 And I wanted to welcome you all to today's presentation, and with that I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to my colleague at Pro BonoNet, Miranda McGeley. Thank you so much, Jillian, and thank you everyone for joining. A special appreciation goes out to my panelists. As Jillian mentioned, my name is Miranda McGeley, and I serve as the Partnerships Manager at Pro BonoNet. So I'll be moderating today's discussion, and I'm very excited to introduce everyone you'll be hearing from. So I'm going to start with my colleague, Zizi Vandera, and Zizi joined the Immigration Advocates Network in 2015 and has extensive experience working for immigrant, worker, and LGBT rights. Their previous experience includes working with the Coalition for Communion, Immigration Rights of Los Angeles, Public Allies in Los Angeles, the American ACLU of Southern California, Equal Quality California, and the Trevor Project. We also have Takao Yamada, who is a Seattle-based attorney and entrepreneur. Among the many hats he wears, he's a co-founder of AirportBlooder.org, which was created in direct response to President Trump's original travel ban and continues to serve as a resource for both volunteer attorneys and individuals potentially facing deportation. We also have Sergio Acubia, and he is the Director of External Relations at Legal Aid Society with Hawaii, and his work focuses on improving access to justice and creating resources for legal aids clients. He's helped to implement Hawaii's court-based self-help center, launched its Self-Help Interactive Forms Project, and developed its Self-Help Legal Information Videos. And last but not least, we have Anna Stale, who is the Director of Consulting at JustTech, where she works with legal service providers to develop and implement strategic technologies that are in line with those organizations' needs. And she's got her start in legal services technology as the technology coordinator at Legal Assistance of Western New York, where she managed a number of LSE TIG-funded projects. So, as Julie mentioned, today is the second of a two-part series on language access, and if you were unable to attend the first of the two-part series, we encourage you to check out the recording. The link to the recording is displayed on the slide, and it's also available in the chat box. The webinar featured a great group of panelists, some I see listening in today, so I'm going to try and do a summary and highlights justice, and they'll keep me honest. So they talked about machine translation, which is basically automated text translation, so things like Google Translate, which many of us are familiar with, as well as Translation Memory, which is software, basically that captures translation for shared and future use. The panel has covered various experiences of both of these tools, but a general theme that emerged is that these tools both have strengths and drawbacks and are dearly used in the context of a broader translation process with some expert human review. We heard about examples of machine translation on its own, making material changes to the meaning of content, so this is an example where human review is particularly important in the access to justice context, and we also heard about successful models of translation memory use by both volunteers and professional translators, and one of the lessons there is that the quality of the translation is really controlled by the strength of the initial translation done using the tool. So the part one series started off emphasizing that meaningful language access is the goal, and part of which means that translation should be understandable about the audience they are targeted for, and I really think this concept of meaningful language access will continue to be relevant and central to today's presentation. So as far as today's presentation goes, after my brief introduction, we'll hear from Anna, who will talk about ReadClearly.org and WriteClearly.org and more generally the rule of plain language as an initial step for this meaningful language access and the translation process. After that, Sergio will cover his experience with LSE TIG-funded Language Access Projects to Cal will then share about his experience with the rapid rollout of airportlawyer.org and special considerations with the translation of site content, including languages that use different alphabets, and the process for outreach to communities that Airport Lawyer was targeting to assist. We'll then hear from Zizi, who is covering the redesign of ME.org, which is a tool for immigrants to understand their legal options around naturalization and other issues, and how confidence and building trust among its targeted users factored into that design process. And we will end with some time for questions, but as Jillian and Sart mentioned, we welcome questions between each speaker. So unless there's initial comments or questions, I will turn things over to Anna. And again, thank you for attending. Hey everybody, my name is Anna Steele, and I'm the Director of Consulting at Just Tech. Thank you, Miranda and Jillian and Sart for having me here today. And so as Miranda mentioned, I got my start in legal aid at Legal Assistance of Western New York, where I was very, very quickly introduced to the importance of plain language and legal aid writing. I was right out of undergrad. I was an AmeriCorps VISTA. I was really excited to kind of jump into the advocacy space, getting to talk with clients and getting to help them with their legal issues. And I worked on my first letter that I had written for my clients, again, applying everything that I had just learned with my fresh new bachelor's degree and how to be a great writer and using big words and sounding really intelligent in your writing. And I present that to my supervisor and they're like, what? Can't send this to your client. And so that was kind of my very expedited introduction to plain language and its importance in the legal aid space. And from then, I have definitely become a huge advocate for plain language and really encourage folks to take it into consideration when they're developing written materials, both for their website, to be given to their clients. And I was fortunate enough to be involved in the development of some plain language tools while at Law New York, which I'll talk about today. Hopefully many of you have heard of them and this is just a refresh. I hope and if not, welcome to those who are starting your plain language journey and look forward to discussing some of these things with you today. So plain language, right? So here we have an example of a foreign actor from our good friends over at transcend translations. And plain language, not only the language access issue, but it's also an access to justice