 Hey everyone, I'm gonna go ahead and get started My name is Andrea Burton. I'm a user experience lead at funny monkey here in Portland, Oregon We are let me get to the front of my slides This is Brett Heckman, he's a user experience lead designer at think shout and We have with us joining via Skype. This is Kristen Anton. She's the community builder for new tactics And we're gonna flip back and forth to hear from Kristen so this session is Looking at the new tactic. It's a case study to look at the new tactics website development and It's to look at the UX process for New tactics is a human rights activist website. So I Was at think shout and I did the user experience process and all of the discovery I left to go to funny monkey and Brett took over and so he did he picked up from where I left off on the user experience and he did all the front-end theming This site was in English and Arabic There are other languages on this site, but we focused for the first round on English and Arabic I have a background in developing sites for NGOs in English and Arabic. I don't speak Arabic I just have worked on a lot of websites that have Arabic on them I used to work for an organization called me Dan based in San Francisco and they do a lot of English Arabic translation on the web So to start this presentation out This is the site that we started with this is the original new tactic site and during a discovery process we went from this site Into wireframing in English Then we went to wireframing in Arabic and You'll notice everything switched sides because Arabic is a right-to-left language into a design Into a design in Arabic and then into mobile wireframes and a mobile design And so through this talk in my portion of the talk I'm gonna go through the user experience deliverables the process that we went through to go from the original site All the way up into the design and implementation So I'm gonna let Kristen Anton introduce herself now and Have her introduce new tactics what what their mission is what their website needs were when they came to think shout and Kristen's role at new tactics So let me pull her up Go for it Kristen. Thanks, Andrea So new tactics and human rights is a program of the Center for Victims of Torture, which is an organization based in Minnesota I'm actually in New York. So that made us have to figure out time zones and At least three different time zones at this point, Oregon, Minnesota, New York We help human rights defenders work more effectively so that they can achieve their goals and better address Human rights violations around the world and we do this by documenting and disseminating innovative human rights tactics We do training and mentoring for activists on strategic thinking and we build an online community of activists around the world to share their experiences and knowledge with each other and In 2011 we received funding to create a regional hub in the Middle East and North Africa region This hub was meant to provide resources training and community to activists in the region And in order to make this work. We knew that we needed a new website So we went to think shout Knowing that we needed a an Arabic version of our website which included all of our online community features We knew that we needed a mobile friendly Website and a low bandwidth design We knew that a lot of our users in that region would be Accessing our resources through their phones and we also knew that some of them didn't have very good bandwidth And then we also knew that we just needed an upgrade to Drupal 7 that this was our opportunity to get on to the next version of Drupal and So my role with new tactics is as the online community builder I'm also the administrator of the websites I manage all the content and all the communications and I managed this web development process from our end at new tactics And I've managed our website for years. I moved it from Drupal 5 to Drupal 6 and now we'll move to Drupal 7 So I knew quite a bit about Drupal But this was actually my first time participating in a discovery process, which Andrea will talk more about and We were basically Going to think shout to build the site from the ground up so just to start from scratch and build what we needed and Even though I hadn't done it before it was a really eye-opening experience and I learned a lot So I'll hand it over to you Andrea. Cool. Thanks Okay So the first thing I'm gonna start talking about is the project challenges. So Kristen came to us and They had gotten funding I've worked on English Arabic websites before and I know from experience is Really helpful to get as much user experience research data Collected so that we know exactly what we're building So there was a fixed budget for this project So I had to a little bit secretly try to get in as much user as many user experience Deliverables as I could so I could really understand who the users were and what they wanted exactly The other thing is that the stakeholders were across multiple time zones We're we're in Portland Like Kristen said, you know new tactics and the Center for Victims of Torture, which is the parent organization They're in Minnesota Kristen's in New York, and then we also had a team in the Middle East in Jordan. So we had a span of I think it's nine or ten hours. So there are many times that I was like on six a.m. Calls with Jordan to do stakeholder interviews and Then defining the exact multi-lingual needs and preparing the translated content For those of you who have never worked on a multi-lingual site The first thing and I'll talk about this later in content strategy the first thing you have to do is figure out what your content is and start getting it translated because That takes a long time Because you have many people in the role you have you have to you know communicate with the translator figure out what your content is in English First get that translated make sure it comes back but also Figuring out exactly what the users need who are speaking different languages and I'll talk about this further, you know Drupal 7 Deals with multi-lingual in a few different ways. We took a lot of time figuring out do we want to do, you know node based translation where the the nodes Correspond to each other in Drupal 7 you can do entity based translation I won't go too technical, but that's field level translation for this project We decided to go with the field level translation To prepare new tactics for the future so they could add more languages In my user experience process, I always start out with the objective or It thinks out we we called it desired outcomes So what I do is I start with a stakeholder Call I get everybody on the phone and we just go through and we talk about you know We talk about objectives we talk about