Stretch Project
After finishing up my contributions to TransitHealth I was given the opportunity to work on a “stretch project”.
Bascially, it was my time to develop something that stretched beyond the work of the internship. Outside of software engineering, I also have a strong interest in business which is why I aspire to be a product manager. Having this opportunity to work on something that went beyond the internship, I decided to develop a product management proposal for the internationalizaion (i18n) and localization (l10n) of TransitHealth.
In order to decide on i18n and l10n, though, I had to do some research.
User Persona
First, I looked up the current trends for website design and found that accessibility and customized content based on geolocation were among some of the top ones and I thought that was enough to advocate for i18n and l10n. Wrong.
After getting the chance to talk to an actual product manager at Google, Diana Chen, she helped me see that I not only needed to look at the market and its trends as a product manager, but it was also just as important to look at who our users are. The overall role of a product manager is to understand your customers and their needs to make better products for them. So, I went back and did some research on who our targeted customer segment was and what their needs were.
TransitHealth is a website that gives data on public city transit and health so generally the type of person who would be using our site would most likely be someone who uses public city transit and someone who cares about health management for reasons like lack of healthcare access, regular exposure to people/environments outside of their home during Covid and so on. Now I needed to do some research on who those people were and what their regular needs looked like.
After breaking down the customer segment into its two groups, public transit users and health-conscious residents, I did research on each to find out which demographics they were made up of which is shown down below:
Knowing that majority of immigrants have a first language different than English, I decided to look up customer behaviors when it came to languages and found the following:
With this, I knew i18n and l10n would be a great benefit for our users and would also greatly improve TransitHealth overall.
Implementing i18n and l10n
For outlining how we would implement i18n and l10n and what it would actually look like on our site, my software engineering experience came in handy and helped me get an idea of what would need to be done to our code.
Working with another one of our engineer interns, Shahzia Perveen, she took the first steps in implementing a translation feature for Urdu for her data question on the website:
Having an initial start to this project already has been very exciting and although the internship has ended, the mentors running it have agreed to have future interns work on the i18n and l10n of TransitHealth!
Down below you can see my full proposal:
Takeaways
Getting the chance to talk to an actual product manager and work on a realistic project in the way that they would has also gotten me more excited about the field and has confirmed that it really is something I am passionate about doing in my future. I am incredibly grateful for my mentor for giving us the chance to connect and for Diana and all of her help, her feedback and advice were invaluable to me.