Creating a Truly Native Experience at Canva with Rachel Carruthers

Rachel: In Japan, sending out what are called Nengajo cards is incredibly popular. They are New Year cards that are also lottery cards. People send them through the post in the millions. We saw an opportunity that was so hyper-specific to Japan. We designed a bunch of Nengajo cards and partnered with a print service that could print these very specific lottery type cards. People could go into Canva, design their Nengajo cards, order 50 of them, print them out, and have them delivered to their home, all in one place. We saw a huge spike in activation and engagement around that very specific holiday.

Brian: Today we are talking with Rachel Carruthers, Platform Partnerships Lead at Canva. She joined Canva in 2017 and was originally responsible for leading product and marketing localisation and internationalisation efforts. She worked to ensure every user had a truly localised experience across web, iOS, and Android. In March 2023, she shifted to platform partnerships, driving co-marketing opportunities and amplifying new product launches. Prior to moving to Sydney to pursue her master's degree in media, Rachel was working as a senior localisation product manager in Silicon Valley. Rachel, welcome to The Native Experience.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me, Brian.

Brian: Tell us about yourself and what you do at Canva.

Rachel: I am originally a California native. I am from the Bay Area. I have a background in language studies. I moved to Australia in 2015 to pursue a master's degree. I ended up building out and leading the localisation programme at Canva for about six years. I have just pivoted to a new role in platform partnerships, which involves cooperation with technical partners like Apple and Google, understanding how we can better globalise our brand and product offering for folks on native platforms like mobile.

Brian: For those not familiar with Canva, give us a little background.

Rachel: Canva was built as a drag-and-drop design tool. Our founder, Melanie Perkins, was a design educator in her uni days. She realised that a lot of design tools were either incredibly complicated or incredibly expensive. She thought there should not be barriers to entry for design and expression. So she, her partner Cliff, and their third founder Cameron built what is now Canva. It has evolved into a visual communications and design tool where people can make anything from social media graphics to presentations to print assets. It is really a platform for expression.

Brian: If you could only speak one language for the rest of your life, what would you choose?

Rachel: I feel like the informed response would be Mandarin because of the way the global economy is going. It is a fun language, but incredibly difficult. I took a first-level intro course and after that I thought it was just too much. I was in Taiwan twice and each time I realised the same word pronounced different ways means completely different things. The glyphs and characters of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean are incredibly fascinating from an anthropological perspective. This is something I nerd out on quite a bit.

Brian: If you could live in any country, where would you choose?

Rachel: Well, I moved to Australia. If it was not Australia, I think it would be Spain. Spain has always had a deep place in my heart. I love the people and the culture. When I was looking at options for my master's programme, I applied to universities in Sydney, London, and the Netherlands. It was a close tie between University of Amsterdam and University of Sydney. It was kind of a proverbial coin flip. Maybe there is an alternate universe where I live in Amsterdam.

Brian: Have you ever encountered a word or phrase that does not directly translate?

Rachel: Always, constantly. That is part of what we do at Canva. My favourite one, and I am probably not pronouncing it properly, is the Portuguese word saudade. It is essentially this feeling of bittersweet fondness, like the loss of a love where you are sad but also feel grateful that you experienced the love in the first place. I think it is really beautiful.

Brian: What is your favourite foreign language film or book?

Rachel: My favourite foreign language film would be Life is Beautiful, the Italian film. We all remember the Oscars moment where Roberto Benigni jumps on the chairs and crawls across the stage. It is a simply beautiful film from a cinematic perspective, and the way they tackle such a visceral, horrific subject as the Holocaust with humour and lightness is stunning. My favourite book would be Blindness by Jose Saramago. He does not use any punctuation, so your brain has to work through mental exercises to understand when people are talking versus narration. The story is about the entire population going blind and what happens to society when that occurs. It is a fascinating commentary on human nature.

Brian: What are you currently nerding out on?

Rachel: Besides language, always language. I am actually studying interior design in my free time. I have always been interested in design in general, but interiors have been a passion. I love how colour, light, textiles, and shapes can transform a space and therefore transform a mood or state of being. Architecture fascinates me as well. It is fun to use my brain in a creative way that does not have to do with work.

Brian: Tell us about your cultural background and how it has influenced your perspective.

Rachel: On my father's side, everyone is Irish, Scottish, and European. My grandmother is from the Midwest, Minnesota. On my mother's side, her father is Ashkenazi Jewish, originally from what is now Odessa in Ukraine, though I don't identify with being Ukrainian. We were raised Jewish. My grandmother on my mother's side is half Mexican, half Filipino. She grew up Catholic and converted to Judaism when she married my grandfather. That is kind of the story of America: everybody is from everywhere.