target audience or personas and we talk about what those users those personas what their motivations are on the site and Kristen was a really great person to work with she was a client that gave a lot of good feedback And so we worked together to develop these we had a lot of secondary objectives, but these were our main ones The first was to create a global community of human rights practitioners and organizations That need a website to come to to share these tactics now What tactics are and this took me a while while I was doing the research tactics are basically Actions or tools that that human rights activists have used in the past to get their message out to The people that they're you know trying to educate The other thing that we really wanted to do was have new tactics be be the online go-to resource for human rights Activists there's a few other sites out there But we wanted to give it a new look and feel to make it really inviting to human rights activists that didn't know about new tactics To come there and just be like this is the place for For my tactics and then the other main goal because the funding was coming to build specifically this hub for Middle East North African users human rights practitioners. We needed to create an Arabic site to enable Activists in the MENA region to be more effective in their human rights work The next thing we did was we identified the target audience or the personas our main target audience was the human rights practitioners as a whole And mostly we were gearing it We figured out in research and talking to stakeholders and interviews that we really want to go for Experienced human rights practitioners. Those are the people who are actually going to get on the site download resources participate in conversations and With those experienced practitioners on the site. They're also going to pull new practitioners in Other practitioners that fall under the human rights practitioners umbrella is experienced practitioners New tactics they do trainings all over the world. So practitioners that have participated in the trainings Practitioners that will participate And then the other users you always have to consider are the people who are going to be adding the content Which is the new tactic staff and the funders the funders. This is an important lesson. I've really learned in the last few years Part part of the website is to show the funders that their money is going to a good place and it's actually working So It's always good to keep the funders in mind. They're not, you know, the number one user persona But we do need to make sure that our website successful Then to create empathy, I like to come up with examples of these human rights practitioners And so this is just a list of different Practitioners that the new tactics website Serves, you know, and I've worked with some of these NGOs, you know, I'm friends with social media exchange in Beirut So while I'm like building features designing this I can think, okay, my friend Jessica in Beirut She's gonna need to get on the site. She speaks English. She speaks a little bit of Arabic, you know How how is she gonna walk through this? So that's why I like to come up with examples to increase the empathy and Then once I have the target audience, I like to really understand. What is their motivation? That specifically helps me define what features are the most important and be able to prioritize those features we came up with a lot of Motivations but I I for this presentation. I just wanted to show these three The human rights practitioners they want to collaborate and coordinate with other practitioners They want a space to reflect on their weird their work with their peers and they When they're implementing a campaign if they've been using the same tactics You know for their whole career. They want to look for new tactics to and strategies to apply So because of the fixed budget and it was limited I was not able to do like, you know, I would have preferred to like, you know interview at least five different practitioners of different types practitioners in the Middle East Practitioners and other places in the world, but since I didn't have the budget for that I went ahead and did surveys using survey monkey It was a way to get, you know, just numbers to look at so I could make some decisions off of this I went with survey monkey because it supported Arabic Other, you know, I'd looked at like a Drupal form and other stuff like that But this was the the quickest thing out of the box that that supported Arabic I'm just showing one question that I That we posed, you know, what kind of internet connection do you have for the device? You would most likely use to access an online community of human rights practitioners and you'll see the numbers aren't huge here I 10 people answered this question, but it still it gave me a little bit of a sense of who who were gearing towards And you know, these are English speakers not necessarily all You know from the States so but you know, we can see that everybody's getting connected through high-speed But when we look at the Middle East in the Arabic survey, we can see that we we still have some people on dial up And so that was definitely something to consider also. They're connected through high-speed USB dongle I've been to the Middle East. I've used those high-speed USB dongles and I Just know from personal experience. They don't always work that great. So it's good to know that these are the people I'm supporting The next thing I did and I read I feel like this is one of the most important user experience deliverables is user experience mapping so what that means is I I create personas based off of our target audience and What I really like to do is come up with names for them and a personality for them, you know and like Somebody's 40 years old and they work part-time at a grassroots human rights Organization they are able only able to get on to the internet from 8 to 10 p.m. After they put their kids to bed Okay, when are they getting on the internet? So or when are they getting on the new tactics website? To do this stakeholder call this was one of those 6 a.m. Meetings we used go-to Go-to meeting. I really like this tool because I was able to screen share. I put I use Omni Graffle I screen shared Omni Graffle, and then as they were talking to me. I just typed up the notes I was moving these blocks around And you it's hard to see here But so the navy blue boxes that is the That's the user. I'm walking through I'm saying where are they getting to this site. They're coming from Mostly social media sites. That's because Kristen is posting new tactics that show up on the site on Facebook on Twitter That's where these young human rights practitioners are seeing that they're