Ola Lite Localisation

We localised our progressive web app (PWA) in Hindi to reach out to more users in their preferred language.

What is Ola Lite?

Ola Lite is a smaller, lighter version of the Ola app that lets you call a cab in 100+ Indian cities
It takes less than 1 MB storage space (less than 20 times the original app) and loads within 3 seconds
It is designed to work even with the poorest Internet connectivity

Roles I played: UX writer and Hindi translator

Duration: 30 days

Stakeholders: Assistant director (customer experience) and developers

Our goals:

Conduct user interviews to justify the business case
Localise the app in Hindi in 30 days
Disconnect the gist of the message from English sentences and re-write the communication so that it feels that it was written in Hindi in the first place

Justifying the business need with user research:

I was part of the team that conducted phone interviews to collect qualitative feedback. We called users from an even spread of all the cities that we offer our services. We received a favorable request from respondents to translate the app in Hindi.

My process:

- I worked with developers to create a content repository of the entire app

- Context setting: We added additional information in the sheet to set more context:

App screen title: Where was the text shown on the app? E.g. splash screen, login, language selector, profile, etc.
Section: How and where was the text being shown? E.g. center, footer, error, toast, pop-up, etc.
Use case: Any additional information related to the text.
String description
String type: Was the text static or dynamic (containing variables)?
Key: Identifiers used to display the strings. Our Hindi translations were mapped to the respective strings of their original English messages.
English Template: It showed us how the static and dynamic text appeared with the variables.

- We categorized the type of conversion required for each string:

Translation: Translate the message so that it feels that it was originally written in Hindi
Transliteration: Some common terms that were easily understood by masses were transliterated, e.g. pickup, drop, category names, etc.