issue. If we are not going to be writing our legal information materials or correspondence with clients in a way that is readable, we might as well be presenting it to them in a language that they do not speak. You know, there's all sorts of information out there on what the average reading level is. And you know, we hear that that's often around seventh or eighth grade and that grade level really changes when we're talking about low income people and people who have not had as much experience in the education system as others. So plain language isn't just, you know, very carefully editing your work, right? It's by no means dumbing down your writing. It's really taking a proactive approach to the development of your writing, really getting to know your audience, writing to that audience, and developing documentation in a way that is really understandable. So when approaching a document, you want to make sure that your audience can understand it the first time around. You know, when people are looking for legal information, they're often in crisis. They often, you know, are trying to gather what information they can between getting off of work and getting home to their families or between two different jobs or after hours, right? And they're trying to get the best handle on their legal problems that they can, right? We all know that we we can't provide an attorney to every person who walks through our door. So the better written material or the better our online materials are, the better off our client population is. And you know, we're really not going to be able to achieve our goal of 100% access without really taking plain language into account. And so plain language is, you know, it's own our training, it's own all-day training, right? So I'm not going to get too too much into the nitty-gritty here, but just some of the highlights, right? There's obviously a writing component to plain language, a grammar component to plain language, right? Things like avoiding the passive voice, right? Things like keeping sentences short, using more basic words, right? Avoiding words with too many syllables that are too complex, right? Really avoiding legalese, avoiding those words like where for that are so common in our legal writing. And you know, beyond the words on the page itself, there's really kind of a visual and a visual component to plain language as well, right? You'll notice from this example from transcend that the plain language example is much clearer, much easier to follow, not only in the language it's used, but the way that it's displayed on the page. So there are a number of tools out there that can help you while on your plain language journey. Two of these are write clearly and read clearly. And these are the two that I'm going to discuss today. The one thing that I do want to point out, those of you who do all of your work in Microsoft Office, there is the ability to test the readability of your information, of your writing, using built-in tools in Microsoft Word and also in Outlook for your emails. You can turn that on in your settings and it appears at the end of your spelling and grammar check. So there's a little readability score there that can help you kind of keep track of things. So write clearly. This is, this project goes way back and has seen many, many iterations, all of which were TIG funded. We worked with a number of partners throughout the process, mainly transcend translations and the folks over, the open advocate team over at Urban Insights. And we'll start with write clearly here and what it is. It's a plain language offering tool that allows you to check your web content for plain language and it's very easy to use. You just go to openadvocate.org slash write clearly and you can click and drag this blue button here. You can just click and drag that right up to your bookmark bar and it will be able to run on websites. So it's free to use and it's very easy to use. It is, it can be used in any browser and once it's up in your bookmark bar you can navigate a page and check it for readability. So here is one quick example that I have. This is from an article on bankruptcy. We've clicked the write clearly button and it gives us our flesh-concade grade level which in this instance is 5.94 so six grades so we're looking pretty good. It gives us a brief summary on what we can do to make that document more readable potentially right so we've got shortening long sentences replacing complex words using gender neutral language awarding too many underlines and it will take you step by step throughout the the content on the website and show you sentence by sentence what you can do to improve that. So we have a couple of examples here. This first one right it's telling us that we should use gender neutral language so not only is that something as a community we should be trying to do in our writing in general but it's also a plain language decision to make right it can be it can overly complicate sentences and can take away from some of the the meaning of the sentence or can confuse the reader about who the subject of the sentence is and also when you're writing in plain language you want to be again you want to be addressing your audience so you want to be saying you whenever possible and and making sure that you're directly addressing them. The second one here we have telling us to replace some complex words or phrases right so in this example it highlighted in order two and it says to just replace that with the word too. So it gives you the ability to see some of the words that are problematic and also gives you suggestions for words that you may want to use instead. The third example that I have here is just telling us to shorten this sentence right let's see one two three is they say that sentences should be around 20 words or less right so that's something that you really want to think about you don't want to have complex sentences and you want to really avoid having too many clauses in a sentence when you're looking at your plan. So the second piece that I wanted to talk about was read clearly read like write clearly read clearly has had a number of different iterations and read clearly is a plain language glossary for websites again it's free very easy to use also available on open ad tickets website and for those of you who have open ad to get websites for your programs you can just click a button to turn on read clearly on your website otherwise you can install it the same way you would install something like google analytics right so really kind of easy snippet to put into your your website code and so while on york I worked alongside Maria Midland and her team at transcend translations to work on these different glossaries and what this does is the glossary will look at your web content