Overview

Goal

Improve user satisfaction & user adoption rate by improving the overall usability of the Tyson Translation App.

Impact

Average user satisfaction rate improved by 62%, from 2.6 to 4.2 on a 5-point scale.

Timeline

August 2024 - October 2024 (Development & Testing until December 2024)

Deliverables

High-fidelity Design Prototypes

Team

Kay Zhang (Me), UX Designer
Joe Klingaman, Senior Project Manager
Rohit Kala, Full-stack Developer
Jayce Martin, Senior Full-stack Developer

Background

The Tool: Tyson Translation

In 2023, Tyson Foods created an in-house translation tool to help new plant workers during onboarding. This was in response to the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rule that employers must teach workers in a language and vocabulary they understand.

The Use Case: Onboarding New Hires

This tool is primarily used when onboarding over 50,000 new hires annually across 165 plant locations. In a typical onboarding session, the instructor and new hires use the app on tablets with headphones. The instructor speaks in English, and the app translates the instructions into different languages for the learners.

The Problem

The first version of the translation app was quickly made by developers under time pressure. No user research or designers were involved. Since its launch, the app has had low user adoption and satisfaction rates (2.5/5).

Our Goal

The UX team has been brought in to improve the overall user experience, aiming to increase user adoption and satisfaction rates. Additional goals include making the app responsive for mobile devices and applying the new Tyson branding.

Research: Engaging Plant Users

The majority of users use this app in plant classrooms, which is quite different from the office environment that the design and development team is in. To make the app truly useful and user-friendly, we continuously engaged plant users throughout the process.

Going in-person

We made 2 trips to visit the local plants to observe users in person. We also requested recordings from other plant locations to capture as many pain points and needs as possible.

A typical onboarding classroom setting, blurred for confidentiality.

Devices used during onboarding sessions: a tablet and headphones.

Validating decisions with users

Throughout the design process, we engaged users at every step, ensuring their feedback informs our decisions. For example, we validated our user journey map with learning managers before proceeding and tested wireframes with plant users before moving to high-fidelity design.

User journey map with pain points, validated by both learners and learning leads.

Design Highlights

1. Improving Accessibility

Due to technical limitations, the app’s default language is English. However, many plant workers have limited English literacy. Therefore, our main goal is to design a user-friendly interface that's easy to navigate, regardless of English proficiency. To make the app more accessible, we:

Simplified the language
Added visual aids like icons
Used clear and accessible fonts

Improving accessibility while English is the default UI language.

2. Helping User Focus

The plant environment can be overwhelming for new employees. There are many distractions such as TVs displaying presentations, background noise, unfamiliar coworkers, etc. To help users focus on listening to translations and viewing content, we:

Used minimal design throughout the app
Applied special colors to highlight important information
Added sound wave to indicate the audio input

Helping user focus through minimal design and focus colors.

Using sound waves to indicate audio input status.

3. Optimizing for Mobile & Tablet

As one of our goals, the app design is also optimized for mobile & tablet according to standard UX principles.

Challenges

Not Following Best Practices

During the rollout, many users reported issues with translation quality. After reviewing the video recordings they provided, we discovered that the main problem was background noise. Most users were not following best practices to use headphones and speakers. This resulted in background noise that affected the translation quality, leading to a loss of trust among users.

To address this, we acted quickly to educate users on best practices to improve their experience. We collaborated with HR representatives to inform the learning leads about these practices and guide them on how to request the necessary headphone devices.

Result & Impact

According to the user satisfaction survey conducted in July ( before the project) and December (after the release), the average user satisfaction rate improved by 62%, from 2.6/5.0 to 4.2/5.0. The distribution of ratings also showed a dramatic shift in user sentiment: the proportion of low ratings (1-2 points) decreased, while the percentage of high ratings (5 points) increased substantially.

User satisfaction rate before and after the improvement.