Hostel Speak
The Challenge
Hostelworld offers hostels in 178 countries and our users have to navigate through challenging language barriers. One of the best parts of travelling is meeting people from all over the world. The problem is if travellers can only talk to people who speak their language, experiences and social interactions are limited.
We at Hostelworld took this challenge and went about solving it through a feature called Hostel Speak (previously Speak The World) with the aim to increase app store downloads and better the user experience of the Hostelworld apps to increase engagement. My role was UI and UX designer.
The Process
Our research showed 70% of users are solo travellers looking to meet fellow travellers and create memories and experiences. We discovered that travellers were often put off by language barriers with some users saying they will not travel to certain countries because of the language barrier.
On this project we went with a Design Sprint process which allows us to quickly validate and test our ideas as the time frame for this project was very short. Firstly we mapped out the problem and talked to users to discover their painpoints. Next we knew we wanted to use voice translate so I wireframed a few concepts. We also pinpointed that our users would be interested in a creative fun approach. So I created concepts using character illustrations or photographs of characters talking on the screen. 3rd stage is we converged to agree on a direction and then began to prototype. I created quick prototypes with Protopie while the dev team worked with getting the Google Cloud Translate API ready to use. In a hackathon spirit we worked to make my prototype link to the API so we could test with that translator working.
Learnings
While designing through the flow myself and the team encountered several areas we had to get right for the success of the project from a UX point of view. Once the user pick the Hostel Speak tab the user is given simple and clear directions to pick the language they speak and the one they want to translate to. We were experimenting with the app to be able to pick up the languages automatically but through testing we noted the technology was not reliable enough as there were too many errors.
Other learnings were that users need visual feedback to know the app was picking up their voice so we added an animation for when it was listening to you. Something else I had to think about is that the way people talk is different, some fast and others slow with gaps in-between sentences so I had to figure out the optimal time for when a user stops talking to when the app starts the translation.
Going Live
From project beginning to going live was just over 2 months thanks to design, development, project manager and brand team working closely in an agile environment. The response exceeded are expectations with a plus 259% increase in app downloads. The first 2 months saw 2 million translations which mean we helped connect people that previously had a language barrier between them.
