The Ethnologue is an academic reference of all the known languages in the world. It was made by our organization, SIL, in 1951, and has since become the most cited linguistic work in the world. In 2015, Ethnologue.com was so popular that it cost nearly $1 million per year to operate as a free website. With funding for non-Bible translation projects dropping, SIL explored how to turn this massive cost into a funding stream. The experiment included limiting what information was available for free, so that more people would need to subscribe to get access. In an interview with Science magazine, our editor-in-chief Gary Simons reflects on the losses the resulting paywall has created.
Our task with this redesign is to add meaningful data to the free version so that both free and paid users can have satisfying experiences, learn what issues face minority language communities, and realize a meaningful impact for them.
Solution sketches and storyboarding steps from our design sprint.
Luke Garvey (Director of Global Communications) groups together related problem statements while Alex, Megan, and Jon Hirst (Chief Innovation Officer) look on.
We kicked off the design process with a “design sprint”, a one-week workshop that involves identifying a challenge, creating a rough prototype, and testing that prototype. You can interact with the prototype we made. In the tests, people responded positively to the prototype, and also gave us helpful data to make improvements.
Ethnologue.com free, premium, and prototype versions