We started off with the following problem statement to guide the direction for this project and uncover key research insights on issues users face:
"How can we help young adults who are open to exchanging language knowledge connect so they can get a more hands-on language learning experience?"
Our secondary research defined 3 key themes that impact language learning and are associated with success or failure in language improvement.
I took the role of uncovering and summarizing the themes of "learning process" and "community" within a collaborative research report.
Motivated By Aspirations
Learners are motivated to learn other languages due to environmental, personal, and professional aspirations.
Seeking Positive Experiences
Negative learning experiences such as making a mistake or misunderstanding culture impedes the learning process.
Fostering Community
Community can help foster langauge learning through exchange of cultural knowledge and social facilitation.
After conducting some secondary research, we needed first hand accounts from learners on the problems they face to find the most salient issues.
During this stage, I took the role of helping draft the interview script, obtaining consent forms, and conducting interviews for two participants. Participants were recruited from personal networks due to time and availability constraints.
Overview
We conducted 8 interviews with the goal of understanding user's learning styles, motivations, goals, and pain points. Each interview lasted about 20-30 minutes and was recorded and transcribed through Zoom with additional notes taken during the interview.
Inclusion Criteria
Interview participants were young adults (18-30 years old) and screened based on if they had attempted to learn a language in the past year.
Some Key Questions
• Have you ever tried to teach someone a language? How did that go?
• Tell me about a time you’ve attempted to put your language learning into practice.
• What has encouraged and discouraged you while learning a language?
Here are some insights founds from our 8 interviews on young adults' experience learning languages. These quotes were coded to find themes across participants that we could then focus on for ideation.
I don't like learning in a classroom. I like it to be more natural. I’m just kind of like learning at my own pace, you know.
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[Songs] made me build, interest towards that culture. I wanna travel one day so I need to be able to speak basic conversations when I go on the trip.
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My skills have improved, but I still need to work on gaining more confidence in speaking outside of the classroom.
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Textbooks would start with like a culture Chinese culture and what national holidays they have how like a family. How families look? [...] That was helpful at a young age. To really get myself interested and invested.
To empathize with the insights gained from interviews we summarized the most important themes into a persona and mapped out the user's current journey.
“I’ve been learning Spanish on apps forever but I still find it embarrassing to talk to my Spanish-speaking friends. I need a judgement-free zone to practice.”
• She prefers to immerse herself in the culture of the language she is learning (7/8 interview participants)
• Finds structured learning environments are too intimidating and do not translate to real life (7/8 interview participants)
• Has difficulties finding one platform to accommodate her diverse learning habits (Project constraint of having one MVP flow made this difficult to achieve so it was not focused on)
From this journey map, we can observe how users like Sarah are able to learn language basics successfully but practicing and improvement in the language poses a challenge.
Through narrowing down the key issues users face, we began to ideate on possible solutions to their problems. We used rapid ideation methods and prioritized them based on user value and designer effort.
Solution Considerations
• How might we ensure the user's privacy when meeting other people?
• How do we prevent this app from becoming too social focus on education?
• Are there other apps that do something similar? How might we improve them?
• Is this feasible with current resources and appealing to our target user?
The final idea we landed on was an app that connects people to meet in person and complete language-related quests. This idea focuses in on the interactivity our users craved in their learning and helps deliver a unique opporunity to interact with cultural topics through conversation.
★ Click or tap on the wireframe screens to see before and after changes
The sketches were then translated into wireframes for testing the layout of the content and uncovering issues that the user might face interacting with the app.
Some issues users faced included:
After finalizing the layout, we looked towards making design decisions that would invoke the right feelings for our users. We started with adjectives like friendly, adventurous, and confident and then tested them through a moodboard.
From the aligned moodboard, we created a style tile to define UI elements like colour, typography, and spacing. This proved crucial in collaborating on the UI injection as a team.
This is a storyboard that shows the MVP flow for the proposed solution. UI elements and content were included to simulate the real app experience.
A variety of different categories from food to songs that users can use to connect themself to their target language's culture.
Suggests public locations where conversations can be done safely and with fewer distractions.
Users are given tasks to keep the conversation going but leave them free to practice naturally.
Quizzes and journal entries help users keep track of their progress and highlight improvements.
As the first end-to-end project in my Master's degree, this experience was invaluable in helping me expand my knowledge of the UX process and practice skills like collaboration, time management, and presentation.
I played a significant role in helping in each step of the process and had the opportunity to present each step to UX professionals, peers, and educators. I consistently organized group meetings, delegation of workload, and valued input from all team members.
Successes
The value of this project was in the collaborative structure of it. Each step of the UX process needed to be evaluated critically so that each team member could work to their strengths. We always ensured this while maintaining a flow of communication that helped us meet deadlines and align on our work.
Challenges
The main challenges for this project arose in the constraints of time and scope. This was only a 10 week project with each deliverable having a week long deadline. This meant that some parts of the process may have been neglected or weaker. Furthermore, the scope of the project being a digital app with one main flow resulted in an inability to satisfy all user needs.
Future Directions
• Exploring the final user need of accommodating diverse learning habits would help create a holistic solution
• Collaboration with other language learning tools is worth exploring to see how this new solutions interacts with existing learning methods
• Adapting to other digital technologies like smart watches and AR to make the conversation support more seamless.
Heuristic Evaluations
UI Redesign
Information Architecture
Zara Redesign
Heuristic evaluation and redesign of the Zara marketing site.
View Case Study
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