Designing an accessible multilingual platform, and one brand across eight hubs

RSH was already well recognised and trusted. The content was excellent — more than 2,000 resources across 18 languages, supporting organisations working to reduce the risk of harm.

But it had grown faster than its structure. Eight regional hubs had drifted apart in colour, typography and tone. Search and navigation reflected how the organisation was arranged rather than what audiences needed. And the identity had become technical where it needed to feel supportive.

The brief: turn a deep resource library with a fragmented brand into one coherent system — usable whatever the user’s language, digital confidence, access needs or connection quality.

RSH’s primary users are small, under-resourced civil society organisations. Many are on unstable mobile connections, basic devices, or working with limited digital confidence. The existing experience assumed an always-connected, confident user — dense pages, inconsistent interfaces, and friction at every step for everyone else.

Multilingual access made it harder. Users valued the translated and regional content, but non-English resources were difficult to surface, and each regional hub felt like a separate destination rather than part of one global service.

The depth of the library wasn’t the achievement. Making that depth findable was.

We began with a UX audit of the existing platform — shared work across the design team — mapping where navigation, content structure and multilingual usability were failing before we proposed anything.

I ran the UX interview sessions and synthesised the feedback back to the team, supervised by a senior designer, speaking with existing users in Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria and Qatar. Interviews were combined with live usability testing, so I watched people use the Hub rather than describe using it.

Two distinct problems emerged:

• Experienced users who knew exactly what they wanted but couldn’t find it in their language.
• Newer users who needed guidance through a large, unfamiliar library.

Those findings fed the old-to-new information architecture mapping and a set of user journeys per persona, which I contributed to alongside the design team. I then ran prototype testing with five further users across Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh on real tasks — find, filter, download — and fed the failures back into the design before handover.

Accessibility was designed into the system rather than applied at the end. The platform was conceived around WCAG 2.2 AA, right-to-left languages, long translated strings and low-bandwidth use — so one underlying system could serve very different audiences and regional contexts.

That meant lightweight layouts, compressed media, offline-friendly formats, keyboard and assistive-technology support, clear focus states, and interactions that hold up regardless of device, ability or digital literacy.

Discovery was rebuilt around what people already know: clearer thematic routes, richer filters, visible language and region on every resource, and metadata and previews so someone can judge relevance before spending data opening a file. On a metered connection, a wasted download is a real cost.

I designed the regional hub pages — the hub locations page and the individual hubs. This is where the central problem of the project lived: eight hubs had been drifting into eight separate destinations rather than one global service.

The brand already defined a colour for each region, so my job wasn’t inventing regional difference. It was building one layout that holds its structure while the colour changes and the copy expands, contracts, or flips direction entirely.

Elsewhere on the platform we used multiple images. On the hub pages I used a single visual built from the brand’s own shapes instead. It’s lighter to load for users on unstable mobile connections. It scales across eight hubs without eight separate image treatments. And it leaves horizontal room for translation — the same paragraph in Amharic or Arabic runs longer than the English, or runs right to left, and the layout has somewhere to go instead of breaking.

Structure stays constant: identical navigation, search and type hierarchy across every hub. The regional colour carries the local identity. One service, eight faces, no fragmentation.

I also designed the resources listing page and the login and create account flow, which had no clearly defined path before.

A simplified information architecture groups overlapping sections, cuts duplication, and creates journeys across regions, languages and themes — instead of treating each hub as a separate destination.

A multilingual design system holds consistency across the global platform and eight regional hubs while still flexing for local content and right-to-left languages.

RSH’s team developed the live platform in-house from our designs. It’s live at safeguardingsupporthub.org.

Most products are never tested with anyone on a bad connection, in a second language, on a cheap phone. This one was across seven countries — before it shipped.