linking to that Okay, where do they go from there? And so they might you know participate in a conversation they might read a case study and Then I like to say okay well, how long are they gonna stay on the site where they're gonna leave from and what this actually helps that helps do is So I've done this so many times where we're like we need to have live chat We need to have all these videos on there and we need to you know Have a discussion forum and all these things but this helps us really focus on what features are people actually gonna use They want to look at their tactic. They want to participate in a conversation They're not gonna hang out and have a live chat at 9 p.m. Because people are all over the world Who's gonna be online then so it allows us to cut out extraneous features The next thing I do based on all of the research that I've Collected at this point is create a sitemap. This is just a small Screen, uh screenshot of a tiny part of one part of the of the new tactics website So I use set the sitemap to define the landing pages where they're gonna navigate to from those landing pages What content is gonna be on those pages? Just a small summary and I'll take that further on and then you know iterative parts of the site So like you know if we have 200 tactics on this site You know from the example of tactics page you'll go into the individual tactics page So based on the sitemap We then define the content strategy now this whole this whole Drupal con we're talking a lot about content strategy I'm a little obsessed with content strategy. I find I've been working on websites for 10 years I find that most websites the the pain point the potential failure point is Getting the content in and when I started working on the web we we would just say oh we'll build the site You have to have all the content written and the site won't go live until it does well I've I've worked on sites that don't go live for six months after we're finished because the content isn't written So what I do for clients is create a content matrix document. I Use a spreadsheet a Google spreadsheet The fields are the page name the URL and this this for the new tactic site It's the language that that piece of content is going to be in what sidebar blocks are going to be on that page What content area blocks are going to be on that page? Are we going to have images or we're going to have video any other media files and then any notes that you know If you have multiple Content editors working on this you can put notes in To figure out where you're at So I created a content matrix document for Kristen. I Loaded her up with a lot of content strategy books I didn't you know I there was no budget for us to for me to actually sit down with her and really help do like a solid content strategy So we work together to get to get this done The other thing for a multilingual site, so there's two parts of doing multilingual sites There's localization, and then there's actually translation of content So the localization what that means is you're translating the navigation links. You're translating Save preview publish like anything in the Chrome that needs to be in the different language Admin menus dashboard menus Things like that so what we did first is we created a translation document for all of those user interface elements She was able to pass that to her translator and then while we're still you know developing features and doing the coding She's already getting that content translated After that once we've really developed the content strategy the content matrix document She knows everything that's going to be in the site Then she's able to pass that on to the translator and I'm going to let Kristin say a few things about the content strategy Andrea when you first asked me if I had a content strategy I remember my response was like oh what I Had no idea what it was Even though I had been managing the site for years and it's embarrassing to admit it, but it's true But all the resources that Andrea gave me were super helpful and I've learned so much and I've really been involved in learning more about it and Although I think that for this first round of web development I think we started really simple with our content strategy and basically just Had this strategy of like let's figure out how to get our main core resources on the new site in a user-friendly way that makes sense to people and that can be translated easily and We've done that and now I can see very clearly how to take that forward So we're looking forward to the next phase of the project so that we can Improve the information architecture and strategy and connecting the content to each other in a in a more thoughtful way What else can I say about that? I don't I remember when you first showed me that spreadsheet that content matrix and it was totally Overwhelming and I don't think I ever actually filled it all out But it was useful at the same time to see all the different pieces that I had to actually figure out before we went forward And I know that things shout kept telling me over and over that Creating the content is going to be the hardest part and it's gonna take a long time And I really honestly did not believe you guys, but it is so true. I had no idea how many people would have to Approve each piece of content and then to get it translated and the whole process took so long So thankfully we got started on that right away and that was definitely something that I learned Yeah, and I think one of the learning lessons there, especially with when working on NGO sites nonprofit sites one thing I've gone to a few content strategy sessions here at Drupal con and It's we need to empower nonprofits to know To ask for a like a content strategy budget like a line item in the budget, and I think we also need to understand that like You know Kristen wears a lot of hats at new tactics. She maintains the site She wrote a lot of the content and like figuring out how to support that I don't necessarily have the answers, but it's like creating but one potential is creating budget to actually have a writer Come on board If that actually yeah, if that's possible if there's money to do it, and I know that there's always limits, but I just think it's It's telling the right story and Actually getting the content written because I can do as much user research and user experience and make as many Suggestions as features, but it's like if we're not telling the right story with the right words It's not gonna work and I mean with websites We do the best we can and and I think you know Well, I'll I'll step forward and show you the design that we came up with and I think we're doing a good job So that's I'm gonna segue out of content strategy and back to the slides So the next