Designing a multilingual safeguarding platform around the realities of its global users

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 the platform had grown, RSH needed a clearer, more coherent way for users to navigate that depth of content - and a digital 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 platform for organisations working in diverse and often challenging contexts.

RSH had an extraordinary depth of content. 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 more readily than the needs of its audiences, while dense pages and inconsistent interfaces added friction across the global and regional Hubs.

RSH's primary users include small and under-resourced civil society organisations operating in very different contexts. For some, accessing the platform means relying on unstable mobile connections, basic devices or limited digital confidence. The experience therefore had to work far beyond an ideal, always-connected scenario.

Multilingual access added another layer of complexity. Users greatly valued RSH's regional and translated content, but translation features were inconsistent, non-English resources could be difficult to locate, and regional platforms increasingly felt like separate sites rather than parts of one coherent global service.

Our brief: Turn this extensive and invaluable resource library into an experience that is simple, coherent and usable - whatever the language, digital confidence, accessibility needs or connection quality of the user.

UX Audit

We began by building a clear picture of the platform from the inside out. An internal discovery questionnaire with RSH teams, combined with historical user research, Google Analytics, a heuristic review of the global and regional Hubs and best-in-class benchmarking, fed into a full UX audit. Together, this gave us a rigorous evidence base for where the experience, content structure and brand system needed to improve.

User interviews

We then spoke directly with four existing RSH users across Pakistan, Jordan, Nigeria and Qatar. These 45-minute sessions combined interviews with live usability testing: participants shared their screens and showed us how they actually used the Hub, where they got stuck, which workarounds they had developed, and what they needed the platform to do better.

The research revealed very different resource-discovery journeys. Some experienced users arrived knowing exactly what they needed, but struggled to locate the right resource in the right language. Others needed more guidance — particularly newer users faced with a large library of content and unsure where to begin. Search reliability, language visibility and clearer routes into relevant content all emerged as key opportunities.

That first round shaped the new information architecture, resource discovery model and core user journeys. We simplified navigation, brought global and regional content closer together, and designed more explicit ways to find resources by language, location and need.

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 real tasks such as finding a resource, filtering by country and language, and downloading content for local use.

The prototype testing validated many of the decisions we'd made: users valued clearer resource cards, visible language options, more unified global and regional content, and the ability to download and share resources directly. It also exposed details that still needed refinement — from the placement of language controls to clearer content grouping — which we fed back into the design before handover.

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 turns RSH from 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.

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 global safeguarding resource that feels clearer, warmer and easier to act on.

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