Designing an accessible multilingual safeguarding platform and coherent global brand

The Safeguarding Resource & Support Hub (RSH) supports organisations across the humanitarian and development sectors to strengthen safeguarding policy and practice against Sexual Exploitation, Abuse and Harassment (SEAH). Through more than 2,000 resources, available across 18 languages, it helps people and organisations reduce the risk of harm.

As RSH had grown, it needed a stronger, more consistent visual identity that could unite its global and regional presence. The platform needed a clearer, more coherent way for users to navigate that depth of content - and an experience that worked just as well for people with limited connectivity or digital confidence as it did for experienced users.

Working with Terre des hommes, Social Development Direct and brand partner Never Know Defeat, we redesigned the RSH digital platform and refreshed its visual identity - creating a simpler, more accessible experience for organisations working in diverse and often challenging contexts.

RSH was well recognised and trusted, but its identity had become inconsistent across central and regional interfaces. Regional Hubs varied in colour, typography and tone, while the overall visual language felt overly technical. The challenge was to create a more coherent, supportive identity that could still flex for local languages, audiences and contexts.

The resource itself had an extraordinary depth of content. From a UX perspective the challenge was making that depth genuinely useful. The existing platform contained thousands of high-quality resources, but users didn't always have a clear route to the information they needed. Search and navigation reflected the structure of the organisation rather than audience needs, while dense pages and inconsistent interfaces added friction across the experience.

RSH's primary users include small and under-resourced civil society organisations working across very different contexts. Some rely on unstable mobile connections, basic devices or limited digital confidence, so the experience needed to work far beyond an ideal, always-connected scenario.

Multilingual access added another challenge. Users valued RSH's regional and translated content, but non-English resources could be difficult to find and the regional Hubs didn't always feel like part of one coherent global service.

Our brief: Turn an extensive resource library, with a fragmented brand, into one coherent system that is simple, accessible and usable - whatever the user’s language, digital confidence, access needs or connection quality.

Brand audit

We started by looking at how RSH was showing up across its global and regional ecosystem. A brand audit, supported by an internal questionnaire with RSH teams, examined everything from naming, logo architecture and colour to typography, imagery and templates. It helped identify where inconsistency had crept in, what audiences already recognised and trusted, and where the identity could feel warmer, clearer and more supportive while still allowing regional Hubs to adapt for local contexts.

UX audit

In parallel, we built a clear picture of the digital experience from the inside out. Historical user research, Google Analytics and a heuristic review of the global and regional Hubs fed into a full UX audit. Together, this gave us a rigorous evidence base for where navigation, content structure, accessibility and multilingual usability needed to improve. The brand and UX findings were considered together from the outset: clarity, consistency and accessibility needed to run through both the interface and the identity.

User interviews

We spoke with four existing RSH users across Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria and Qatar, combining interviews with live usability testing to understand how they used the Hub, where they struggled and what they needed it to do better.

Some experienced users knew exactly what they wanted but struggled to find it in the right language; others needed more guidance to navigate a large and unfamiliar library. These insights shaped the new information architecture, a simplified navigation and core user journeys.

Usability testing our designs

Once we had a design we believed would work, we tested the prototype with five further users across Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Bangladesh, asking them to complete tasks such as finding, filtering and downloading resources. We also tested how the refreshed identity worked in practice — whether it still felt recognisably RSH and supported clarity and usability.

The testing validated key design decisions around resource presentation, language visibility and more unified global and regional content. It also exposed details that still needed refinement, which we fed back into the design before handover.

Never Know Defeat led the evolution of the RSH identity, with Here I Am helping translate the new brand into an accessible, usable digital system.

The aim wasn't to lose what users already recognised and trusted, but to create a clearer and more coherent identity across the global platform and Regional Hubs. The refreshed brand retained familiar elements of RSH while introducing a warmer, more human visual language and clearer rules for colour, typography, imagery and regional variation.

That flexibility was important. RSH needed to feel like one global service without flattening the different languages and contexts represented by each Hub. The result is a stronger shared brand foundation that can flex for local content while remaining recognisably RSH.

We stripped back dense interfaces, prioritised strong hierarchy and scannability, and treated speed and simplicity as accessibility features. Our recommendations included lightweight layouts, compressed media, offline-friendly formats, keyboard and assistive-technology support, clear focus states and interactions that remain usable regardless of device, ability or digital literacy.

Resource discovery was redesigned around what people actually knew. Users shouldn't need to remember the exact title of a safeguarding document to find it. We introduced clearer thematic routes, richer filters, visible language and region information, more useful metadata and previews so people could judge whether a resource was relevant before spending time or data opening it.

We also rethought the relationship between global and local content. Rather than treating each Hub as a separate destination, the new information architecture (IA) created clearer journeys across regions, languages and themes, while retaining space for genuinely local content. Testing informed a simplified IA that grouped overlapping sections, reduced duplication and made regional content easier to discover.

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 — allowing the same underlying system to support very different audiences and regional contexts.

The redesign brings RSH's brand, content and digital experience into one coherent system - turning a deep resource library into a platform designed to guide people towards the right support.

A simplified information architecture gives users clearer routes through safeguarding guidance, learning and resources. Search and discovery place greater emphasis on language, region and context, while clearer metadata helps people understand what a resource is before opening or downloading it.

The new multilingual design system creates consistency across the global platform and Regional Hubs while supporting local variation — including right-to-left languages and different content needs. Together with the refreshed identity, it gives RSH a more recognisable and consistent presence without losing the flexibility needed for regional audiences.

And accessibility is present in the fundamentals: lighter pages, clearer hierarchy, simpler interactions and experiences designed to remain useful when connectivity, digital confidence or device capability is limited.

The result is a platform with the rigour its subject demands, but less complexity for the people using it: a clearer, warmer and more coherent RSH — easier to recognise, navigate and act on.

The platform is now live, developed in-house by RSH, from our designs - View the free resources here.