thing I'm just gonna quickly touch on the wireframes. We chose to use aksher for the wireframes We did this because aksher actually Supported Arabic I could a lot of times with Arabic. It's really hard to cut and paste into certain programs Because of the characters, but with aksher. I was able to do that I also chose aksher because it allowed you to create mobile Clickable wireframes and also desktop clickable wireframes. You can do like different devices And so I'll just walk you through some of these wireframes We actually went through and did English wireframes Arabic wireframes For the home page and then we also did a mobile Arabic and English just because also doing the survey we found that a lot of the Arabic users They're they're doing a lot of their reading on mobile. So You know here these were all clickable We had like a URL to it so that new tactics and our developers could click through You know one thing that was really important is that we actually needed to define what new Tactics was when people came to the site So I really just wanted to have a big headline that said this is who we are we are a community of human rights activists and then one another thing that we found is like People just were really confused about what to do when they got there So we have you know a get started right away and then because a lot of the funding for this redesign was coming To support the you know the Middle East North African hub I wanted to boom have Arabic immediately on the page where you could see it and announcing the the Mina hub This is what it looked like in Arabic It just was really helpful to do it in Arabic It's helpful for the client who you know hasn't done a Arabic specific site to see this is how it's gonna look like it's helpful for the translators to know what they're gonna work on and Then this is just screenshots of what it looks like on the mobile and You know so we we did a Yeah, we did this in mobile and then Actually, I don't know if we did an Arabic mobile wireframe, but anyway The next Deliverable I really like to do is style tiles What are style tiles? You know style tiles are something that have been around a long time Samantha Warren who used to be a designer a phase two and now as a designer with Twitter She made them really popular a few years ago So a style tile is a design deliverable that references web face Interface elements through font color style collections and So it's instead of doing a whole mock-up of the design I did three different mock-ups to define different colors different type treatments different styles So this was one with one specific color palette and specific fonts button styles And then here, I'm just I'm just doing really quick elements design elements The next one is similar, but we've got a gradient We've got some more textures in there and these styles are different. We've got a Serif font instead of two sans serif fonts and then we did one in Arabic You know, we've got rounded corners here but just just to show like what the Arabic is gonna look like what Arabic fonts are we gonna choose and Right around this time Google web web fonts put out Arabic web fonts and they also have they have a ton. It's they're still an experimental web fonts But you can still use them. So that was the web fonts I chose to go with So now I'm just gonna go to Kristen's feedback of the UX process. Do you want to go into that? Yeah, just briefly I think that the biggest reflection hopefully useful Reflection that I have as you are going through those sides is that as a nonprofit and human rights organization, we want to do everything and when we came to think-shout We had like this huge big beautiful idea of what we wanted for our website And we wanted our users to be able to participate in the conversations through their email and we wanted all kinds of crazy stuff And you guys did a great job of Helping us to narrow down what we needed But I think that it it showed itself through every step of the process When you were trying to get us to identify our goals When you were trying to get us to identify the user motivations the audiences We came up with like 30 things for every question that you asked us when really what I think you wanted was like one to three You know definite answers and that was a huge struggle for us I don't think we knew we didn't know what we wanted and we didn't know the answers to these questions so it was it was a process for us and I guess that's just a word of advice for future Designers as you're working with nonprofits is like Some way to really whittle it down and make it clear that Having just a couple goals is more useful than coming up with 20 because if you have 20 goals How do you know you're gonna actually reach them? And then just the other piece Something that I wish that I had coming out of this discovery process is something that clearly states what our goals were what came out of the user research and then The decisions that we made for the features So that you know even some kind of like table that would clearly show like this goes to this goes to this So that I can go back to that document in two years and say the reason why we chose that font is because of this and the Reason why we have that block over there is because of this remember we put all that thought into it, but Besides that it was a really useful process Excellent. Thanks for that feedback Pull up the slides here, and I'm about to pass it over to Brett This and then this group this slide right here This is the final design based off of all of our research all of our wireframes and The style tiles choosing the colors. This is what we ended up going with and Then I left think shout and Brett came on and so he took everything that I had and he then went in to build the theme so We Passed the baton off so I'm Brett and I'm the current User experience engineer at think shout and as Andrea said I inherited this this this project When the idea of this session was first proposed I wasn't really Sure that I really had Much much to add Of much value, but after Some reflection It occurred me to occurred to me that there there were some really valuable lessons That I learned or or relearned Throughout the process Some more in the vein of relationship management and and others more practical tips coming from someone who had never executed a theme with That required right to left support so the first big hurdle for me was I'm not Andrea Burton There was a ton of work as as we just saw that went into the discovery process a Lot of conversation and discussions that even the most detailed discovery documentation Can't capture all of the nuances of And so the issue for me was you know Day-to-day in my role at think shout currently I rely on a lot of the same methods that