“Don’t use a five-dollar word when a fifty-cent one will do. ”
— Mark Twain
At Nielsen, many of my colleagues, as well as our users around the world, spoke English as a second language. I made sure that our design system and products used clear, simple words, avoiding idioms that can be hard to translate.
I recommended a plan to define and implement international currency standards, so that our products could be offered in multiple markets that would prefer to use their local language and number formatting.
I also created a strategy to use design tokens more widely. We needed to be able to build designs that adapted dynamically to languages with long words, languages that don't use the Latin-1 character set, and languages that read right-to-left.
And of course, accessibility was a very important part of everything I worked on. I checked our code and design components for WAI-ARIA compatibility and against WCAG guidelines.