I’d love to know how to [insert a skill here].
Kalligraphia, a design story.
Everyone has that thing they’d like to learn but never start. Like: “I’d like to know how to play the guitar”, but you never do. It’s always a bad timing. You have too much work to do, you have exams, a travel planned… and life goes by and you don’t start it.
Well, with me it was calligraphy. It’s hard to find time and resources to practice. I’ve actually tried once — bought a dip pen, practiced for a few weeks and then it all sat there on my table while I had something else to do.
So, when it came the time to choose my capstone project for the IxD specialization on coursera the theme was just there, sitting in front of me. But here’s the tricky question: How could I design something to facilitate behaviour change?
Following some of the skills I got from the specialization, in two months I came up with Kalligraphia. The first step on the process, was to interview a few people who practice calligraphy and learn about their habits.
From the interviews I realised finding inspiration was not a trivial task. I learned that for people who practice, the content of what you write or where you get inspiration from matters. Sometimes, making that decision can consume a lot of your time — that you could’ve spent on practicing.
After brainstorming and getting some inspiration, the first drafts of Kalligraphia came to life. From the storyboards, I came up with two paper prototypes that approached the practice of calligraphy from different angles. The first one had a lot of social interactions going one, and was the one I chose for moving on to the heuristic evaluation.
The feedback I got from testing got me thinking about one of the assumptions I made when trying to tackle this problem. So I decided to change my design and make some big changes to it. I removed a feature where you could challenge your friends to write, and took different approach to motivating people to write and learn new things.
With the new prototype, it was time for some more user testing. This time, it was even more interesting. One of the users mentioned that the learning letter by letter didn’t make sense, since they usually practice groups of letters together — and those groups are separated according to the movement you make when you draw the letter, rather than alphabetically. This comment made a big difference, and once more the prototype was changed.
From storyboards to paper prototypes, to heuristic evaluation, to user testing, it took a lot of adjustments to get to the final prototype. And still, there are a lot of things that need adjustments! Overall, it was a great experience. Kalligraphia helps people new to calligraphy to learn new alphabets, upload their work and share it with their friends, track their progress and get inspirations on what to write. You can check out a video introduction to it here, and a prototype here.
That’s all for now. If you’re interested in the project, let me know! :)