that That Andrea used in this project To to figure out objectives organizational goals and you know the The primary The primary objective from a logistical perspective is to arrive at documentation that provides a A roadmap for for implementation But almost of equal importance. I've learned is that it's it's it's a wonderful platform to to begin building trust and so The the first hurdle that that and the first challenge that I was faced with in this project was How to inject myself Given where the project was at this point and How to start that relationship with with Kristen Because there was still plenty of design decisions and user experience work to do as as implementation progressed and If I've learned anything over the years of doing this it's that trust is absolutely essential It's the one thing that stands between a project that's moving forward efficiently towards success and one that's That's you know just there's a time drain Going on so the first thing that I did was obviously I Reviewed all of the discovery documentation that Andrea put together and it was immensely helpful and what I was looking for was Just that any opportunity where I could add value so I was really looking for a small win and What I chose to focus on was just an initial pass at the theme Taking the work that was indicated in the the style tiles and the wire frames What's what I've learned is so great about these these two deliverables is that What you arrive at after putting those in place is essentially just an underpainting the other the other thing I had to remind myself was I Can't be afraid to ask questions I know that Kristen didn't expect that I would That that we would have just been able to transfer all of the knowledge that was inside of Andrea's head when she was leaving the project At the same time I didn't I didn't want to ask stupid questions I wanted to be sure that I was that I had properly reviewed all the discovery documentation and the other thing that was really difficult for me is that something that I enjoy about the discovery process is that You know when it when you first begin it's it's all about these big ideas and and and then Gradually becoming more and more focused Based on what you learn and so I really had to Leave that Roll behind because at this point the the minimum viable product features had been defined and And implementation had begun So some features were complete And others the finer details about how they were actually going to be executed We're still being defined and worked through with the developers So you end up serving more as a guide and as those implementation Issues come up and arise you you help to sort of navigate and find the solutions So now I'm going to move into just a real brief overview of Adding right-to-left support to a theme Drupal does a lot of the heavy lifting for you if you've got the contrived modules That are necessary in play If you don't have a if you're working with a three theme and you want to add right-to-left support And it doesn't currently support that You can take a look at Inside of the the root directory the modules slash systems HTML template And what you'll see there is that Drupal is setting some language specific variables for you for this site we use the Zen theme and And specifically in Zen What they do you can find in template dot PHP is Set these set these language and direction variables and then if you look inside the the layout that won't necessarily be in your your theme if you use the starter kit Unless you have some reason to override that HTML template But if you look inside the the base Zen theme You'll see That at the top of the page In the the beginning HTML tag. That's where they're printing the HTML attributes Variable that we set in template dot PHP and then the result if you want to take a look in fire bug is basically the printing of You know language English direction left to right versus Language Arabic direction right to left from there It's really just a matter of naming conventions in your style sheets. So Take food Style sheet dot CSS add a dash RTL to it This works in a cascading style cascading way so the style sheet dot CSS will be loaded first and Style sheet dot RTL dash RTL will be loaded second. So it's that that ladder The last style sheet is really just for overrides specific to the right-to-left version another great trick that I learned along the way was that Using Zen grids, which is not necessarily only possible using the Zen theme It's just a grid a grid fit framework that could really work with anything He's got this really great Function called Zen reverse all floats That's provided in the right-to-left theme Style sheet Once you set that to true and Import the The the standard left-to-right layout All of the floats will automatically be be reversed the only other best practice that I can recommend is that And this is was learned the hard way is that commenting your code when it's patting or margin or float styling specific to a Particular language direction is absolutely essential unless you want to really go back and have to pick through your theme with a Find tooth comb to to find all those language specific styles So now we're gonna go into just lessons learned I'm gonna let Kristen talk about Some things that she learns and then Brett and I will add anything that we haven't added yet So over to you Kristen Okay, I just have a couple things and maybe you all will have some good questions about our experience building this But there were a lot of tiny little frustrations when dealing with Drupal and Arabic Of one very small example is that the auto complete fields on the back end of nodes You have to put your cursor in the field in Arabic And then you have to use the arrow key to get the cursor to just the right place And then you can start typing and it's just not logical at all where you're supposed to put the cursor and it takes a lot of trial and error and Then you can start typing and then the Drupal will pick up on what it thinks you're typing And this has been a big challenge for us because it just means that it's a lot more difficult for my staff to learn How to use these things that are supposed to be pretty simple in Drupal as a content management system something that is a really big frustration with Arabic is that Currently you can't search our Arabic site in Arabic It turns out or it seems that Drupal core the search in Drupal core doesn't Support Arabic so we're gonna have to completely redo that Which is really frustrating and a lot of these things we just had no idea that you know, this is going to be a problem and then for myself I've been an administrator of a Drupal site for years and Walking into this rule of becoming an administrator for an Arabic website. I wasn't