the words will be highlighted that are in the glossary and it will give a plain language definition of that word and like I said we've had many different iterations of the glossary refining it over time expanding and refining it over time and we're really really happy with the direction that it's going in and one thing that we've been really excited about which kind of also plays into the conversation of of these past this webinar and the the preceding one is is the language access issue component of this and we added the ability for certain words in the glossary certain English words in the glossary to have Spanish definitions right so someone may be able to read English to an extent but they may find it easier to have more complicated words explained in their native language so here's an example of that where we defined a mortgage in Spanish to give a someone who's a native Spanish speaker a better idea of of what a mortgage is right because that's something someone who's not a native English speaker might not understand or they might know what it is but to have the definition in their native language makes a lot more sense and then the next component of this is a full Spanish glossary right so we also have a small full Spanish glossary for folks that have Spanish mirror sites or content that is all in Spanish and it does the same thing it gives definition to the words that we select and this has been a really interesting process we've learned a lot and I think one of the important things that to consider going forward is you know when we first our first adaptation of this and using Spanish as part of these glossaries was to just take the words that we were defining in English and define them in Spanish but what's important is that we kind of think through that a little bit more right because a complex word in Spanish may not be a complex word in English an easy word in Spanish or excuse me in English may have a more complex word in Spanish something we wouldn't normally define in English we would want to define in Spanish so I think as this project continues to evolve that's definitely something that we want to to be thinking about is making sure that you know we're not just directly translating the glossary necessarily from English to Spanish but really thinking through how we can make it more beneficial for folks who speak other languages and one of our biggest requests around read clearly has been to be able to create custom glossaries and you can do that now you we keep all of our read clearly glossaries on github for those of you who are unfamiliar with github there's a couple really good ellen's and tap webinars on how to use it and so what you can do is you can go go to our github github repo and you can find these glossaries and you can download them and edit them and make them their own if you want to spin up a whole new language you can and you know then there's a vetting process for these glossaries and then they can be made available to the the read clearly community as a whole which is really exciting because I know that you know different jurisdictions different states have different you know words may be used slightly differently there may be you know places that want to create glossaries that are specific to a certain area of law or again a specific language so I definitely encourage folks who are interested in using read clearly to consider what they would need to do or if it's necessary and what they would need to do to create to create their own glossaries as I said this is both of these projects are ongoing and evolving so definitely interested to hear feedback from folks who are using it and I really strongly encourage all of you to think about plain language in your content development and I'm happy to answer any questions now or at the end of webinar or feel free to reach out if you have any questions as well thank you Anna I think we'll pause now for questions before we turn things over to Sergio I am not seeing any questions at this time just definitely want to reiterate though how amazing read clearly and write clearly are as resources just super valuable I use them with all of my new staff because really untraining that those bad habits from law school is so important for helping clients thanks Art so now we'll hear from Sergio good morning everyone let me go back a slide all right I think I'm all set here yeah good morning everyone thank you again Miranda and for everyone for having me as part of this panel this morning so I'm really as I'm coming from the perspective or experience of from an LSE organization you know for some of you that are on the call you know you understand we have limited resources so for us we rely a lot on on TIG funding rely a lot on creativity and you know finally we rely on what we some best practices that we get from some of the conferences that we attend the ITC conference you know learning from what other organizations are doing especially what Anna was doing when she was with the legal aid organization in New York so I'll be talking more on that perspective with Hawaii we're a little bit unique that I know some other states probably face similar issues that issues as well but 25 percent of our population oops I'm going to go back 25 percent of our popular having a little bit of trouble here okay so with 25 percent of our population speak a language other than English at home there's at least 130 languages are spoken in the state the top three spoken languages are Tagalog Ilocano those are Filipino languages and Japanese but according to the Hawaii State Judiciary the highest demand for interpreter languages are Chukis Ilocano and Marshallese so what makes us a little bit unique is that you know with you know our sister states in the mainland you know Chukis Ilocano and Marshallese they're not common languages that you would find even if you had machine translation there's not as much resources that you would find for Chukis or Ilocano and Marshallese so Chukis and Marshallese those are languages spoken from the co-planations compact or free free association association so those are countries in the Pacific and that's kind of the challenge that we face out here in Hawaii so I'm going to go over some of our current legal legal tech tools that we have and again these are all mostly from TIG funding so we have our legal form helper we have our legal information videos and then we have our Hawaii legal services portal I know a few other legal aid organizations you know the online forms that the H.J forms it's common for us we have over 40 40 forms now you know in all different areas of law from housing to family to disaster relief and of course with the issue with this is despite the number of forms that we have we don't have any that are translated in other