Rachel: I was travelling through Israel once and they asked about my background at Tel Aviv airport. They said, well, you're a salad. I was like, yes, I am a salad. A little bit of this and a little bit of that. I remember growing up and people saying, how can you be Mexican and Jewish? Well, here I am, and Filipino as well. My passion for design and colour probably comes more from my Latin background. It is quite interesting being in Australia because although it is absolutely a diverse place, in my experience individuals tend to be less multicultural themselves compared to what I grew up with.

Brian: What cultural experience apart from your own has stuck with you?

Rachel: As an American in Australia, one of the biggest shifts is the attitude towards work. In America, generally you are living to work. In Australia and many other places, people are working to live. That is not to say Australians don't work hard, they absolutely do. But it is also very much part of the culture to take a "chuckie sickie" every so often, where you kind of have a sick day but you're going to the beach. People do all sorts of mental gymnastics to figure out how to maximise their holidays. It is so embedded in the culture and I absolutely love it. It is all about balance.

Rachel: I took a six-month sabbatical in 2022. Canva gives you an extra month of paid leave at five years, and then I took four months unpaid. My job was very much in place when I came back. They are incredibly supportive. Being in a high-growth company and sprinting for six years, you do get burnt out. I needed to take that break to be able to add value and continue to lead the team. It was exceptional. I don't think that would ever happen if I had been in America.

Brian: How do you think language shapes the way we perceive and understand the world?

Rachel: It is really all about the anthropology of things. Having words that express emotions or concepts that are not available in other languages. In Mandarin, the glyphs originally took on the shape of the word or concept they described. That does not exist in Latin characters. Things like intonation shape perception and culture. Australians have this playful attitude that comes across in the way they speak. Everything ends in a question mark. Versus Americans, the joke is that we can hear an American a mile away. In every restaurant, nobody has this concept of having a quiet conversation between two people. It is interesting how these mindsets shape communication.

Rachel: An interesting example is feedback culture. In America and business culture, we are quite direct. In Australia, and I think this is a knock-on from British culture, everything is more understated. They use the feedback sandwich: say something wonderful, give the negative feedback, then follow up with something nice. I sometimes find it difficult because I have to dig through what was said to get the actual valuable feedback.

Brian: How did you get into localisation?

Rachel: I always had a passion for languages. I picked them up fairly well in high school. At UC Santa Cruz, I took lots of different courses including a linguistics 101 class. It brought out the nerd in me. Linguistics is essentially the math of languages: formulas, theories. I ended up majoring in language studies, half linguistics and half studying languages like Spanish and French. I graduated and realised that basically everybody with a linguistics degree goes into academia, and I did not want to do that.

Rachel: I ended up working as a paralegal. Then a friend from university reached out and said he was working for a localisation agency and they were looking for project managers. He remembered I studied languages. I asked, what is localisation? I looked it up and found it all fascinating: how brands communicate, how language can be tailored and personalised based on locale. I joined WeLocalize and worked there for several years before moving to Australia. It was a bit of passion and a bit of luck.

Brian: When you came to Canva, what was the first market or language you started with?

Rachel: When I joined, they had already localised Canva into about 20 or 25 languages. It was first live in Spanish, either Castilian or Mexican Spanish. The woman leading those efforts, Georgia Vidler, spoke Spanish and had lived in Mexico. When I was brought on, the goal was not market by market. Melanie, our CEO, wanted Canva available in as many languages as Microsoft Word. She wanted to remove language and literacy as barriers to design.

Rachel: My brief was to scale out the programme, build the infrastructure, and get us to 100 languages. We went full bore and ended up at about 120, then peeled a few back. Canva is live in over 100 locales today. We looked at localisation as table stakes, which is incredibly rare. Normally companies look at where they want to grow and then localise for those markets. We did a top-down approach and just localised into as many languages as we reasonably could. It was accessibility first.

Rachel: Since then, we have started drilling down into certain markets for growth. We look at where opportunities are in terms of internet users and design habits, and then shape the product for those locales. Hyper-localising where we need to, localising template content to meet users' needs in those markets.

Brian: Can you share a specific example?

Rachel: Japan. Japan is a very design-forward market. Fonts and glyphs are very much a part of Japanese design. They become illustrative. We sourced a lot more fonts for Japanese because fonts play such a crucial role. If you have a limited set of fonts, it becomes a non-buyable tool.