I really wasn't sure what to expect and It's been pretty interesting I've had to add all of the translated content Not just the content but also all the blocks all the labels all the buttons all the menus the taxonomy terms and it's tough because I don't read any Arabic at all and so it's a lot of guessing and Working with my team in Jordan and it was hard because I can't just train my staff in Jordan on how to add a translated taxonomy term to a Drupal 7 website I have to figure it out intimately so that I know exactly which button I'm pushing and it was also a lot of spreadsheets of Translated terms so I would just go through page by page of the English site and write down every term and every phrase And then ask our translator in Jordan to translate it all in that spreadsheet So and I still have it and I still go back to it all the time So those are some of the lessons learned and frustrations so far I'm sure there are a million more and and for me Some lessons I learned is that like When I start on a website like I'm a user experience nerd I love working on multi-lingual sites I've traveled in the Middle East. I've worked with a lot of NGOs in the Middle East and so and I work with NGOs specifically because like That's my passion. I want to see change in the world all of these things and I think on this project. I I Just wanted I wanted to do all of these deliverables. We didn't actually have budget for so I had to I had to sneak them in a little bit and So I I don't know I guess the lesson is either get more budget ahead of time or I have to just like calm down and be like I can only do these few things and you know hope that I get the You know get the features and get that all of what I need, but you know a website's never finished and It's gonna take multiple iterations and like we've taken this new tactic site from You know the old design to the new design and like Kristen said before we're still learning lots of lessons So I'm gonna wrap it up if there's any questions you can come to the mic I could just add one other thing. Sorry Just to tell you guys a little bit about the result the end product Oh, yeah The English site was launched in December and then the Arabic site was launched in February mostly because the translation hold ups And so far we've hosted two online conversations in Arabic which is really the main event that we host through the website and Those topics were on the strategic use of social media for human rights And then the second topic was on monitoring prisons We had a total of 170 comments for both of those conversations And it involved about 25 people from I think about six or seven countries in the region So it's been really positive. We've had 9,000 visits at least That was as of like three weeks ago since the launch of the Arabic site and that's specifically for the Arabic website and we can also see through our Google Analytics that the The number of visitors coming to our site that have their browser set to Arabic has increased by 350% which shouldn't be a surprise, but It I mean really we've broadened our audience by so much and We are offering so much to people to activists in the Middle East and It feels like there's a lot of momentum and excitement and we're really happy with the response so far any questions so I was wondering the Difficulty that Kristen mentioned about Arabic in the autocomplete fields if either of you know if That or things like that are being addressed in like the D8 Translation internationalization initiatives, maybe you don't but I thought I have no idea. Yeah, nobody else know I Honestly, I honestly don't know I'm gonna guess that it hasn't been addressed yet I Think I mean there's also an issue is that And I faced this at me Dan when I was working with Arabic is that neither Kristen or I speak Arabic and like so When I was having to add, you know translations to different websites like I do read and speak Hebrew So I understand like right to left But and so I could like recognize the symbols But you have to like change your keyboard and like I work on a max You have to change your keyboard to Arabic you have to figure out what the key mappings are You have to like do all of these things and then like so, I mean I really guess the lesson is and it's it's not It's nobody's fault. It's just like We need an Arabic speaker to really put you know, like that's the user experience an Arabic speaker needs to be putting this content in But that's not the actual possibility I don't know if it's a JavaScript thing or if it's a utf coding thing because like So I'll find out. I'll look into that We got another question. It's also an opportunity for us to engage the Drupal community in the Middle East because I know that there are a lot of Really active Drupal contributors in Egypt and other countries there and Maybe maybe this is the time for me to finally reach out to them and ask for their help and find out what they What solutions they've found to these kinds of problems? Yeah, definitely or just sharing the problems that I'm having that'd be helpful too Yeah, there's a sorry go ahead Sounds like a bug to me and you could just post an issue and someone might try to reproduce it and help you figure out how to fix it Okay, I just wanted to address the translation Management there's actually a module called the translation management tool I haven't personally used it But and this probably speaks to you're running out of budget sounds like towards the end of the project But I would definitely recommend anyone doing international websites to spend a lot of time thinking about the Administrative interface and plan for a tool like this. Yeah, there are other options like Exporting Content to be translated professionally, but that requires obviously a lot bigger of a budget the transmission Translation management tool allows for an inner a centralized interface and you can assign Drupal roles to be a translator And so you can actually just have it's sort of like an automated way of Using that spreadsheet, but it actually maintains the content in the context of the Drupal website So nobody has to go through and copy and paste that content back into Drupal. It's just like a Drupal interface Yeah translating the content in the website Yeah, I've I haven't used the Translation management module for D7. I used it in D6 It switched namespace. Okay, and I have never used it personally because what it was a company There was a I can localize I can localize was doing it I used it at me Dan for Drupal 6 and It it worked I think me Dan is actually working on their own translation management module the reason we didn't go with that on this project Is because new tactics only has one translator and so to put a huge code base for one module for one translator