I’m not a designer, my background is software. I started with programming robots, and later moved to mobile/web apps, and that gave me the honor to work with designers that are 1000x better than me. I think I learned some things from them.

I’m currently looking for a house in Norway, and although I can read some Norwegian(due to a combination of languages I know a little of, such as Portuguese, Italian, German, English, and Dutch), but with Norwegian I’m really really bad.

I came across this site: finn.no, and I wanted to see if I could use it without translating it.

Do you understand?

It didn’t go super well, but I imagined a couple of ways that it could be improved, a few well designed and well placed icons could have made it possible for me to understand everything. So I fixed it:

Is this better?

Someone asked me if this wasn’t a problem only I faced, due to a Norwegian housing site being targetted at, you know, Norwegians that speak Norwegian.

So I did some research. The city gets a lot of students that plan to stay 6 months to 2 years, due to Erasmus and other studies. This isn’t enough time to Learn Norwegian!

15.5% of the population of the city is not a native Norwegian speaker.

So no! I believe these few icons that took 5 minutes for me to add would make a serious difference in the ease of searching for a house/apartment in Bergen.

But can’t they just use google translator?

I’ve tried it myself! But translations from Norwegian to English are mediocre at best, some things are very, very lost in translation.

TL;DR; Use your site in a language you don’t understand, or even better, get a friend(not necessarily a co-worker) that doesn’t know the UI to use it in a language they don’t understand!