ABOUT THE PROJECT
Every company wants to reach all its customers, but it can be expensive. Microsoft translated every piece of technical content into over 30 languages using Machine Translation. The Microsoft Research team creating the language algorithms was very interested in improving those algorithms, and so would accept suggestions from readers. Readers of the technical content from all over the world would suggest improvements to the machine translation, but the professional translators at headquarters were getting overwhelmed with a review interface that was keeping them from being most productive.
I interviewed stakeholders to understand the business goals, and I invested six sessions working directly with the professional translators, observing their workflow, and then observing them interacting with prototypes I created.
The design evolved part time over the course of about 8 weeks. I was still a full time design manager at the time, but I enjoyed solving these interaction challenges.
