Hey Everyone,

A big shout out to the reading web team (and Adam B), who rolled out a number of subtle, but important changes to the mobile web sites of all our projects earlier this week.

Through a series of UX improvements, the team made it easier for people to switch between languages in an article on mobile web. To all you monolinguists out there, this is a very common and vital ability for people who speak more than one language. In addition to being a big improvement for our multi-lingual users, the development of this feature followed many of the best practices we aspire to at the foundation:

language switching on mobile initially discovered as a problem to be solved through quantitative research
tied to reading team's early strategic objective of better serving global readers
development stages included:

community consultation
iteration based on results
a/b testing and analysis in beta
qualitative research with live users
iteration based on results
collaboration with the language team (they are simultaneously rolling out compact language links out of beta on desktop)
iteration based on collaboration

Am I missing anything? More on the project here and a screenshot of the new language switching button is below

Best,