languages so despite having these resources I mean the problem we're facing is how can we have you know how can we get usage from LAP communities language English proficient communities in our state to use some of these resources online with that in mind we did apply for another another grant a TIG grant it was to create these legal information videos and then just knowing kind of the language access issues that we do have in the state we were able to translate a few of these videos into two piece the locano and Marshallese in terms of actually translating it we worked with the Hawaii State Judiciary just to get feedback from them in terms of in terms of what languages that you know that that they're experiencing in the courts for interpreters what are well the most common language is that they're that they need interpreters for so based on that their feedback we created these legal information videos what's great about some of these youtube videos is that you know you can create the subtitles on the bottom for people that are hearing impaired if some are in English you know you could you could do different subtitles in different languages so this is some we have we have some that are translated into two keys we have some that are in Marshallese and we have some that are in locano and of course some of the challenges when doing this doing these videos it's just making sure that the product that we're producing is actually based on best practices you know in terms of translations just switch screens and then our final project so we also have the legal services portal so with this portal you know working together with pro bono net and in law help which is to have a resource where people can go to can go to for the right referral and for the right legal resource and information brochures and of course the challenge that we're facing of course is how do we get people from the LFE communities to use these resources when one we don't have it in their language and two we're not even sure if they're able to access some of these resources so you know based on that our current TIG project TIG a funded project is to basically to better some of these resources to make sure that you know we do provide meaningful inclusion for our LFE communities you know we can have all these great tools and resources online but if it's not being used by our LFE communities then you know I feel like it's really a disservice to our state and to the different populations that we serve so one of our main goals is improving online accessibility to legal resources for the state scoring LFE population and what we're looking to do is working with the Hawaii State Judiciary and its Office on Equality and Access to the Courts just again to determine the best languages for translation and I think for us it's really just working with our community partners especially our judiciary and you know our other community organizations just to get feedback and you know what are some of the issues that they're facing or what are some of the issues that they're seeing in the LFE communities and we'd like to be able to translate our current law help website into at least three other languages. A lot of law help sites nationwide you know they're available in in Spanish or some of the more common Asian languages but for us you know to be able to have something in Marshallese to be able to have something in Chukis it's just really important for our community and then just something that I think that's a novel or for us just a novel approach we're actually looking to do outreach and education to the different LAP communities making sure that they're aware of these resources and from our understanding with some of our staff that are from some of the LAP communities is that one of their methods of communication you know letting people know that you know this resource is available or letting people know where to go to for help this is it's through Facebook through Facebook and social media some of their community navigators you know one of our staff member who's who's working on this project you know there's this notion that the community respects well-known advocates so we're looking to launch this community navigators project and then based on based on their feedback letting them know that these tools are available and then from that from that being able to share the resource in the community for some of these more the island-based cultures it's really still word of mouth you know through community gatherings through churches through extended family events and right now it really looks like through social media specifically through Facebook that's how they get their information across you know not everyone has access to a desktop but everyone usually has some sort of cell phone or smartphone you know and from that that's where they access Facebook or some of the different social media platforms actually something coming soon is is the legal navigator this is something that we're very excited about this is a project that's led together by Microsoft the legal services corporation in a pro bono net we also have the Pew Charitable Trust that joined nearly 2018 and what it is it's a it's a new initiative that's a I know some of you guys have heard about in different conferences but it's a web-based tool that uses clear simple language to help people understand their civil legal problems and find the correct path forward so really the goal is just it's it's Hawaii and Alaska were chosen to pilot these online platforms but we're looking to use cutting-edge kind of user-centered technology to make sure that people can access the civil legal help that they need and access to other resources and I think for us what's exciting about it is that there is the component of language access I think that's one of the common questions we get all the time when we do when we share this project with the public is how are you especially here in Hawaii is how are we going to address language language access language access issues in terms of the project it will support machine translations right now the basic strategies to support machine translation for basic navigation elements like the informational text but it's also going to allow for human centered human translated versions of the curated experience so what's great about it is it's it's still going to be in the beta testing we're going to test it out hopefully we'll have something to pilot early 2019 tested out in the different LEP communities see how we can improve the tool based on their feedback and again it really goes back to Microsoft's inclusive design strategy when you know when you started this project it's it's just using the set of principles and methods that they use when they produce products that are with the mindset