I walk along with my project mate, Ji Hu, and asked him what kind of App are you really enthusiastic to create? I can’t believe we had the answer that finding a new way and creating an English learning app is our common goal. We believe we encounter the same problem in studying English processing as a secondary language, especially in applying new words in an appropriate context. As non-native English speakers, it is always a challenge to enlarge our vocabulary to communicate with English speakers fluently, acutely, and professionally.
Roles
• User Experience Designer
• User Interface Designer
• Interaction Designer
Deliverables
UX/UI Design
• Usability Testing
• Prioritization Matrix
• Personas
• Task Flow
• Storyboard
• Style Guide
• Low-Fidelity Wireframes
• High-fidelity Mockups
• Prototypes
Project Specification
Duration: 2 Weeks
Tools:
• Invision
• Adobe XD
• Google Sheets
• Miro
• Google Docs
After talking with my teammates about my idea, they are all interested and think this kind of app will also speed up their learning process. Then we try to empathize with our potential users and form our hypothesis statement:We believe that by creating an app that helps users expand their vocabulary in real-time by storing the words and terms into organized lists with recommended references and keeping footprints of their research, storing their reliable resources for easy study reference. Such an app we believe will increase the user’s vocabulary comprehension by streamlining and organizing their learning experience.
Proto persona is a hypothetical starting point to consider: Who is our user? It’s an educated guess, and will need to be validated through more user research.
Here, we have two proto personas that Ji Hu and Charlie created: one is a native English-speaking young professional who needs to learn new words to inspire his creativity, and the other proto persona is a young professional from Korea who is constantly learning new words and wants to break the culture and language barrier and master coding.
Quantitative research: Online Survey
We use proto personas as a starting point. It is the role of us as researchers to validate or invalidate the proto-persona.
We started with online surveys. We prepared a survey with Google Forms and distributed it among people who are young professionals on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat.
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We started with online surveys. We prepared a survey with Google Forms and distributed it among people who are young professionals on social media like Facebook, Instagram, and WeChat. The purpose was to discover the pain points of users’ learning and research process of trying to expand their vocabulary. Learning about the problems of potential users is a good way to get inspired. Working with real-world quantitative data is a good starting point to help avoid guesswork and bias. From these results, we could refine the questions to ask the users during the interviews.
Qualitative research
The data we collected from the surveys showed us quantitative data in the areas of our potential users’ current learning styles and what other features they think will improve their vocabulary learning overall.
Online research
According to our interview and online survey with users, we found a very interesting and surprising fact that most people say they need to see a word 4 times to memorize it.
After quantitative research, qualitative research, and online research, we had plenty of data and information about our users. How can we use those data to understand the users' actual needs? The affinity diagram helped us to create categories and narrow our focus. After a few iterations of the diagram, we could understand our users’ needs and wants.
Not only we had learned the users' pain points but also needed to gain deeper insights into users, so we used the visualization tool empathy map to provide a glance into who the user is as a whole and sheds light on which problems to solve and how.
When people are learning new vocabulary, they can often get frustrated with unorganized online personal learning materials, time management, and old learning models that don’t fit into their busy lives. How might we create an application that helps users expand their vocabulary and boost their confidence in an efficient and modern way?
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Not only we had learned the users' pain points but also needed to gain deeper insights into users, so we used the visualization tool empathy map to provide a glance into who the user is as a whole and sheds light on which problems to solve and how.
We had a vague idea of how the app will function, but before we wireframe and prototyping, which are all very time-consuming, we did task flow and user flow first, to map out each step the user completes a task.
Paper prototyping is fast, and you can change it anytime you want, it’s very convenient for fast iteration. Each of our team members did sketches for one of the core functions. This was the first step to help us visually imagine the app.
The core function of the app is to help users memorize and study, so when we are designing the logo, we want to use some visual elements to represent learning and memorizing.
We create a UI style guide. Blue is the color of the sky and ocean. It is often associated with depth and stability. It symbolizes wisdom, confidence, and intelligence. Dominant dark blue balances the various gradient colors. Colorful gradients enhanced the rhythm of the visual.
For this round of user testing, we added a splash screen and three onboarding screens, each onboarding screen describes one of the core functions of the application: how to add a word to the app, how to refer to where you found the word, how to customize the notifications and set daily learning goals.
Learning is so important for humans, and words are the bricks of the knowledge castle. Technology plays a big role in people’s lives, let the computer do the dry and organizing jobs, humans should just focus on how to save time and learn a lot. I will keep testing our app Word Repo, and get more data from potential users to make the app more useful, desirable, and accessible, because articulating your product should be a consistent process, and a product should involve as the market changes.
From this project, we learn designer’s hypothesis is not the users' problem or care because we have our own bias. We need to validate our hypothesis through all kinds of research.
JI LI