Adrian Cohn
Head of MarketingSmartling
We’re inspired by products whose design principles are form following function. To us, Smartling is more than just a product. It’s a tool used by thousands of people every day. We asked ourselves, how could we improve the experience so that you could do more with less?
This month, we launched a beta version of the New Experience to our first batch of customers. We completely re-wrote the underlying architecture of our platform and introduced a standardized look and feel. We kept the main functions front and center and tucked away features users don’t need on a very regular basis to avoid unnecessary clicks and visual clutter.
Let’s take a look at the top highlights.
Intuitive navigation for easier access to the most common tasks.
We slimmed down the top navigation to include only key project management tools: Projects, Jobs, and Reports. Background actions and settings are stored under Account Settings and Personal Settings.
In addition, we placed Global Content Search directly in the top navigation, so users can find specific strings across multiple projects. For example, to update a standard sales announcement across your website, mobile app, and marketing brochures, it’s easy to find and replace all instances of this announcement.
Global view of all strings with the ability to filter.
We introduced an improved Strings View in the New Experience. Users can now view a project’s strings across all translation statuses and languages, rather than just one at a time. They also can drill down by status, language, source keyword, translation keyword, and hashcode. More flexibility means more robust management.
GDN Pages View summarizes available content in a GDN project.
When looking at Word documents and design files requiring translations, we naturally summarize this content by file, rather than by sentences or paragraphs. This wasn’t the case for GDN (web proxy) users, who reviewed content by strings. We wanted to extend the file/page-level organization experience to GDN users.
The New Experience includes a new GDN Pages view that displays content by web page / URL. Users can select content to translate, review, publish, or exclude at the page level, rather than individual string level.
Underlying architecture re-written for API-driven actions.
We’re unleashing the full power of APIs. We have a completely new back-end system that is faster, more scalable, and more flexible for our team to build and release new features more quickly. Going forward, we’ll be building all new features on this new architecture. Say hello to faster deployment of your new feature requests!
We’re so excited for our users to start using the New Experience. Our Help Center article outlines all of the features included in this UX and contains screenshots comparing the New and Classic Experience. We’ve already been receiving valuable feedback on our beta version. Keep sharing your questions, comments, and ideas!
About Jennifer
Jennifer Chew is the Product Marketing Manager at Smartling, responsible for overseeing go-to-market for Smartling's new products and features, and creates content to educate customers and buyers on benefits and best practices of using Smartling Translation Cloud. Jennifer has been a part of the Smartling team for over two years, previously contributing as the Marketing Manager, and collectively has over five years of B2B and B2C marketing experience.