that it should be accessible to all and learning from the different types of perspectives so that's something exciting and especially when it comes to language access though we hope to get this right as one of the pilot states with Alaska and we'll have more to report back once we go into testing phase with that I'm going to turn it over if anyone has any questions thanks Sergio that was awesome and I look forward to seeing more okay so I don't believe there are questions for you at this point we're also safe time at the end for questions and next up we're going to hear from Takao hi sorry I was muted for a second there thank you so much for having me here today as Miranda said I've helped found and developed the airport lawyer app that helps people with visa issues at the airport I also helped found Wyden which is a new program which helps immigrants that are facing removal proceedings receive paid legal counsel and that professionally my background is in the business side of tech startups as well as being a lawyer but I'm I'm here because of my experience with particular translation issues related to the development of the airport lawyer app airport lawyer was developed following the announcement of the travel ban in early 2017 and the response at the time involves the legal a huge number of lawyers and the legal community in general expressing significant interest in going down to the airport and helping out and this was great but it created two significant problems the first was organization which each airport dealt with differently but they all sort of spun up their own ad hoc organization the second problem was both more important and more challenging and that was just how to find people who needed help all these lawyers wanted to help but they had no way of reaching or even discovering potential clients CBP would pull someone aside and take their cell phone and secondary screening so they had no way to call out or alert anyone that might need help and so our solution at first was very basic which was of course to walk around the airport and talk to anyone who looked worried and looked like they'd been waiting a long time and this was productive and we helped a lot of people but you can see that this is not comprehensive and there's anything but efficient so I ended up discussing this problem with another tech oriented attorney and we reached out to a software engineering firm the other logic that had previously expressed interest in trying to help with the problem and there we began the process of trying to build something new which of course meant a lot of very lengthy conversations on flak and via email we started with a problem people in distress or who are worried that it might be placed in distress have no means of contacting the ready supply of legal aid that is waiting to help them and from there we began stripping it down to its most essential idea two groups of people needed to connect now what does that mean that means there needs to be simple because you need to account for every level of sophistication it needs to be as Anna Steele pointed out her presentation in plain language because it needs to be used quickly and also plain language really helps ease the process of translation it needs to be secure enough that random people can't access it but it can't be so secure that it takes time to build because building very secure systems is time consuming and challenging for all the parties involved in the process and so what we came up with is airport lawyer you can see on the screen airport lawyer is a simple straightforward web app that lets people enter their relevant information have it be received by a selected coordinator at their destination it's very simple text light it's in six languages it's secure and it doesn't require significant user steps it's been very successful we worked with 20 different airports and 20 different organizations and well the travel ban is no longer in place I still get contacted as a Seattle coordinator almost once a week by someone using this app or someone who's been referred to this app to try and get legal help as they're entering the country and there are a couple of lessons that I think we can take from our development experience and apply to any anyone looking to develop new technologies that will require translation the first and most important thing that I took away from the experience was about the gathering in value of user stories for something that is going to have to be translated in multiple languages at an early stage of development when developing new product especially in an emergent situation like this was in response to the travel ban it can be easy to forget that you're not the end user and get very focused on the product you wanted to design in your head in this case you know we started development but the lawyer is not the end user as a airport lawyer it's the that scared person waiting in customs and thinking those terms helped us to better define or refine the problem and it helped us deal with translation issues earlier rather than later because what we did is we reached out to a number of community leaders and brought them into the discussion and started the conversation earlier about well what what what are your needs going to be what's it going to look like and how is how is this going to work for you so you know when we started out we had this vision of a platform with real-time communication and a full suite of security measures but that's really complicated that's very slow that's challenging for someone on an iphone or with no wi-fi in the back of the airport who doesn't speak english so one of the first things in feedback we got was a lot of keeping it simple and on a language translation level this minute we needed to think about a lot about design and how our product would look when translated across multiple languages and across multiple different language scripts you can't have a lot of tight spacing and variant text boxes when you need to bounce between English and Arabic and Persian and a number of other languages knowing that in advance met we also work with the community and we listened and we learned that translation was not just a matter of simply the language but also cultural translation in particular one of the key pieces of feedback that we got that I mentioned before was that this is something that had to work primarily on a mobile device you can see our home our landing page right now on the screen and that's on my desktop but it looks exactly the same on mobile and is really designed for use on that you know it's got one button action items and it's very simple and we did that because regardless of language the feedback we got from all communities was that the people who are going to be using this whether they're