
UX Case Study: SmartPeople Part I
In this article, I discuss the UX process of creating an app to learn languages.
Brief
Smart People Inc. is a fictitious educational company founded in 2014. They currently offer in-person language courses — English, Spanish, Italian, French, German and many more — for kids and teenagers from 12 to 21 years old.
Their main attraction is a summer camp. Hundreds of teenagers join every year in different locations, as they have a very special recipe: they integrate sports, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching a second language.
Even if this is dope…
They’re finding many students are unable to attend the summer camp due to cost and time reasons, but still want to access the curriculum.
The Summer Camp
- Currently, they do three four-week camps each summer
- A course has around 20 activities and 20 lessons
- Out of these activities and lessons, students get to decide which 10 they want to take
- If they are willing to join more sessions, they can either be put in the waiting list or ask to volunteer
- All attendees receive feedback from other students and their coaches
- Coaches follow student progress, in order to effectively asses them and be able to co-create the most adequate learning path together
- Smart People Inc. has a lot of material in the various formats already developed after years of running the camp and school
Smart People Inc’s Problem Statement
Smart People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the summer camp.
Team & Project Scope
For this project, we were a team of two UX Designers, Julie Sadeg and myself. Julie is cool and collected, she’s detail-oriented and a very good listener. I am good at organizing things, seeing the big picture and getting things done.
We had five days to create a Minium Viable Product (MVP), which is an app with just enough features to be considered ‘working’, meaning that it should achieve the purpose it was built for in the most basic way.
So we had five days to:
- Research our potential users
- Understand their frustrations, needs, learning styles
- Define the problem
- Ideate
- Prioritize concepts and features that will be part of the MVP
- Create the app information architecture
- Create wireframes (low-fidelity prototype)
- Test the lo-fi
- Create a mid-fidelity prototype with Sketch
- Test the mid-fi
- Iterate on test feedback and improve the mid-fi
This was our goal, the reality went a bit differently… We planned the five days at the beginning of the project, started on a good foot, then systematically ran out of time. This is what we call a reality check and we dealt with it.
User Research
Smart People Inc. addresses kids and teenagers between the ages of 12 to 21 years old. This is a wide age range. To offer a more personalized solution , we needed to focus on a smaller group of users. We chose to focus on the 18 to 21 years-old age group.
After conducting qualitative research, in the form of five interviews, we realized that our potentiel users:
- Did not feel engaged with their academic language learning
- Learned languages by watching TV and listening to music
- Were motivated by the cultural aspect of languages (music, films, religion)
- Used their phones a lot — 3 to 10 hours a day
- Liked to travel
- Needed to work in the summer to earn money
Our quantitative research, which is an online survey, yielded 23 responses. We expected 100 but we had to deal with the small turnover.
This is the main finding of the quantitative research:
- 48% learned two languages on top of their mother tongue, which makes sense because our users are based in France and it’s custom to learn two foreign languages in school.
- 91% learned foreign languages in school. Some started in high school, other started in primary school. The ones that started early had a better mastery of the foreign languages that they learned.
- 59% learned foreign languages by listening to music (this is not mutually exclusive with the academic learning).
- 81% of respondents want to improve their English skills, 43% want to improve their Japanese skills, and 33% want to improve their Spanish skills.
- 44% of respondents worked last summer.
- 74% want to travel next summer and 56% say that they don’t have the financial means to do so.
Meet Fiona
Fiona is our user persona, based on our research, she represents our main user.

What We Are Trying To Solve
Fiona, the active university student, needs an affordable and engaging way to learn languages because she wants to communicate with ease when she travels.
Ideation
Our team used the Crazy 8 method to brainstorm ideas.

Our user research shows that our potential users don’t want to feel like they are in an academic setting where they have to complete exercices, read and write. They want to feel engaged in a fun activity while learning languages.
So we came up with a lot of creative activities which were not directly related to learning languages but which could be ways to learn languages. And we kept in mind that these activities should have cultural components and be affordable.
Our Solution
Fun Missions
Our solution is an app called Smart People. With this app, teenagers and people who are in their early twenties can join teams of three and complete different missions while learning English. Each mission lasts 4 weeks. Students are given a brief and guidelines to complete each mission. They can chat with their team members through the app.
Since this is a MVP, we only offer one language to begin with, we chose English as 81% of our research respondents want to improve their English skills.
Some exemples of missions are: writing a comic book, or creating a song.
Mentorship
Mentorship is this app’s secret weapon. Each user that signs up for a mission is paired with their own mentor who will guide their process. Mentors are English native speakers. Students book weekly calls with their mentor and discuss their progress and any questions that they may have. Mentors keep users accountable.
To ensure mentor’s quality, each mentor goes through an extensive online screening process, gets paid for each mission and reviewed by users at the end.
App Demo
Images speak louder than words, so here is a demo of our app prototype:
User Feedback
We tested our app with three potential users and the main feedback was:
- The mission price is too high, would have paid a maximum of 20 Euros to study languages on an app or have subscribed to a membership rather than paying for each mission
- Mentorship is of great value and provides trust in the app learning proposition
- Understand that they can chat with their team members through the app
- Got stuck in Week 1
- Liked the app concept

Next Steps
We ran out of time here… If we were to continue this project, our next steps would be:
- Fix the flow to make it more seamless when we are on the mission’s page
- Rethink the pricing
- Offer more activities and more languages, starting with Japanese and Spanish
- Create a high-fidelity prototype
- Test the hi-fi
- Iterate 😊
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions, feel free to comment below, and don’t hesitate to clap if you enjoyed reading this article! 👏
