Designing for extremes on a truly global platform
It’s hard enough to design a product for one country but trying to make a single product that works as well for someone in Nairobi as New York is another level challenge.
The Acorn Collective is a truly global crowdfunding platform. We will be using blockchain technology to help founders and startups find access to funding.
As head of User Experience (UX) at The Acorn Collective, I wanted to share how we will be approaching the design of the Acorn platform.
In my first article, I gave a brief introduction to the guiding UX principles that we have come up with to help us ensure the platform is as usable, accessible and pleasurable for everyone who comes in contact with it.
In this series, I will discuss each principle in the context of a challenge that we will face when building this new product.
We’re truly global
It’s hard enough to design a product for one country but trying to make a single product that works as well for someone in Nairobi as New York is another level challenge.
Our principle is to design for extremes.
When we create solutions that work for the people with the most extreme needs, we make life better for everyone. We look at far ends of the spectrum, whether that relates to ability, environment, sentiment or anything else.
It’s not just a matter of translating
Even if we are taking about something as basic as how to talk to people in different countries, it’s not as simple as having our website translated into different languages.
In the west we read left-to-right — therefore most of our design assumes the viewer is going from top left to bottom right.
Not if you are Arabic (or Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and many others). They read right-to-left.
Mongolian speakers read left-to-right but in vertical columns!
If they start from the wrong end we can’t assume people are going to understand something as simple as a row of pictorial diagrams
Even if we get the direction right we can’t stop there.
There are ‘low-context’ languages such as English and German where the language does not rely heavily on context. Whereas many Asian languages are ‘high-context’ meaning they prefer not to include information that they feel the audience should already know.
When dealing with language, we also need to consider different needs outside of the cultural context.
A turn of phrase such as ‘significant other’ (meaning spouse or romantic partner) would make perfect sense to most English speakers, especially in the United Kingdom. But what about someone who is Aspergers? Some people on the autistic spectrum take things very literally so ‘significant other’ might lead them to ask the question “significant other what?”.
Thinking about the language we use when communicating with people with Aspergers or learning difficulties will also help people who speak English as a second language, young people who might not have come across that term or simply anyone who is rushing through the text and doesn’t have time to stop and comprehend a cute idiom.
One solution would be making good use of icons. But even here we need to be aware. Icons aren’t any good for blind people. They can be ambiguous (does a star mean I ‘like’ this project or I am ‘favoriting’ it?). And they don’t even translate; An icon as seemingly universal as the ‘thumbs-up’ icon means ‘up-yours’ in parts of Italy, Afghanistan and Iran.
TLDR — Keeping language simple helps people who have learning difficulties, people for whom it’s their second tongue, or simply those who are in a rush or distracted.
Global means everyone
When we talk about ‘crowdfunding for everyone’ we don’t just mean every country. We mean everyone in those countries. No matter their status, religion, gender, ability or any other factor.
By designing for those people with the most extreme needs we help everyone else.
Once again when we design for those with the most extreme needs we make life better for everyone else.
For instance, when we design something that can be used by someone with limited mobility we help that person that happens to be carrying a child or shopping bags.
Some developing countries have limited access to computers and data is very expensive but they tend to have good access to mobile phones, especially feature phones (basically ‘non-smart’ phones — like the one your nan uses).
How do we deliver a crowdfunding platform someone who has a feature phone?
Well, we probably can’t create a whole platform that works on a Nokia 3310 — we can try — but loading Acorn Collective over WAP isn’t going to be a good experience and probably prohibitively expensive. So we can look at easing parts of the journey.
For example: perhaps founders could update their project via SMS text message? That would help our founder who has no internet at all, and we probably make life easier for someone with a good connection but who finds tapping out a quick SMS easier.
USSD is a protocol you’ve probably used in the past without realising — such as for finding out your phone’s credit. USSD is similar to SMS but works on a real-time connection allowing a two-way exchange.
I like to think of it as a text adventure — the user sends a code to us and we reply with a list of options. One might be to find out how much their campaign has raised so far. Another might be to post an advert to Facebook.
We can take their requests and process them server side and feed back information. It’ll never be as easy as using a proper web- based service but it’s free to the user and can be completed on any GSM-enabled phone!
A marathon, not a sprint
As you can imagine trying to make sure our platform works for every culture, ability, environment, etc… is a massive challenge. In fact it’s nigh on impossible.
The first version of Acorn isn’t going to work for every person in every language first time. Instead, we will try to create a single platform that does its best to work for most people with the most extreme needs. Then we can focus on specific countries and their cultures to create versions that are dedicated to their needs.
Using the powerful concept of ‘design for extremes’ we can ensure it works for as many people as we can manage.
Our aim will be an Acorn for everyone… eventually.
