SMART PEOPLE : AN UX CASE STUDY

When I’m abroad and I am facing the language barrier, I’d like to have a magic trick that allows me to understand and say instantly what I want.

While waiting for this “magic service” we still need our brain to learn, and especially to learn a new language. But tech and design can help us make learning more fun.

This was the challenge that France A and I were faced.

Smart People Inc. is an educational company born 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.

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

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 problem:

Smart People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the summer camp.

The Challenge:

This project is about creating an online learning platform for 12–21-year-old students. It will transform the in-person learning experience into a 100% digital experience that can be accessed by students at a lower cost.

Research Methods

User interviews

We started by interviewing 6 people between 16 and 18 years old. What we wanted to know before anything else is :

How important is it for them to know another language and what would be the best way to learn ?

Throughout the interviews, some points were highlighted :

Best ways to learn a new language — the oral method:

• Traveling abroad at least 1 month
• Being completely immersed in another country
• Lessons with a teacher
• Introduce speaking earlier in the learning process (learn to speak before learning to write)
• With TV shows and movies, first with french subtitles, then english ones, then none

Reasons for learning another language — for their professional future and for their curiosity:

• They have to; for us english is the universal language
• They like to learn new languages
• They feels comfortable with speaking other languages
• They have foreign relatives
• They have foreign friends
• They have a goal: want to work or plan to travel abroad

Reasons for dropping apps lessons — redundancy & unadapted exercises:

• Redundant structure, always the same type of exercises
• No practice, can’t talk, only written exercises
• No obligation so difficult to be consistent

Motivation to use language learning app :

• Prize to win once user’s reached a milestone. Prizes can be a trip or some free lessons for example
• Receive a certificate at the end of the course
• Competition: with other users of the app, from the same region/country or from other countries.
• Feature to speak the language with a teacher through the phone
• Activities like guided tour for foreign tourists that would be led by learners
• Like a dating site: organize meetings with foreigners and discussion in the foreign language
• Frequent milestones or recap of what was covered during the lessons, or the level the user has reached, to give the feelings that the user has learnt a lot
• Learn in group, with friends

Quotes Directly from interviewees :

“The best way to learn a new language is the change of scenery, being completely immersed without French”

“I’ve learned ten times more German in one week of vacation in Germany than in six years of school”

“I downloaded an app to learn Russian. It’s good for bases but if you want to progress it’s not appropriate. You can’t talk with an app”

Benchmark

To follow our research, we started to look at a few competitors or similar platforms, analyzing the price, the methods of learnings and good features. The purpose is to know if an app stands out from another by its content or relevant feature.

Learning methods and content different from one app to another. Each app customizes exercises and lessons according to their users. On the other hand, apart app such as Hello Talk, no one prefers the oral methods.

All of these app are based on fun learning content.

User reviews from language learning app

To confirm the comments above, we searched for users reviews on those app. Here are the most relevant :

Note: We also built a survey to confirm our pain points and big insights. The 15–18 age group is harder to find than we thought. We did not have enough answers for this survey to be relevant from a quantitative point of view.

Persona

After downloading data from the previous research, with an empathy map, we’ve built our persona.

Let me introduce you Marco. Marco is french, he is 17 years old and he is a final year student in french high school. He enjoys spending time with friends and family. He likes skateboarding, riding his bike, watching movies & series on Netflix.

He has studied English and Spanish since high school but he finds that his level is not good enough. He would like to improve his English and Spanish skills to successfully pass the final exam of high school.

User Journey

Next, we transcribed the typical learning experience of Marco from school to home when he download the app to improve his skills. For more efficiency, we build a “user week” instead of a “user journey”

What we can see is that Marco doesn’t have good grades at school. He doesn’t like the way of learning ; a lot of text and books to read. He needs and is motivated to improve his level of English, but lessons are boring and his speaking skills don’t improve. He gets bored and he drops the app.

The main pain point of this week are when Marco tries to make some efforts and does 20 min lessons every day. The redundancy of lessons and the lack of speaking practice do not allow him to get more comfortable and more fluent in english.

