Increasing Crosscultural Participation with AI
Business Challenge
ThinkTank (acquired by Accenture) is a cloud-based platform that delivers amazing outcomes by cutting through organizational politics and social biases, tears down silos, and reduces conflict.
The challenge was to meet a board directive to prototype a new disruptive feature in 5 weeks. Based on deep UX field research and customer interviews from the previous 7 months, the idea was to remove the language barriers that come from non-native speakers participating in live collaborative sessions, such as brainstorming.
Participant Equity
Not only would this real-time solution help neutralize penalties to participants who don’t speak the host language, but it would also reduce the cost of session translations.
This could be a gamechanger!
UX Director: Product offering, UX Research, AI tooling, Visual UI design
Week 1 — UX Research from Across the Globe
“Chinese stop talking when language goes to English, they often don’t have the confidence to participate.”
— Malay / Spanish / Norwegian session
“Lots of upfront translation is needed to support the sessions last year.”
— Spanish / Portuguese session
“When using ThinkTank, the nuances are very important.”
— Swedish / English / Norwegian session
“Been using Google Translate to translate the results back to English.”
— Portuguese / English session
Research Insights
When using ThinkTank, the nuances are very important—and quality is most important! The facilitator must trust the translation.
Global customers believed the concept would alleviate some of the cultural/ language barriers, resulting in better participation and outcomes. If it works, the Return On Investment would be substantial.
Hypothesis
AI services in natural language processing, language translation, and dialogue could get better results faster by providing live translation across participant languages.
Translation Quality
Quality is the biggest potential showstopper. With this in mind, we leveraged a network of friends, family, and co-workers who were native in other languages to take a few days and live-test the translation services. The goal was to determine which service provided the best quality. Testing included Danish, Portuguese, Spanish, and Persian (Farsi), using Bing, Google, Watson, and Yandex.
Week 2 — A Concept Story
Using the existing platform, we presented the new disruptive feature as a concept story.
Nancy is leading a multi-country implementation of a Human Resource Transformation project. She set sup the Globex Implementation project for her client, based in 6 countries.
Nancy makes the session visible to all participants and adds a collaborative live “Crowdsource” activity.
Later as the facilitator, Nancy orchestrates the discussion in her native English language.
Jose, meanwhile, is experiencing the content translated live, all while he participates in the discussion.
Weeks 3 to 5 — Coding & QA
2017 Summary
Customers loved the concept. Facilitators could save weeks on preparation and reporting. Working with dev, we found translation between languages was feasible. Unfortunately in 2017, no translation service was robust enough to simultaneously localize between all of ThinkTank's supported languages.
2024 Perspective
With the advances in containerized services and parallel computing, this product is now feasable.