It just was a little bit overkill and the user experience of that is a little wonky and when I use it in D6 It's like a big I can localize logo and I think their specific use case is Hiring translators who you know, there's there's a whole translator community where you can like You can just work online and make like two cents a word or something like that The new module there's there's an interface. There's two ways of doing it There's one where you can hire out your translations And then there's another one where you can just have an administrative interface within your site and assign a user a translator role So cool. I'll check it out for D7. I just most of the projects. I've worked on didn't have like You know the the translation infrastructure of like managers and editors and stuff, but yeah, thanks, Jesse And another question Did you talk just briefly about your approach to the low bandwidth Goal or objective? Did you have a separate targeted site to cut down on images? Or did you just make the focus on making a whole site super low bandwidth? So You know, we knew that there was low bandwidth. We knew that certain places in Like so Jordan has really good high-speed internet Beirut Lebanon has good. I Think it's download speed, but the upload speed is really slow. And so it changes everywhere I mostly tried to like Just design it in a way that like didn't have like really really heavy background images for the body and that You know, I had certain ideas about if I was going to do the theme, but you know life happens I got a new job. So I don't know Brett. Did you specifically build any of those things in? You know, I mean the other thing to do is like you can do different kinds of different Resolutions of images things I've done is on mobile sites. You just don't show the images There's different things you can do to like be like, you know You can test what this bandwidth speed is. We didn't do that here, but yeah, okay. Thanks Yeah, I'm about to be working on a project Encompassing a lot of Africa. So yeah a huge issue another thing is like don't Like web fonts adds extra extra Download anything that's gonna like a jQuery that if you're like pulling that in from Google like external URLs You just want to limit those kind of things like yeah Yeah I'm working with the side and it's multi-lingual. We have to translate the content in seven different languages. Wow, and I'm having a problem like I Figure out the way how to translate the menu items. We did that. We are just I mean we just launch the site as a beta version and We are working in a dev to translate the content Can you tell me how do you manage the taxonomy like when you define a content type and reference the Taxonomy on the content type like did you actually translate the content type? So taxonomy term or Did you bid did you add a different taxonomy term for different languages? Gotcha. I Think there's a taxonomy translation module I'm not sure Kristen. Did are you using the same taxonomy terms for Arabic and English? Well, like are the are the terms you know if one term is strategy. Are you exactly translating that to strategy? I Believe so But it there could be a few that were set up a little bit differently Like country for example that we're using a taxonomy term for country Or vocabulary for country and so each country has a direct translation into Arabic that was really simple But there were a couple Vocabularies that we're using that didn't have that one to one where we wanted to allow for some Arabic terms that would exist just on the Arabic site and some English terms just on the English site But I'm pretty sure we implemented that way, but I can't think of an example of how we're using that But another thing maybe to point out is that our site isn't a one-to-one translation for all of our content We can have nodes Conversations comments that are that just live on the Arabic site and we can have content that just lives on the English site That was something that we hadn't mentioned. Yeah and Another thing I would say I mean, this is where a trend trans multilingual sites get really really confusing And I really like it because it's a challenge, but a lot of developers I talked to they're like Well, I'm not even gonna mess with multilingual, but I think it's really important to look at the use case like you know Are your users? Bilingual do they speak multiple languages? Would it be helpful to show specific taxonomy terms in one language? But also show the English or another language You know, what would would that hurt the user experience if there is not a one-to-one translation? Like maybe there's one term in one language that actually doesn't translate So I don't know if Drupal does Multilingual taxonomy terms that well But it doesn't because if you set it up that way So there should be a one-to-one translation, but you don't enter that other translation You'll see that there's an empty field if you're making if you're displaying that field on the node Now that I think about it and we ran into that problem a few times and You know at funny monkey. We are thinking about doing We do educational products, so we I really want to get into the translation world With the educational products and the way we're starting to think about translation is not the way that Drupal is thinking about it Not a one-to-one relationship like you have this piece of English content And then you've directly translated it to this, you know Arabic content because they're both going to change and So the way we're thinking about it is you have this original content you clone it And then you say okay now I'm going to make the language Arabic and now they're two different entities and they're going to exist on their own and so Entity translation like doing field level translation kind of helps that so that if you're looking at a page in English you can hit translate and you can see which fields have been translated, but I still think it's like If I only speak Arabic, I only want to see the content that's in Arabic I'm not going to look I'm not going to use the language switcher So I think like it just it really actually it's a content strategy thing again. It has to be relevant to the users that You're you're hoping will read the content Did you use any fallback? cases like for example if we launch a site in English we put every content and We don't have a content ready on Spanish And somebody click on the Spanish language. I mean it's partially translated to Spanish. Yeah So what will happen like in that menu menu items and content is there a way that? We can if it's not translated to English Spanish can be just display in English. Yeah entity entity feel like field level translation will let you do that So let's say you've done the title and the