LingoForce

Product designer: John Wurzbacher
Software used: Figma, Adobe XD, Photoshop, Illustrator
Type of product: SaaS, B2B, B2C, B2B2C

The Story

Imagine you are a deaf patient heading into the hospital on the day of your surgery.  It’s a risky procedure and you’ve felt a bit apprehensive about it.  The stories you read on the internet certainly didn’t help.

When you arrive, you quickly discover that the hospital was unable to find an ASL interpreter for you.  Now you have no way to communicate with the surgeons and medical staff.

How will you voice your needs?  What if a miscommunication leads to a poor health outcome that could have been prevented?

Sadly, this situation happens too frequently in hospitals around the country.

News headline:
“Local Elder wasn’t given a Navajo translator to speak to his doctor; he died after his visit”

Discovery

For too long, the agency model has dominated the industry.  This model is inefficient and benefits agencies themselves rather than the translator, the business, or those in need of a translator.

Agencies have a major bottleneck.  When a translation request comes to an agency, they call an interpreter to see if they are available.  It may take a few hours for the interpreter to respond or they might not respond at all.  The agency then calls another interpreter who also doesn’t answer their phone. The service request goes unfilled.

Value Proposition

LingoForce seeks to disrupt the agency model and break down the silos that are creating poor health outcomes.  LingoForce came to me wanting to create a SaaS app that would automate the scheduling process that would prevent missed appointments.  This will result in more work for interpreters, better health outcomes for individuals.

They also wanted to offer video interpreting directly through the app.

Define:

In researching our competitors for this app, I found that they were focused on being a scheduling solution for a single agency.  There are several pain points I found with this approach that came out of user interviews:

Key Insight Researched: ASL Interpreter

“I work for several different agencies and I have to have a different app for each one.  Sometime I miss appointments because I’m double booked.  I also have freelance jobs that I manage through a different calendar.”

Here’s where the ideation began.  What if we could create something bigger than a scheduling solution?  What translators could manages all their jobs for multiple organizations in one place?  What if the app could sync with their own personal calendar and prevent scheduling conflicts?

Design challenge 1:

How do I show the interpreter jobs for the organization they are part of, and not jobs for other organizations?  What happens if none of the organization’s interpreters are available?
 

Key Insight Researched: Hospital Administrator

“It’s costing us tens of thousands of dollars each month with jobs going unfilled.”

Findings:

Hospitals face getting fined or sued for not providing interpreters and adhering government mandates.

Clearly some filters are needed, but how does the interpreter become part of that filter?  What happens in no-one accepts the job who is part of the hospital staff?

At first, I thought that the solution could be to have a server administrator manually set up interpreters with each organization.  However, that would be terribly inefficient for LingoForce.

I needed to solve this problem through the app’s design taking a self-serve approach.  In talking this over with LingoForce’s CTO, we came up with the concept of connectors.  It would be a way for interpreters to become part of an organization.

The organization sends an invite to an interpreter who can then accept or decline the invite through the app.  What’s great about this model is that an organization like a hospital who already has a team of in-house interpreters doesn’t have to use our interpreters, they can use this product with their existing team.

If the request goes unfilled, they can send it to the LingoForce anywhere network where interpreters outside the organization can accept it.

Design challenge 2:

There are many different types of video interpreting the app has to support including scheduled video (for appointments booked in advance), on-demand, emergency medical, direct and assurance (customer walks into a business), how do we differentiate between them in the app?  Who initiates the scheduled call?

I knew we needed a visual clue within the job list that would indicate whether the request was an in-person or video call.  The difficult part was how to get the call started.

At first, I thought that it should be the client initiating the call.  However, what if the interpreter wasn’t ready?

After discussing this with the CEO and CTO, we decided that the best approach would be to have the interpreter initiate the call.

Here’s the journey I came up with:

Interpreter taps “Start” > Push notification is sent to the client > Client taps on push notification to accept it > Video call is started

Celebration:

I not only designed the app, but I also led the development team, did a lot of testing, and ensured pixel-perfect design.  The app is now being used in a growing number of hospitals and healthcare systems throughtout the midwest.  Talent who once worked for our competitors are leaving to come join the LingoForce team because they are excited about this product.

Retrospective:

This is very complex app and I had to solve dozens of problems and design over 70 screens.  It was also a very meaningful project to be part of because I was able help people with communication challenges overcome them through the use of technology.

What started out as an app for ASL translators has broadened to becoming a product for spoken language translators.