Case Study: Develop a Language Learning App for Teenagers
This time I want to share my first experience on discovering the design thinking process on my very own. (And just to spoiler you: This path has a lot of ups and downs).
The Brief
Smart People Inc. is a fictive company which business model is to run summer language learning camps for teens between 12 and 18 years. Their concept is to integrate sports, outdoor activities, technology, humor, games, and other cool stuff to their mission of teaching English or Spanish as a second language.
Since not all kids are able to access these kind of summer camps either due to money or time issues Smart People Inc want to extend their portfolio with an app which allows pupils to study English and Spanish from everywhere. Base for the app is on the one hand the lectures and knowledge Smart People Inc. (SMP) already has from their bootcamps and of course the values SMP stands for.
User Research
First challenge was to get in touch with teens from 12 to 18. But luckily my brother just turned 18 and I have three younger cousins in this age range so I forced them friendly to share my survey within their friends (thank you guys!). Additional I did a lot of research about Gen Z and their learning habits. You can see my key findings about this generation and all the important input I got in the following sketch note.

When I talked to younger students they all complained about the vocabulary given from school. Basically they said, that they just don’t get the point why the need to learn stuff like setting up a bank account in Spanish, serving dinner like a waitress or what’s the Spanish word for borecole, if they just want to go travelling after school. They also said, that they would be more likely to learn if there would be vocabulary they actually need in their daily lives and if they had the option to chose the topic they are interested in.
Problem Statement and HMW
Combining that with my knowledge about Gen Z, the competitor analyses (I had a look to apps like Duolingo, Memrise and Babble) I came up with my HMW and my problem statement.

User Persona
Through the input from my rough user research I also came up with my persona Marco. I focused less on the actual demographics from Marco as more on the needs and fairs Marco has and what he’s struggeling with
Even so some of my peers told me that Marco seems quite German, what’s probably caused by the fact that I just had access to German teens for my use research.
Anyway Marco is a teenage boy, who really wants to go Barcelona after his A-Level. He’s learning Spanish at school, but since he’s not really interested in the topics he’s not putting a lot of effort in. His mom is carrying about him and they have a lot of fights because he’s promising he will do something for his Spanish grades but he’s not doing it. On the other hand Marco knows exactly that he needs to do something about, if he really wanna go to Barcelona, because he has heard that Spanish people aren’t the best English speakers. Since he’s a bit afraid of other people and his peers at school will laugh about his Spanish skills and he’s not able to communicate he’s looking for an easy way to study basic and useful vocabularies.
And hey — You never would have guest what happened: Marco found the app from Smart People Inc!

User Stories, Feature Prioritization and Information Architecture
After my ideating session (which is by the way definitely not a exercise I will do alone again, because it’s about creating a lot of ideas what’s in fact easier with more brains instead of just mine — lessons learned!) I decided to create an app which plays a bit with VR. Means you can just open your camera scan stuff and it would show you the Spanish word for every object you scanned. That would combine the students daily life and make it possible for them to create own study lists.
I know it’s quite hard to do that and there needs to be a lot of stuff developed before cameras are able to differ a white paper from e.g. milk, but feasibility wasn’t really the focus of the project.
To connect my idea with the brief I decided that there would be also a bulk of lessons you can join. Each lesson would be based on the Summer Camp Lessons and would include some informational stuff, new vocabularies and (like in the real summer camp) a little game to keep the words you’ve learned better in mind.
After writing down all the stuff Marco want to do with the app as user stories, I went to the feature prioritization process to define my MLP (Minimum Lovable Product ❤ ).

So the basic feature the app would include are:
- A lessons mode including mini games
- A trainings mode with flashcards
- A personal library
- The VR scanner
- A translator which is able to translate written or spoken stuff
After that I figured out my sitemap and tested it with a open card sorting.

User Flow, Happy Path and Lo-Fi Prototype
After my site map was done I went a bit crazy on the user flow. To make it a bit easier for you I marked the happy path, the flow Marco is going and which is definitely clickable in my prototype green.

After the user flow was done I did some rough scribbles for my lo-fi prototype and tested my paper prototype with some people. Actually it went quite smooth, I just figured out that I need a fullscreen mode for videos when I include them, that my icons need some naming, because they aren’t intuitive and I needed to rearrange the menu order a bit.
So yeah, people got the idea of the app and they completed all tasks I told them- Honestly till this point I didn’t really believe that this project will lead somewhere BUT as my teachers said: You need to trust the process. And obviously it’s working like that.

Mid-Fi Wirframes, Prototype and Thoughts On That
Doing my first mid-fi was not really a no-brainer. Which means even if we talked so often in our class about what mid-fi means (black and white, just boxes, icons and placeholders) my first try turned out pretty coloured.
But hey, heard it’s one of the most common mistakes designer newbies do: skip steps of the process, jump directly into the high-fi and learn, step back and enter the process at the point you left again and start over again.
As I recognised that I wanted to much to fast and mid-fi not means losing my self in details and colours, I restarted and translated simply my lo-fis into mid-fis.

As you may have recognised I ended up with some more screens than the actual happy path would need. But since I had time I designed some more screens to sneak peek the other features of the app in my prototype.
If you made it to here and still curious to see the final prototype: Watch the following video.
For this prototype I used the Sketch Prototype function which allows to turn you’re designed screens quite fast into a click-dummie. But be aware it actually just links screens not less and not more so compared to a Invision Prototype there way less options for gestures, anchor points on artboards, device frames etc.
Learnings, Learnings, Learnings
What I’ve learned expect to trust the process? Probably a lot about the behaviour of Gen Z and you can really believe me if you thought it’s hard to satisfy Gen Y, than try to motivate Gen Z.
Further than that I experienced how amazing a network can work, because even if I know just 2–3 people in the age of my target group really good, I managed to get through them more than 10 people I could talk and run a survey with. And I realised that even when you not be able to get people from your target group, so just talk to people who are close to. In my case teachers and parents and german teens. On the other hand I definitely learned is that your interviewees and survey participants gonna bias your persona, if they not fit the target to 100% and you should be honest about that later on and not hope people wont figure that out.
And last but not least I figured out that prioritising is hard if you have to many ideas and love all of them. ;)
Summary and what would come next
Gonna be short — promise! So all in all I’m happy with my results. The app turned out as something really could be used and that was my goal. The prototype testing went pretty well and people told me that they actually like the idea of the app. For sure there’s space for more, but hey it’s just the MVP ! So based on my interviews some stuff the app would really need to get used:
- More than just the camera mini game, that students don’t get bored
- A Placementtest to suggest you specific lessons and to individualise your experience and get individuell study plans
- Implement gamification (Rewards, Batches and Achievements) to achieve stuff and compare yourself with your peers (what leads to the Social Aspect)
- Live content like Stories & Videos how you do your challenges
- Join live sessions of influencers, teachers etc.
Glad if you made it till here! I’m curious about your feedback, your thought’s about the trust the process and of course any kind of question you may have! :) Julia
