Stephanie Pereira
Localizing digital product content is challenging on its own. When you add the need to communicate about sensitive financial topics to very specific audiences, the complexity of the work quickly grows.
Stephanie Pereira is a content design manager working on the Google Payments product. She deftly balances a range of internal compliance and design concerns with the very specific hyper-localization needs of her audience.
(We had an internet connection issue around 28:00 - apologies for the break in continuity.)
We talked about:
her hyper-localization work as a content design manager at Google Payments
how localization work can highlight product features that may need to be contextualized differently or otherwise changed
how she balances global brand policies and very specific local design and language considerations
how even presentation-level information architecture decisions can vary by locale
how variety in voice and tone and language can vary even in the context of one interaction environment
how dealing with that dynamic variation in content shows up elsewhere in her work
how the Google design system supports her work
the different levels at which you can hyper-localize a product
the variety of privacy issues that arise in her hyper-localization work
how her multi-lingual family history influences her work
how even the smallest local touches can improve a customer's experience of a product
Stephanie's bio
Stephanie Pereira currently leads content design for Google Payments in APAC, supporting hyperlocalized experiences in markets like India and Japan. After deciding that law was just not her thing, Stephanie spent the decade pre-Google leading regional content and business operations teams at local startups like Groupon APAC, Fave Asia, and honestbee.
In her day to day work, Stephanie enjoys figuring out how to write with empathy for different cultures and being best friends with all her legal counsels.
Connect with Stephanie online
Video
Here’s the video version of our conversation:
https://youtu.be/SA8X22N6sOs
Podcast intro transcript
This is the Content Strategy Insights podcast, episode number 204. The internet has made the world a lot smaller, and some aspects of communicating online lend themselves to one-size-fits-all, globalized content. But product and content designers still need to serve the needs of local populations, and sometimes these groups can have very specific needs. At Google, Stephanie Pereira works on hyper-localized content, balancing a mix of challenging internal product demands with a rich variety of external cultural concerns.
Interview transcript
Larry:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode number 204 of the Content Strategy Insights podcast. I am really delighted today to welcome to the show Stephanie Pereira. Stephanie is a content design manager at Google Pay. She's based in Singapore. And welcome to the show, Stephanie. Tell the folks a little bit more about what you're up to these days.
Stephanie:
Thank you for having me. So, I work on payments. I'm based in Singapore, as you just mentioned. A lot of the work I do is hyper-localized in the sense that we work on very specific markets. And that's sort of given me the opportunity to think about how we write for different people, what their mental model is in a lot of these different places. Because I work in payments, especially how their relationship with money, how that translates to language as well. So yeah, it's been a very fun journey.
Larry:
Yeah. Well, language ... I've had a few people from the financial industry world, and money stuff is notoriously fraught. So, that kind of adds a whole accountability level to your job, I'm imagining, and the important-
Stephanie:
Yeah.
Larry:
But it's also like for the individual end user, it's really important to understand specifically what's going on and how to complete that transaction you're in the middle of. Can you give an example of ... Because I think a lot of people think, "Oh, okay, I'm going to do my product in India. I'll just translate it. I'll just do Hindi and English and we'll be good to go." Tell me why that's a dumb idea.
Stephanie:
I might have a specific example here. I've worked on screens where we've had a lot of language, and a few years ago we had one of these screens where we wanted to do it globally. It's a lot of language. What we tried to do is maybe simplify some of the language, like use simpler words, use shorter phrases, use things like that. And one of the things we realized was just the sheer amount of content, even when the language itself was simpler, it just gave people pause, it made people feel anxious. It made people feel like, "You know what? This entire product is just too hard for me. I'm not confident. I don't know how to use this." And these were people who'd been using the product every day, but at this point they were just like, "Yep, I'm out. This is too hard for me."
Stephanie:
So, I think it's also just recognizing that sometimes that translation is not just, "Hey, we translated it. That's the extent of it." It's also recognizing that the feature itself might need to be shown or contextualized or changed in a way to suit the market. Because what works in one place, for example, if for example, this were a privacy screen, in some markets that longer language would be comforting like, "Hey, we're being very transparent." But in some markets this just feels overwhelming. So, that's sort of, I guess, one of the nuances we had in these markets.
Larry:
That's really interesting to me, because you just described a conversation, you have to go back to the product manager and just go, "Hey, this isn't working over here." Do you have a lot of conversations like that? Or tell me, do you collaborate differently? I don't know how many other content design roles you've had, but that sounds like a unique leverage point to influence the product itself.
Stephanie:
I think because I work in payments, the more difficult conversation sometimes to have is with legal, because there's a lot of language that we have to have. I think a couple of years ago I was working on something where I think one of our legal partners said something that just really resonated with me as a UX writer. She said, "Hey, if people can't even understand this, what are we doing?" We can't ask people to consent to something that they don't even understand.
contextualized or changedSo, it is our job to make things a lot easier. It is our job to sort of surface things in a way that makes sense, in a way that makes people feel like, "Okay, I get what's going on. I understand. This is clear. This is transparent. I know what I'm agreeing to." And so, I think when you have a partner like that, that recognizes that the intent is to make things easy and clear and help people understand what they're agreeing to, then it really helps.
Larry:
That's it. Because legal will definitely keep your feet to the fire in terms of that being specific and clear about the intent. Now, all of a sudden, I'm curious, so the hyper-localization, I'm just trying to figure out and picture what level does that legal obligation go down to? How localized does the language have to be to comply with local laws and regulations, for example?
Stephanie:
Yeah. I think a lot of it, especially with payments is regulations are local, but we also often have very global policies in how we phrase certain things or how we want to position ourselves. So, a lot of it is just making sure we're having the right conversations with people to be like, "Hey, we understand this is the guideline, this is the thing, but what's a good work-around here? What do we do to make this more user-friendly in this country?" But also just recognizing, "Hey, this is the brand we have and this is how we want to position ourselves."
Stephanie:
So, I think just going back to that eternal struggle as a content designer, it's always about what the trade-off is, right? You want to make something user-friendly. You also want to make sure you're meeting all your internal guidelines. But yeah, we just have to have the discussion and see where it falls.
Larry:
You're reminding me, the friend who introduced us is Anna Potapova, the content designer at Alibaba Express, and she was talking about when you're talking about that notion of globalization versus localization and the specifics for the local environment, in China versus the West, there's this whole difference in density of information and that kind of thing. And so, as we're talking, it occurs to me like, okay, great. There's another dimension. You have those cultural things underneath it all, and then you have these very specific legal requirements, plus all the usual UX design stuff. And you just mentioned that it's all about balancing those trade-offs.
Larry:
Can you give examples? Like we were talking before we went on, about that language around debited and credited, and very specific financial language. How do you deal with that kind of ... Because legal probably says you have to use a word in this family or something. Tell me about how you reconcile that stuff.
Stephanie:
I actually have a very good example for that because I'm based in Singapore now, I'm Malaysian, but I'm based in Singapore. I like to say that the way we speak is very economical. So, what's that character in The Office who says, "Why use many words when few words will do?" So, something I realized when I first joined and when I was writing here, based in Singapore, was I would write something in one line, I would share it with a writer in the US and they would be like, "This just sounds really rude. It's very direct." I don't add the little like just and like also, and all those little sort of cushion words you use when you write.
Stephanie:
So yeah,
