guidance, we were able to proceed while learning the basic development policy and implementation method for multilingual support (huge thanks to him).
Our Multilingual Support Project was Commended
Unfortunately, we couldn’t complete everything within the camp period, but our multilingual support project was commended at the Development Camp! By the end of the camp, I had gained enough knowledge to proceed with multilingual support on my own. During my spare time, I worked on it and finally completed the implementation of all features on iOS. Since I ended up doing almost all the iOS implementation myself, I was able to familiarize myself with Swift and Xcode.
After the feature implementation was complete, Vivi, who had been pushing the multilingual support movement with me, took charge of coordinating with other related departments (Sales, Marketing, Customer Support, PR, etc.). On the other hand, I was responsible for discussing future translation policies and maintenance policies with the mobile development team and creating draft help pages. As the product managers of the respective teams usually handle such coordination, this was a good opportunity to learn what should be considered for a release.
Finally, on May 18, 2023, we were able to release the English version of the iOS features. *The Android version is also currently in progress and will be released soon.
Conclusion
While we have been pushing for multilingual support from the bottom up, we are now planning to officially projectize it and move forward with multilingual support for other features as well.
It’s been a year and a month since Vivi and I first discussed multilingual support, and we’ve finally made our initial release. It’s not often that you can plan a feature from scratch that isn’t on the product roadmap of a company the size of freee and follow through to its release. I plan to write an article about this effort soon!
There is also a lot more that I couldn’t cover in these articles.
If you want to hear more about freee’s global development and multilingual support efforts, want to know about freee’s design organization, or want to chat over coffee, feel free to message me on LinkedIn!
