Content is a crucial component of user experience (UX) and design. With the right words, organizations can clearly send their messages across to their customers to facilitate interactions and build strong connections. This is why organizations should make sure to seamlessly manage the words in their application’s user interface (UI).
One powerful tool that enables organizations to deliver exceptional user experience and help application development teams to manage texts or strings more effectively is from Qordoba. As the first and only strings management platform, Qordoba empowers product teams by creating, editing, and updating product content without asking engineers for help.
SourceForge recently had the opportunity to speak with May Habib, the CEO of Qordoba, to discuss strings intelligence and the advantages of using strings management in application development process. Habib also highlights the ways on how organizations can create compelling user experiences by managing all of the words in their products through Qordoba’s AI-powered Strings Management Platform.
Q: Can you please tell us more about Qordoba (year founded, size, solutions, etc.)?
May Habib, the CEO of Qordoba
A: Qordoba created the world’s first and only strings management platform that helps organizations manage text strings (the words that show up in a product’s UI), check spelling and grammar mistakes, measure emotion and tone, and check for alignment with brand guidelines. Founded in 2015, Qordoba currently has 29 full-time employees, with plans to grow to 45 in the second half of 2018.
Q: What are your company’s goals? And what are the challenges or problems that Qordoba seek to address?
A: The Qordoba Strings Management Platform provides a single source of truth for writers, UX strategists, designers, and product managers to access, edit, and update UI content. Currently, most UI content is hardcoded by engineers like the rest o an application, which means editing the words that show up in a user interface must be done by a developer looking through various repositories and making those changes manually, i.e. typing them into a file in a GitHub repository. By bringing UI content into a single, accessible location, engineers are relieved of this time-consuming task and product copy is in the hands of those who really want to edit or create it, the ones who devote their jobs to the UX. Then they can create a Styleguide, and Qordoba’s AI can then actually measure product content against the Styleguide for emotion, tone, and brand alignment.
Q: What specific industries do you serve? Can you tell us some of your current clients and/or customers?
A: We have customers across all industries, though we are definitely seeing a lot of interest from software/high tech, hospitality, travel, finance, and retail businesses. Our customers are fast moving and focused on building products with awesome user experience, so they have a lot of copy needs, they iterate on that copy a lot, and they have lots of different audiences – all great use cases for Qordoba. Some of our customers are GitHub, Visa, Marriott, Postmates, Bird, Sephora, and the NBA.
Q: For our readers that are unfamiliar with strings management, can you provide a brief overview of this solution in the simplest of terms? How does strings management fit in the application development process?
A: At its core, strings management is the idea that you should be centralizing UI content, or formerly hardcoded text strings, so that they are manageable by product managers, designers, or content strategists. Strings management with Qordoba means adding in a layer of measurement and analytics to improve product content with the aid of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), including analyses for spelling, grammar, emotion, brand, and tone. Companies that adopt strings management can make copy changes without bothering engineers. Additional benefits include product content versioning, content roles and rules, auditability, and security.
Q: What are the best use cases for strings management?
A: The best use cases for string management include product personalization, product copy changes, localization, and content analysis.
Q: The Qordoba Strings Management Platform leverages artificial management (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) methods to measure and identify the emotion related to a specific combination of words. In context, how does this solution enable product teams to create compelling user experiences?
A: There are so many ways to quantify the success of design elements and features of a product – but until now, quantifying the success of words in a product or how UI content actually drives UX hasn’t really been possible. Something as simple as running a spelling and grammar check on every word in a product’s UI, or determining how complex language is (i.e. at what grade level does this vocabulary clock in) was not possible. When you list content insights neatly displayed alongside your content, as you are writing it, it becomes a part of the copy development process to incorporate suggestions and literally improve in real time. Qordoba allows customers to lay out their content guidelines in a feature called Styleguide, and suggestions are based on that gold standard for a copy.