body, right? Yeah, if you've done the title in the body in Spanish, you can see those Spanish terms Yeah Right, which I honestly I think is all kind of hacky like what does the user really want? You know like let's say I only speak Spanish and I come to this page Am I going to be satisfied to read a title and a description when really what I want is that PDF download? you know, so it's like Is it even helpful to? Have a Spanish toggle on that page like probably shouldn't even have it You know unless you think your user might be able to read both languages Okay, my other question is did you use? like did you use the nose turn no translation or in entity translation because I Found that node entity translation. You'd have to translate every field in the content type And they separate user interface for translating can't like every field So is that what you did or? I wasn't involved in the development. I know that they used entity translation. Do you have any? We don't have the person who did the back end development here adding when you add in content Will you will you say that this is for English hating? This is for Spanish hating this is for our big heading. Yeah, did you have to say that or I mean? Kristen when you're adding content, so you have an English node when you want to make it Arabic You you're just translating via the fields, right? Well, there's a translation tab like you would expect and then you see the entire back end of the node Just as it is in English actually and it's all in Arabic. So there's the title. There's the body There's the taxonomy terms. There's the publishing options Everything is there in Arabic So I don't know how that was built on entity translation because it looks like it's the entire node being translated But I'm not sure. I think that's the node translation of the entity translation when you say entity translation that field has to be translated with the via Translation interface. Yeah, it does sound like it does sound like no translation I'm not sure because I wasn't there during the development, but I can follow up with the developer and have any problem with like Translating views in different languages because Yeah, when you put the views on the page How did you handle that like when you are the piece if somebody is check on different languages and You supposed to render the same piece and if you're different language So this specific website like the Arabic content didn't match up like is Totally different content than the English content. So they were different views, but yeah, you're right There is a problem like Drupal is not a perfect multi-lingual solution. I think we do what we can and You know like Yeah Okay, so there's a there's a module called views translation to have any experience with the search like whatever search like we are using solar search and That search has to be translated like we have ten different microsites. We are Combining into one side. Yeah translating into different like seven different languages, right? It's all real content and all landing pieces. Thank you. Yeah I sorry, I don't have all the answers. It's it starts to get really really complicated and like when you throw solar search in there and then you're supporting seven different languages and then you have to have like I Did a site in D6 with Apache solar search and We had to get a bunch of add-ons to like support the specific language and With the database and to make sure that you know, I'm not I'm not a backend developer So I don't know all of the details, but it was a process. It's not straightforward and Yeah, so I feel your pain But I think it's possible and like I mean this is this is the great thing about the internet is that like It's global. We're all speaking different languages. You know, it's possible like I'm really inspired by global voices Website because they're doing a really good job of translation. They're doing the best they can they're using wordpress. I believe What's that Yeah So I When I'm trying to think about translation I go and I'm like, okay, how are they doing it? Global voices on is it global voices or global voices online? Oh Yeah, global voices online global voices online Yeah, thank you. Thank you so much Kristen Yeah, can you talk right into the microphone Kristen when you refer to English side or Arabic side, what do you mean? Okay, because it's all one big site. It's so interesting Because with my team mighty tactics team I always talk about it as if it's there's an English site and an Arabic site, but really it is all the same site Yeah, what I mean is that there's a community of Arabic speakers Okay able to go to straight to the Arabic website Now if their browser is set to Arabic it will automatically show up in Arabic in their browser And they're able to search and explore all of our resources that are in Arabic and there's a lot and they're able to participate In a community in the Arabic language. So it's like it says if it's its own Thing it's like its own platform and then the English speakers would participate in the English Okay, thank you Yeah Sorry for the confusion. It's all one site Which was part of a you know user experience problem we had to solve it was like okay We're gonna have Arabic users going on to the same site, but they only speak Arabic But maybe they'll be bilingual, but we really just want them to participate in the Arabic conversations It's not like we're having one conversation that gets translated. It was we're having two separate conversations Any other questions? Yes Yeah, so the question was a timeline question She asked we we published the English in December and just and then and then recently the Arabic one We started develop or we started the user experience process Can you refresh my brain May it was May in May for April and The I left think shout in October so but but Development had already begun before I left so I was finishing up the research We had already started the development Brett came on and did the theming so from October to December They finished up the English site. So yeah, and by finishing up the English site I just mean that the website was live and we hid the Arabic button So it's not like we launched one site and then another site That's another confusing part on my and it's that we just didn't we just didn't make public the Arabic button Yeah Yeah, you're welcome. Well, thanks everybody for coming and state sticking around at the very end of the day and You can find me on Twitter at Andrea Burton and If you have any more questions New tactics is at new tactics on Twitter Answer and at KJ Anton and you want me to say your Twitter, you're not much of a Twitter or Okay, thank you. Everybody. Have a great conference. Thanks for coming. Thank you Yeah, thank you Okay, bye