Heritalk : Crafting a ancient language learning app that avoids misleading progress from game playing
Feeling stuck playing games instead of learning languages?
Ever wanted to learn ancient languages or about ancient cultures?
But all you found were dull lectures?
Problem Statement:
❓But what is the real problem?
History fans, language lovers, and those into cultural heritage struggle to find good stuff to learn ancient languages. There’s not enough real texts, native speakers’ help, or cultural stuff for a proper deep dive.
ℹ️ Project Information:
👊 But what about our competitors?
- After digging deep into competitive research, there aren’t any direct competitors in the market at the moment. Recorded courses and live classes dominate this space. However, there are indirect competitors like Duolingo, Drops, Memrise, and others.
- Secondary research on these competitors revealed complaints about content quality and excessive gamification. Many users seem to be treating language learning more like a game than actually learning the language.
👬 Let’s get to know our users:
I’ve identified two types of users:
- People who are History/Cultural enthusiasts and want to learn these languages to explore.
- People who are researchers and scholars, who want to learn these languages for academic purpose or researches.
Now that I’m done with research, I started making stories based on what I found. I made up 2 different kinds of user stories:
📃 Initial Research:
I did some internal primary research to get more context and understand the actual problems that users were facing. By analyzing reviews of competitor apps to gain valuable insights into the problems users were facing, I was able to identify a few problems that the users are facing even with the current products in the market.
- Limited availability of texts, books and resources.
- No Pronunciation guides
- Boring/Too basic learning resources
- Languages are hard to learn by oneself
- No one to chat with or practice.
Learning ancient languages also has positive impacts on people’s brains and their command over their native languages. Additionally, the language learning market is growing, with few or no competitors in this specific segment.
🤩Competitive Analysis:
I went ahead and collected screenshots of several apps to observe how they organize their content and user flows.
The common patterns I observed:
- Onboarding
- Lesson taking
- Gamification/Reward
- Personalization
🤯 Information Architecture & User Flows:
After looking at what others are doing, I figured out what’s good and what’s not. Then, I made a Information Architecture for how everything in the app should be organized. I also brainstormed about how users will move through the app for different things they want to do.
✏️ Wireframing:
Now I get super excited about making wireframes, and I really enjoy it. Drawing them with pen and paper is the quickest way to put your ideas down. It’s also great for trying out different layouts and making changes fast.
💥 Introducing HeriTalk
HeriTalk is an app that helps people at all levels learn ancient languages. In a simple and fun way.
After doing all the research and making wireframes, I had a big idea for the app. But because of time constraints, I decided to focus on solving a few main problems and designed for those.
Let’s Go 🚀:
🔥 Onboarding:
- Onboarding helps both users and the business understand each other better by asking a few questions.
- These questions help learn about the user, their language level, and personalize content accordingly.
▶️ My approach to design Onboarding Flow/Screens:
- The onboarding flow should be simple and straightforward, like a short journey. However, in this case, we need to gather information about the user: their current language, the language they want to learn, their proficiency level, and their reason for learning the language.
- This information gives us insight into the user’s background. It helps us personalize the content to match their proficiency level, ensuring they get relevant material tailored to their needs.
- Existing users can simply select the “I already have an account” option on the first screen to access the home screen of the app directly.
- To streamline the sign-up process, instead of asking for contact information after the questions, users are given the option to integrate their social media accounts. This saves time and eliminates the need to remember passwords.
🏠 Start Learning (Home Page):
▶️ My approach to design Home Screen:
- The common theme I noticed in E-language learning products is simplicity. Instead of overwhelming users with too much, I chose to focus on showing the main content right away. This allows users to start learning as soon as they land on the home page and select the lessons they want to learn.
- Users can adjust their proficiency level from the home page, but first, they need to take a test to change it. If they’ve subscribed to premium, they can skip the test and freely explore the app.
📖 Taking a lesson:
▶️ My approach to design Taking a lesson flow:
- While designing these screens, I researched various articles and app reviews. I discovered that many apps lack meaningful connections and rely too heavily on gamification. To address this, I opted to include videos of people speaking and making gestures rather than illustrations and other visuals.
- To ensure ease of understanding, each screen contains three meanings for the word: one in the original language, one in the user’s language for reading, and the translation in the language the user speaks. This setup makes it simple for users to comprehend and practice pronunciation.
📁 Browse Screen:
- The browse screen empowers users to take control of their language learning journey. They can excel in specific scenarios or choose different modules easily by searching or selecting them from this screen.
📚 Library Screens:
- The purpose of this feature is to provide users with additional materials to enhance and accelerate their learning.
- This screen directly addresses users’ need for access to authentic texts and books.
- I added this feature after analyzing research and user needs. My secondary research revealed that users crave authentic texts, books, and articles to dive deeper into the language and culture.
- We can measure the success of this feature by tracking user activities, such as book purchases and downloads.
👭 Communities:
- After reading multiple articles and reviews of different competitors, I identified a key problem: the lack of community. When learning a new language, having an accountability partner or a group of people learning the same language can speed up the learning process by 10x.
- A community feature can provide this access, allowing users to discuss doubts and communicate in the language they’re learning.
- Communities have certain constraints; for example, only premium users can create and make changes to communities. Additionally, related communities for all languages are primarily created by HeriTalk.
- (Discarded Idea): Initially, I considered making the communities more like classrooms where proficient or native speakers, or language scholars, could communicate with users on an hourly rate. However, this idea would turn communities into a tutor-like solution, so I decided not to move forward with it.
🏁And that’s a Wrap!
I hope you found the case study engaging! I thoroughly enjoyed working on it. If you have any feedback, please feel free to share it in the comments.
Your input is valuable, and I’ll definitely take it into consideration.
Thank you for your time and patience.
😵 Some BTS images:
Here are some or many of the discarded ideas and iterations.
The case study that might look cleaner to you is a mess in my figma file, Going through iterations again and again, But that’s the part of the game.
Learnings and Takeaways:
- Understanding user psychology and empathizing with their pain points are crucial aspects of design. While it can feel overwhelming at times, experience and practice play key roles in developing the ability to design solutions that effectively address user needs.
- Learned the importance of taking feedbacks and Iterating on the solutions.
- Understanding the ‘Why’ behind every decision was a major takeaway.
- The more time you invest in designing user flows and information architecture, the smoother the process of designing visuals becomes.
- Learning when to stop researching is essential. Instead of exploring every method and framework, it’s important to use constraints effectively to avoid “Analysis Paralysis.”