Rachel: For Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, font files are so large because they contain so many glyphs. We had to build font sub-setting, which shows a limited number of glyphs at a time and loads only the necessary ones as people write, instead of uploading the entire font file every time. We wanted an easy, simple, intuitive experience.

Rachel: Then there was the Nengajo card example. Nengajo cards are New Year cards that are also lottery cards. People send them in the millions. We designed templates and partnered with a local print service so people could design their cards in Canva, order them, and have them delivered without going to the post office. We saw a huge spike in engagement around that one holiday.

Brian: How do you balance the needs of different international markets while ensuring products are globally successful?

Rachel: When looking at product localisation strategies, we try to look at what is globally applicable so we can reach as many design community members as possible. For hyper-localisation, we look at data around user engagement and trends to understand if the effort is worth it. We want to know if something is table stakes for users in those markets, or if we are putting a localised band-aid on a larger global issue.

Rachel: We look at internal product usage data and also listen to our community members through social media listening and design communities set up around the world. A lot of times the feedback is global, which means we get to develop the product in a way that benefits a lot of people. But we keep our eyes and ears open for market-specific value adds. At the end of the day, if we are not building a tool that is valuable for our design community, what are we doing?

Brian: What challenges or lessons learned have you had from launching in a certain region?

Rachel: The biggest was right-to-left language support for Arabic, Urdu, and Hebrew. We needed not just the UI mirrored but the design editor itself rebuilt to handle right-to-left text. When we first approached this, so many people were saying we just need to flip the UI. It was so much more than that. We had to teach our editing backend how to treat right-to-left text, and then bidirectional text where Roman numerals and punctuation that are hard-coded as left-to-right need to work in an editor that had only known left-to-right.

Rachel: It was a massive learning experience and a huge piece of work. The key was taking stakeholders, engineers, and product managers along for the ride. Just flipping the UI would have been a terrible experience for right-to-left users. It would almost show that you don't care enough to do it properly. Having them put themselves in the shoes of those users was the aha moment: this is a mammoth task, but we know why we need to do it.

Brian: How do you measure the success of your internationalisation efforts?

Rachel: We look at growth metrics like monthly active users and monetisation on the pro revenue side. For the localised experience, we send out customer satisfaction surveys and look at the number and type of support tickets in different languages. We have a team of language managers for our top markets who handle language quality issues and adjust UI localisation to be more intuitive.

Rachel: So much of what we do is driven by feedback from our community. At Canva Create, we unveiled 12 new features, and so many of those were a product of direct user feedback. We define success as meeting our users' needs in a very direct way.

Rachel: Design is so personal. One of my favourite things is hearing user stories. We had a woman who found her birth mother through a Canva design and social media. An older man whose wife had passed away started making children's books using Canva. These stories are why we do what we do. It is so fulfilling.

Brian: How do you stay up to date with trends and best practices in localisation?

Rachel: My former team, we are all massive nerds. We read a lot about what is going on in the industry. We attend conferences when we can. We stay in touch with the larger community. We have formed friendships with people like Natalie Kelly at HubSpot and Robin Larson. Even though we are all in tech, we work for very different companies and the challenges are different. I think that is where we learn the most: from our peers in the industry.

Rachel: What the team members all have in common is that word, anthropology. A passion for understanding users and how their cultural reality shapes their digital reality and their design reality at Canva. We all love to geek out on those challenges.

Brian: How do you think language and technology will continue to evolve?

Rachel: We are at the beginning of an AI arms race that absolutely involves language. Neural machine translation is kicking down doors in terms of cross-market communication and globalisation. It is making the world smaller, not in a negative way. I think it is helping us understand each other better. These tools are getting built into tech platforms more and more, breaking down barriers so we can have better cross-cultural understanding and empathy.

Rachel: We just launched Magic Translate in Canva for all of our languages. People can translate Canva designs if they are not already in their local language. If I make a presentation and colleagues around the world want to use it in their own offices, they can use Magic Translate within the tool, saving time and effort. Then they can tweak it however they need. It breaks down the communication barrier and makes us a more cohesive team. I really think we are working towards a more connected reality when it comes to language and technology.

Brian: Rachel, there is so much great information here. Thank you for taking the time to join us.

Rachel: Thank you so much for having me. It has been wonderful.

Brian: Rachel Carruthers, Platform Partnerships Lead at Canva. Thank you. Remember, always strive for authenticity and embrace the power of native experiences.

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