Problem statement

We have observed that Marco, a high-school student from Paris suburb area, who needs to find a way to improve his English and Spanish speaking skills, feels frustrated because classic learning methods at school focus on reading and writing while he prefers oral methods such as listening to music and watching movies in their original version.

Our online learning platform will be designed to help high-school students like Marco to improve their language skills. As physical schools, most language learning apps don’t help users improve speaking skills, which is causing them to feel demotivated and drop the app learning.

How might we create an engaging language learning experience through online lessons and offline activities to help Marco improve his speaking skills and successfully pass his future tests/exams?

Let’s ideate

The crazy 8 method is a good tool to generate a lot of ideas in a limited time. After putting ideas in common and voting for our favorite, we prioritized each feature with the MoSCoW method. Also an easy & quickly tool that allows us to organize features in 4 categories :

Must Have (vital)/ Should have (important)/Could have (nice to have)/Won’t have (out of scope).

User flow

Thanks to that, now we have a better idea of which features we want to built in the app. Mapping the user flow of the app forced us to figure out each step of the “happy ”path.

Site map

Building the site map of our future solution, help us to better organize the navigation

Sketches

This was the first step to help us outline the app and visually imagine it. We started sketches on a board. Then prototype it on paper.

Our low-fi prototype

We decided to focus our big feature on the oral method :

First — user has to create an account and choose on what he is interested (sports, films, etc …).

Then the lessons and exercises are customized according to what he likes. We privileged video for the lessons. Indeed it is the most suitable format for our young users.

Finally after completing the exercise of his lesson, he can book an activity (based on his previous preferences). Activities takes place outside and are meeting places where the students of the app exchange in the language that they want to improve.

Testing time

Our low-fi prototypes ready, we wanted to test it. Before going through the testing part we have to build a scenario to dive our users into the context :

“You are in the last year of high school, you pass your grade at the end of the year.
Since the beginning your English level is not good. You have bad results.
In anticipation of the upcoming final grade, you want to strengthen this language by focusing on the oral method. You prefer to improve your skills with an app because it will give you more freedom to review and study. You want to test the app for free for 1 week”

Then we asked users, tasks as :

• Create a profile
• Start lessons
• Book an activity

What I like with an iterative process, is that you can ask easy task as create a profile, and just with that, it gives you a lot of feedbacks really quickly.

We tested our prototype with 5 different users.

What we noticed, is that users didn’t understand why they have to choose their activities after completing the exercise from lesson. From their point of view, they can book or choose activities without completing the whole lesson.

Then throughout the tasks they had to accomplish, all were confused about the exercise page, they all want a page with the good answers and we hadn’t prototype it.

Some icons and wording were not detailed enough and not understandable for us.

Mid-fi Time

Taking into account user feedback and organizing our features we’ve built our mid-fi prototype.

Next steps

About the design part

The big next steps for us is to create a dedicated chat which allows students (for the summer camp and students from the app) to communicate with each others.

Also we would like to add a funny challenge at the end of each lesson. The challenge would be digital challenge — each student create an avatar and guide him with requested tasks linked to their previous exercices or lessons. They talk to their avatar and if the tasks is well pronounced they win the challenge and have some rewards.

Then, we would like to add a “2 week digital challenge” to create a link with the summer camp. Based on the principle of the summer camp, the 2 weeks challenge would be an intensive immersion of learning a new language but in a digital way. Courses, fun games,

About legal aspects

We also would like to review the legal aspects of the app. Indeed, majority of users are underage. As we’ve dedicated our solution around outside activities, we would want to know if there is some legal part to take into account (risk, insurance, parents authorization).

During the all process, working as pair has been very instructive. Indeed, we were much more invested in the different stages of the project than working with a big team. It also allowed us to go further in thinking and to take more time on each iteration.

As often the discovery phase was the one I liked the most. I was surprising how our dear young students can be very communicative. They are felt valued that we can be interested in them and study a solution for them.