in the airport or not are going to be using it on a phone phones are the primary and predominant means of internet access for the communities we're trying to help so it doesn't make any sense to build something for desktop if no one's ever going to view it there and then the other thing we also learned was about the limits of information people would be comfortable sharing so we built our product to collect the bare minimum of information in order to show the people felt comfortable filling out the form and these are the things that I think of not just as language translation but as cultural translation so that it's not just going to read in their language but it's actually going to work for them with their background and you know this kind of customization when you're working in an emergency situation can sometimes feel unnecessary it feels like you just want to get it out there but I always refer back to the idea that if the information if people can't find your information easily from that information no matter how valuable doesn't serve any purpose content that can't be accessed is content that functionally doesn't exist and this is especially true when you don't know where your users are going to be accessing your product or how long you're going to be able to hold their attention so if you don't make it easy you could lose some of the very people you're trying to help you know and it comes back to this idea that the people who need help are the end users of what we build and we should always be asking whether what we build is meeting their needs not necessarily our own design goals and as I said this extent is not just language but cultural as well and the secondary thing that I want to focus on with these collecting of user stories and their importance is the dramatic impact they can have on development because they begin the process of addressing issues with representation and technology and how that representation problem can slow down exactly the kind of translation efforts I'm talking about and I think this refers back to what Sergio was talking about with community navigators and having those people already in the room was going to save you a lot of steps and really streamline your development process into building the most useful tool and going out into the community and getting feedback and taking the care and the time to generate these user stories and use cases that inform our development shapes our front end like I said it you know the front end changes if it's got to be mobile first and our back end in terms of what data we're going to collect and this does slow development but in an emergent situation if you think about development as all the way to actually being useful it's worth it to seek out the information because it made our tool that much more impactful it made it something that really made a difference when we released it rather than releasing it and going through three iterations before we could get into something that was useful before we could get to something that really made a difference for people you know and fundamentally most software tools are somewhat social justice agnostic you know they carry information from one party to another and the speed and skill with which they carry that information isn't defined by the substance of the project they're they're just tools and what we can do when we engage in thoughtful and community oriented development is pick up the tools and use them to help others and we can design the best tool still for the most number of people so that's it thank you very much I'm happy to answer any questions that anyone might have thanks so much together was awesome pause to see if there's questions or comments maybe everybody's digesting the wisdom I'll take criticism or complaints as well seeing any questions coming in but we can definitely if people are typing them in we can wait until the end as well okay sounds good and if somebody can make me present here we'll hear from GZ next hi everyone thank you for having me today my name is ZZ Bandera and I'm the community engagement coordinator for Immigration Advocates Network we are a 501c3 organization that designs web-based tools to increase access to justice for immigrants and to strengthen the capacity of the organizations that serve them today I'll be talking to you about one of these tools which is IMI I'll start with sharing with you a little bit about the website what it does and then I'll share about how we redesign the website to have more accessible language and user workflows which we learn go hand in hand so I'll start with a little bit of background to IMI over 1.5 million undocumented immigrants are eligible for immigration relief without knowing it IMI is a free online tool that helps immigrants in the US understand their legal options users fill out an anonymous online questionnaire that takes anywhere from 10 to 30 minutes depending on the the answers then they are provided with personalized results explaining the immigration options they may qualify for based on their answers as well as any potential risks next slide please the problem we notice is that users were struggling to quickly access and understand the content that was relevant to them the platform requires so many inputs from users that many were not completing the survey and it's difficult to find answers for specific questions by browsing the website we also have a robust learning center which is part of IMI with a lot of know your rights information and people were missing or not accessing it the way we wanted another big challenge was that it was not immediately clear to users that the site is credible or privacy safe and I'll go into that a little bit more next slide please our design challenge was to redesign IMI to better support our user goals we wanted to make it easier to discover personalized recommendations by streamlining user workflows and optimizing the navigation for quick access to critical content we wanted to emphasize IMI's credibility in order to build trust and confidence among our users next slide please so how we did it we were lucky to have the support of Google designers who were amazing and provided us with a lot of their time and expertise for this project we organized two rounds of semi-structured exploratory interviews with our target users and yeah like Mike has been mentioned earlier there's really no way around this if you want to ensure that your website is useful to the audience that you're targeting we always try to step into the shoes of our users but there's nothing like actually sitting next to them and not only observing how they naturally navigate the site but also be able to hear about their worries their lives and their reality so based on our findings we made design changes we then