Rachana Solanki
Quick Summary
My role was User Experience Researcher and Designer intern for the duration of 10 weeks (18th June - 24th August) and I got the opportunity to work on three varied projects. All the projects were supervised by the Director of Language and Communications Access program, Manar-ul Islam Swaby. This would not have been possible without the City employees and their experience in each of these projects.
My role and responsibilities
Project A.a was to design and implement usability studies to identify the most comfortable language for the top five communities (Haitian, Cape Verdean, Chinese, Spanish and Vietnamese). As part of this project we reached out to four primary communities (i.e. Cape Verdean, Haitian, Spanish and Vietnamese).
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Part (A.b) of Usability Study was to conduct Usability test for the multilingual usability testing of the City website (www.boston.gov). As the website is recognized as a meaningful and essential online resource for the community.
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Research Question:
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How usable is the multilingual functionality of the website?
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For Diglossia community, what languages should city vital documents should be translated to?
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Target Audience:
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Haitian : Diglossia
Spanish : Monolingualism
Cape Verdean : Diglossia
Vietnamese. : Monolingualism
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Research Plan:
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Secondary Research
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Census data - Demographic and literacy​
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Diglossia Community and their history
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Primary Research
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Stakeholder Interviews - Community Liaisons + Officials from 10 other departments​
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Survey - got the survey translated and digitalize
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Usability Test (4 tasks)
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Questionnaire
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Success Metrics: Usability Heuristics from Nielsen Norman Group + Multilingual Usability
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Multilingual Usability Test (4 tasks)
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Legibility
Haitian Creole : Very frustrated with the translation
Spanish : Can navigate but based on guess
Portuguese : Can navigate but based on guess
Vietnemese : Lost and frustrated with fonts and content size
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User Reactions:
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Ranks 8th immigrant share city
28.4% foreign born
17.4% LEP
(Part B)
Recommedations: A 2-year plan was delivered at the end of the internship with the list of actionable items
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Challenges​
I. Time
II. Translation of documents ​​
III. Community Outreach - Target Audience was difficult to approach and communicate​​
IV. Low vision participants​​
VI. Approach linguistic person ​​
VII. Missing Data variables
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Learnings
I. Participant recruitment covering a large audience ​​
II. Socio-technical issues and solution for the same ​​
III. What to do when you are the only designer ​​
IV. Design and modify UX methods as per the need yet achieve the goal of the methodology​​
VI. Print business
VII. Interpersonal and Communication skills
VIII. Learned few words from Spanish, Vietnamese, Haitian Creole and Capeverdean Creole.
Boston 💟
I am a city girl - grew up surrounded by water bodies, crowd, diversity, celebrations, variety of food etc. I could resemble so much with Boston and felt it is similar to my home city - Ahmedabad. My best time was taking a walk to the Charles River and look at Boston skyline. The history trail, harbour cruise, kayaking and different cultural activities are a must. And the Food 😋I tried Italian pizza, Cape Verdean buffet, Mexican Quesadilla, Indian buffet, Boston burgers, Boston shakes, and many more. It was a delicious and pleasant living in Boston.
More Projects