Q: As the first content management platform to integrate artificial management (AI) for emotional measurement, how can this intelligent solution empower organizations to improve their product and marketing content?
A: Improving content might mean different things for different organizations, depending on how advanced they are with their product copy and how much standardization is already in place. If, for example, they have never checked every version of their app to make sure their product name is properly spelled and capitalized, that is a great starting point. If they have simple guidelines like, use the Oxford comma and never use emojis but haven’t been able to enforce them, that is also a great starting point and would improve product content by brand standards quite a bit. Really, Qordoba is built to be flexible enough to fit into whatever state the product content is in and enforce the standards the team wants to, from day one so they can see immediate and incremental improvements.
Q: Managing the text part of an interface can be a challenge for product teams and developers. In what ways can strings management help developers and product teams build better user interfaces (UI) at scale?
A: This is one of the things our customers are actively using Qordoba for, right now. Collaboration between design and copywriting has always been a challenge, even for one app on one platform, because it requires so much back and forth and adjustments on both sides if one makes a change. Once you add in multiple versions of apps and the expansion of channels, it gets even more complicated.
For developers, UI content has always been a pain that is not in a typical engineering job description but really crept in and became the responsibility of developers anyway. One way we tackled this problem was through a huge integration ecosystem – we have over 100 integrations that address both the engineering and design side of UI and UX strategy and lets the product team design their workflow however they want, while keeping the tools they currently use.
If you want to design in Sketch and iterate on product copy as your mockups evolve, and then ask your engineers to implement the design from GitHub, we can accommodate all of that and actually facilitate the transfer so that product copy never creates a bottleneck. That covers the logistics of the changes, but when it comes to global expansion, there are several other considerations including brand adherence, style guidelines, and localization. We provide solutions for all of those potential issues from the platform, brand, and style through Content AI and localization through our automated translation and workflow capabilities.
A lot of the issues that arise from scaling and improving UI content really comes down to how you do it, and if you are trying to make changes manually, through Excel and email and support tickets, and you never have a single location to store content, it’s understandable. Qordoba allows you to solve those problems and then actually enhance and personalize content as you fix all the mechanical and logistical issues.
Q: Tell us a bit more about Qordoba Strings Management Platform. What are its key features and capabilities?
A: The key features of Qordoba Strings Management Platform are strings management and content scoring – editing and creating text for the UI and then monitoring and measuring that content for spelling, grammar, emotion, tone, and brand.
Q: What makes Qordoba Strings Management Platform unique from other content management platform available in the market?
A: There are currently no other solutions that manage all the words in digital products, so we are happy and proud to stand alone for the moment.
Q: Looking ahead, what trends, technologies, and strategies do you think will drive the adoption of strings management?
A: Personalization is a huge product undertaking on the majority of product manager’s roadmaps – and one that has a lot of solutions when it comes to tracking and analytics, especially for design, but one which has very little in terms of in-product copy and voice. The desire to make a product experience personal in real time requires focus on the UI content, and not just analysis, but a way to make changes quickly and with confidence. This doesn’t just apply to millennials in Wisconsin during summer, it also applies globally, where keeping brand standards in check while creating regionally appropriate content will become more segmented, more personal, and harder to maintain – unless you have a way to manage that content and apply standards in an appropriate way.
Omnichannel and omni-platform distribution also plays a part because once you consider every person in every region that might need a personal experience, you can add in the different ways they might interact with your brand, whether that’s through an embedded device, on their lap or desktop, or mobile phone. Whether you want a user to have the same or a different experience based on the platform or channel is up to the brand, and even being able to consider that choice is something we are thrilled that our customers are able to do.
About Qordoba
Qordoba is the first and only machine-learning based strings management platform that extracts text from strings in source code. Qordoba’s Strings Management Platform makes every application’s words accessible and measurable across different platforms, technologies, channels, and teams. Headquartered in San Francisco, Qordoba is backed by Rincon Venture Partners and Upfront Ventures.