tested the changes with another round of interviews lastly we implemented round two findings which I will show you shortly we had a total of 25 participants and spent about an hour with each the group we talked to represented a mix of age genders and countries we tested both mobile and desktop and we also had a few internal design sprints throughout this process with our immigration analytics network team next slide please our content principles were to build trust with users set expectations for what IMI does and doesn't do use positive human language and avoid legal jargon or only use it when needed next slide please come on man so these were some of our key findings I'll go a little bit into each of these we learned that we had to add information about the organization behind the site to the home page user trust hinges on first impressions and navigation elements or though about us was not enough for our users I mean again these are recommendations that are specifically for you know our goal and our users we also learned that we had to reassure our users of upfront that any data they provided would be anonymous and that their data was secure through the interviews we we did most of our users mentioned fear of being surveilled by the government many express invitation and even searching for resources for immigrants online because they thought it would flag them to the government and this is not necessarily new finding for us but the extent to which the fear is heightened is specific to the time we're living in this which made it especially important for us to express the anonymity of our website and to communicate trust through careful use of language and design on our site we also learned that users were looking for a physical address for our office on the website and then having one on the website was depriving trust with our users they wanted to know that we had a physical location whether it was close to them or not this is a challenge and continues to be a challenge for us because we don't provide direct services or anything of the sort so we don't have a physical office address that we can necessarily publish we're still trying to find the best way to address this given our limitations but it's a it's a good tip that we learned and wanted to share with you all we also learned that we had to modify the signage copy to be simpler and easy to understand these are some examples you know going from defensores legales to expertos in immigration which is we previously had legal advocates and we changed that to immigration experts as an example or you know one of our main calls actions was a film a questionnaire which means take this quiz and we changed that to answer these questions just to make a more clear call to action and we also created a tagline which was a fun process for our team we from the user interviews we learned that people were confused about our name and our logos so we created a tagline to go with it not only was it fun for us but we also came up with something that resonated with people and was effective through our user test next slide please so this is our old in me design our version one so there were many things that we learned from our user interviews including you know things specific things to the language we were using but also design like the the grain that we had on the website some users had a hard time reading or you know seeing the grain was a little too light for them and you'll see when i go to the to the updated version the changes that we made when you can skip to the next one next slide please thank you at the top of this one you can see the user stories as well as you can go back one yeah thank you so at the top of this screen you can see it was a little mean and and these are all user stories that we created based on the different user journeys of our audience and that was mentioned earlier just the importance of people being able to connect we get a lot of user support requests from people that are specifically on you know each of these stories and are sending us questions that are relevant to them or you know these stories are resonating with them and they were able to connect with the user stories so then they're like oh well this sounds like me it's something my situation and these are questions that i have so we also learned that that's really helpful next slide please so these are some quotes from our users and these are translated to english most of our the users we tested on were you know spanish monolingual speakers or first their first language is spanish so first one it's having a website my mother language is so important because legal things are hard to comprehend i have visited websites where the translations to spanish are so bad that they leave you even more confused than anything else and for us we are lucky to have spanish speaking staff on our on our teams that are that are able to review the translations and make sure that they are accurate and sending you know the message that we want to our users but making sure that that not only was it accurate translation but that the specific words weren't scaring people away was also really important second quote all the information here reads very simple and friendly which was our goal and this is feedback from our very final testing with the users and then the last this this they're referring to the tagline make me feel supported like they care about me i feel confident i will be able to understand the information because they said it's simple and i love that it's free because the target spent two hundred dollars on a lawyer consultation if you don't even know if you have a case so once participants discovered the tagline they felt they knew the site much better some of the adjectives that were used to describe the tagline they then feel were supported confident relieved and trustworthy which was our our goal so we thought that this was really effective um another thing is that the users through our the feedback that we received they felt like the site was extremely useful to the immigrant community especially in the current climate since the options toward legalizing have diminished or are being threatened and this is something they're constantly hearing on the news and people also felt the mission of me dot org was clear clear at least more clear than it was in our version one and excited about the project of receiving information about the their immigration policies and their native tongue and next slide please the moment we've all been waiting for here is the redesigned website as you can tell the the green is now a darker green we included this in the news section or the panel that has some quotes from different publications we've been highlighted on and these are you know news outlets that our users