Building the Product

How do I design an app that works well for users who aren't fluent in English and may switch languages?

A starting point

Lean on icons and layout that read without words, keep sentences short and literal so they translate cleanly, and never bury the language switch. As a starting point, remember that translated text is often longer, so build layouts that stretch, and test your Hindi or regional-language version as seriously as English rather than treating it as an afterthought. For a lot of Indian products, the vernacular experience is the main experience, not a nice-to-have.

Go deeper

Hand-picked from around the web, each with a note on why it earns your time.

3 resources 3 link-checked Watch Read Use

Watch

▶️ Video
✓ Link checked India Free Intermediate

Why we picked it Most localization advice is written for German and Finnish, this session grounds it in India instead: the team that built Tez (now Google Pay India), Files Go, and Datally talks through designing for users who switch languages, may not read fluently, and are on shared low end devices. It is honest about what actually failed in the field, not a polished case study. Good for seeing why voice, icons, and vernacular defaults matter before English does.

Challenges and learnings of building for the next billion users (Google I/O '18)

On Google I/O (YouTube) by Google (Next Billion Users team: Nithya Sambasivan, Josh Woodward and colleagues) About 40 minutes

Challenges and learnings of building for the next billion users (Google I/O '18)
  • Designing in the user's primary language first, then adapting to English, is the opposite of how most teams build, and it changes onboarding, trust, and layout decisions.
  • Many users share a device and switch languages between people and sessions, so a hardcoded single language setting quietly excludes half the household.
  • Voice, familiar imagery, and offline friendly patterns often carry more of the interface than text does for users who are not fluent readers in any script.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →

Read

📄 Article
✓ Link checked Free Beginner

Why we picked it This is the plain, research backed baseline for the whole question: it draws the line between translating an interface and actually localizing it, which is exactly where most multilingual apps quietly break. It walks through why the same screen behaves differently across languages and cultures, and pushes you toward testing with real users in the target language rather than guessing. Treat it as your starting frame before you touch a single string.

Modify Your Design for Global Audiences: Crosscultural UX Design

From Nielsen Norman Group by Feifei Liu About a 12 minute read

  • Translation swaps the words while the layout stays put, localization reworks the design so it still reads and feels right in each language, and the two are not the same job.
  • Non native speakers lean hard on visual cues (icons, imagery, layout) to navigate a screen in a language they are shaky in, so text alone is a weak crutch.
  • Do not trust your assumptions about a culture or language, run usability testing with people who actually live in it.
Open nngroup.com →

Use

🛠️ Tool
✓ Link checked Freemium Beginner

Why we picked it This is the practical answer to the scariest part of multilingual design: a button that reads Submit in English can blow out to something much longer in Hindi or Tamil and quietly wreck your layout. The Lokalise Figma plugin pulls real translations into your design and lets you toggle languages so you see the breakage before it ships, not after. Pair it with Figma Auto Layout so frames flex instead of clipping.

Lokalise for Figma (localization plugin)

From Lokalise by Lokalise Plugin, set up in minutes

  • You can preview actual translated strings in your Figma frames and switch between languages to catch overflow and truncation early.
  • Set per key character limits and send screenshots to translators so copy is written to fit the space, not retrofitted later.
  • Text can expand roughly a third or more from English in some languages, so seeing it in context beats designing against a fixed English string.
Open lokalise.com →

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