CASE STUDY
Airbnb
Understanding international communities
Airbnb sought to gain insights into their diverse global user base through international community panels, aiming to better serve and connect with users across different cultures and regions.
Background
As a global company with a presence in almost 200 countries, Airbnb’s product needs to be intuitive for different cultures and localized across languages. Prior user research at this company focused primarily on the English-speaking members of the community, but this approach eventually created a gap in the highly diverse user community – a gap the research team was committed to closing.
Though they had an internal localization team, its priorities were the product and marketing materials. When the research team launched the International Community Panels (IC Panels), a six-month research project involving participants in nine non-English speaking countries and conducted in week-long cycles, they needed another solution. The IC Panels required incredible speed in order to incorporate feedback into the rapid product development process, so this project was far outside what the localization team could realistically handle.
And that’s where Multilingual Connections came in.
35 linguists on a Friday night...
With just one week per research cycle – nine languages, over ten thousand words each, and up to 35 linguists ready to go Friday evening for a Sunday delivery – this project required a partnership that emphasized communication, clarity of workflow and a high degree of speed and accuracy.
Accommodating such a tight turnaround required the best of technology and human translators, in addition to strong collaboration between both teams.
“The only way to ensure dependable, fast, quality translations was working directly with a nimble translation company that could flex with my needs and that would see my translations as a top priority. Multilingual Connections was fully willing and able to create new processes and adapt existing ones to meet the challenge of the IC Panels program.”
Wyatt Hayman | Research Program Manager, AIRBNB
“As an anthropologist and former user researcher myself, I’m committed to finding flexible options for supporting research, both in corporate and academic settings,” Connections. “We love working closely with clients and finding the best ways to support their goals, and this relationship is a great example of that.”
Dr. Jill Kushner Bishop | Founder & CEO, Multilingual Connections
Leveraging technology
Accommodating such a tight turnaround required the best of technology and human translators, in addition to strong collaboration between both teams.
The client was using an experience management platform, as well as Google Drive and Google Sites for sharing questions and responses among researchers. On Multilingual Connections’ side, they leveraged their TMS (translation management system) and CAT (computer-assisted translation) tools, together with their team of international linguists and project managers.
Once the team received participant responses, the client exported a CSV from the platform to share with Multilingual Connections via Google Drive. From there, Multilingual Connections utilized their TMS to help automate the process of splitting the files and assigning them to their linguists. The CAT tools allowed Multilingual Connections to share a glossary with linguists to ensure consistency as well as leverage translation memory to expedite the translation process.
As Multilingual Connections received translated files back from its linguists, project managers used CAT tools to perform a final quality assurance step – checking for extra spaces, misspellings, missed translations – and then shared a master file back through Google Drive for analysis by the client’s research team. Additional but separate components of the study focused on design translations, where Multilingual Connections’ design team translated website mockups for participant feedback.
Lessons & impact
Did everything go perfectly from the start? No, but translation is more than a mere transaction, and both sides worked to streamline processes and identify opportunities to improve quality and turnaround.
The impact of the research is already being seen. The IC Panels have fielded 439 questions in the first four months of the project, and thirty six researchers within the company have utilized the data to inform the work of their product teams. Engagement with the IC Panels has been very efficient, with an 80% response rate from the members, and it has also helped reduced survey burn-out on the larger community. As momentum for multilingual research grows, the Research team hopes to expand its IC Panels program to include more countries, languages and additional types of community members.
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