Apple Relay
Internal asset management platform
The clock starts when Tim Cook leaves the stage. Here's how I made sure language choice didn't slow anyone down.
Role
Product designer. I pushed for a single-site approach and designed it page by page.
Outcome
Fewer steps to reach assets during a launch, and stakeholders aligned on one site.
MULTI-LANGUAGE SELECTION
CONTEXT
Relay is Apple’s platform for third-party marketing partners to download product assets during launches. Apple doesn’t send assets early, so when a launch goes live every partner logs in at the same moment. By the time they’re in, they needed to be moving five minutes ago. When Relay expanded into multilingual markets, the ask was to add language support.
Partners are already stressed when they log in. Anything confusing or extra costs time they don’t have. The real question was where the language decision should live, and what it costs if it’s in the wrong place.
THE PROBLEM
I looked at three setups. Separate sites with separate logins meant partners managing credentials in the middle of a launch. Separate sites with one login still split assets and notifications. A single site with one login kept everything together. The first two treated language as a site-level concern, but partners manage assets, and language only matters when they reach them.
APPROACH
I went with a single site and a single login, then worked out what that meant on each page.
The homepage has one job: get partners to the right asset kit fast. Language came off it so nobody makes that decision twice.
The library is where partners find and download assets, so that’s where language belongs. Research with big box store partners showed most work in one language at a time. Language became the first choice on the library page, visible on load.
DESIGN DECISIONS
Library: Language is the first thing partners see on load.
Homepage: Language removed from the first decision point.
Fewer steps to reach assets during a launch, language selection where partners already make decisions, and stakeholder alignment on a single site. There are no metrics. What good looked like was partners getting in, finding what they needed, and getting out.
OUTCOME
Where a decision sits in a flow matters as much as the decision itself. The library call was shaped by a narrow slice of research, and next time I’d bring more partner types in earlier.