recognized and was also something they were looking for to see who basically had endorsed the website or if it was something they could trust and we stayed away we had at some point considered having different leaders or you know different figures like what we are most are people that are well known in the community but we thought it would be better just to have a even broader for example quote from univision versus the specific reporters and you know things happen sometimes and it's mine it might change the way that these specific figures are perceived so just to keep it as safe as possible and then one of the things you can also see here is that our main headline change to pass to legal immigration status in our version one the main headline was do you qualify for a way to stay in the US and that was kind of turning our users off which is not what we wanted to do so so yeah we changed it and found that people were receiving more receptive to this information in this way and the navigation bars are all different the the call to action buttons are all different we also made sure that the the three people that you see which are the same user journey stories that I had mentioned earlier are still there they're a lot more prominent on the website because we felt that people were really connecting to them and wanted to see also a story of a family which was something that we added that we didn't have previously we have individual stories so that was another thing that we changed so this is most of what some of the highlights of what we learned through our redesign process a lot was focused on the language and the content being friendly and being really careful about what messaging we were using overall and then specific to each call to action and then also the the design overall of the of the website and like I mentioned earlier we were very very lucky to have the volunteers from Google helping us out with this process and sharing their expertise so this is something that you're interested in for your website or your tools you can they have a few community grant programs that they you know you're able to connect with their designers and that you're able to donate time to different projects so I would definitely recommend checking that out and if you have any questions about the process well what we learned from it or anything that you could benefit from feel free to reach out and I'm sure post will be sharing our contact information yeah I'm always happy to share what we learned so thank you. Thanks so much Zizi so we'll see if there's any questions from the audience and I just want to thank all the panelists today because it's been really a thoughtful and helpful presentation and I'll wait to hear if there's any questions from our audience but one question I had was how maintenance and language access are handled in your respective projects so it seems like with legal technology projects the work is never done so there's you know enhancements boxes fixes etc constant review law changes how are those things handled with multi-lingual content this is Zizi for us a lot of this feedback or the way we maintain an ear to the ground is through our user support request that we get and we do send us to manage those and they come to me so and I'm able to see where people are sending questions from or what page of the website so sometimes if there is something that's not resonating with folks I feel like it's not clear depending on whether they're on Spanish or English we will change it the website is not a I guess a very direct translation from English to Spanish some things resonate more said differently in Spanish and vice versa so we just take it as as we go I guess if I could add to Miranda from one of the pointers that LSE you know provided I think for us before we were kind of reactionary you know if we saw something needed to be changed on the website you know we would just change it you know the flexibility was good I think what they had pointed out was having some sort of written like an update plan in terms of like how many times are you going to review it or when you would review it for updates who would update it so that you know there's some sort of institutional knowledge there so that that's something that we're working on as well so how is user testing really involved in the process and what what part of your budget is really part of user testing with regards to translations um for us this is easy with any for us like I mentioned we were very lucky to have full support and they were able to provide hard users for the first round $100 gift cards for their hour and then the second round $50 gift cards and this was provided by Google so users were very happy and there was also also important to note that you know we always want to be able to compensate people for their time especially when it's you know people that are earning or have trouble with financially just to donate time in that way but there were a lot of the people that were interviewing who were really hesitant to accept the gift cards as well and they just were really happy to be able to help and and provide feedback on the website um there's a question here to Mr. Yamamata is the airport lawyer service also available in Guam well the airport lawyer service is available for incoming airports I don't know that we have partners a partner legal organization in Guam if there's interest in one we're certainly happy to create access tools if uh if there's someone wants to split up but we're not a partner with the airport organization in Guam no um any other questions at this time oh we we have several comments of thank you from our audience we we greatly appreciate you putting on this webinar are any other questions from the panelists or any final thoughts that people have uh thank you who's want to repeat it again to the panelists and thank you for uh listing everyone who joined the call today um we encourage you to check out the next panel and I can drop my contact information into the chat box if you have any questions about today and we encourage you to uh share the recording of today's panel panelists with those who might be might be interested but we're unable to attend this morning or this afternoon right thank you so much to our panelists and our audience and to Ellis end up thank you yes thank you so much from internet for putting this together we greatly appreciate it um there will be a survey coming out um after this this particular two-part language access was a response to the high interest last year if there are particular topics that you would like to see please feel free to put those into the survey that comes out and give us feedback on this that's how we choose our future trainings thank you to all of the speakers we greatly appreciate it