Smart People: the future of learning languages — Part 1: User experience
Context
This project consist in creating an app for learning language. In this project, we work for a company called Smart People. 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.
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.
Goal
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.
Problem statement from the brief :
Smart People Inc. needs a way to provide an engaging online experience for students that cannot attend the summer camp.
Approach
In team of two, we decide to apply the Design Thinking process to this case.
First we needed to empathize we the user and understand who is the user we design the solution for, what is the main problem they are facing.
Before starting to empathize with the user, we did a benchmark of the existing solution.
1. Empathize
The first thing we did was to write an interview guide so that we can get qualitative data about how they think and feel about e-learning platform and especially about learning a new language online. Those interviews also helped us understand what was frustrating them to learn in the classic way, so that maybe the e-learning solution might solve those frustrating moment and maybe help user to learn faster.
We realize 6 interviews and gather enough data so that we can build a survey to validate or not our findings from the interviews.
- Today, a lot of people have tried an e-learning app but only a few ones reach the end of the program.
- People are bored by theory lessons
- People are scared of being judged when speaking
- People want more interaction with native people
- People find out they learned better when speaking with context to native speakers
- People like to consume native content to practice their understanding skills
From those findings, we create an online survey.
The survey helped us understand the current frustration when it comes to learn or practice a new language, and what motivate people to learn a new language.
2. Define
From all the data we gather, we manage to realize the Empathie Map.
Empathie Map: An Empathy Map consists of six sections of a chart. These sections reflect key traits that the user demonstrated during the research. The map provides an overview of a person’s experience.
From this Empathie Map, we defined our Persona.
Persona: Personas are not real people, they are fictional characters assembled from the behaviors and motivations of the many actual users we encounter in our research. It describe demographics, behaviors, and attitudes. It is helpful in brainstorming, communicating and building empathy around the user and should reflect user needs.
Michelle is a young adult, between 18 and 21 years-old, fan of the United Kingdom culture. She learned English during her high school but never had the chance to really practice it with other. She would like to be fluent and be able to understand and be understood.
Once we defined our Persona, we defined the Problem Statement that is facing our Persona.
Problem Statement: A problem statement is a clear and concise description of the issue(s) that need to be addressed by a problem-solving team. Problem Statements, as well as User Personas, are important because they define the project’s main objective. These are created based on the pain-points and opportunities you uncovered during the research phase.
Our Problem Statement is:
Michelle, the young adult UK fan, needs a way to improve and practice her English skills in real situations because she’s currently not fluent enough to fully enjoy UK culture and plan a travel alone.
3. Ideation
For the ideation part, we realize a Crazy 8 workshop. Crazy 8 workshop consist in sketching 8 crazy idea in 8 minutes, and present them to the team. Once we did that we decide to merge together some of our idea in order to build a complete solution.
The chosen solution
We combined some of our ideas to build a product with the necessary functionalities to meet the users’ needs. The app will allow the user to learn different country’s cultures through web content and game.
The first part of the solution is a lesson. It contains videos, articles, musics, texts and vocabulary so that the user could practice every day by listening, reading and watching native people express ideas. In the second, once they got through all the content, the user access a digital in-real-life game. The user get into a treasure hunt that will lead him a meet up. There, he will meet the others participants and natives. He would be able to talk about the lesson theme seen during the day.
User flow
Once we started to have a clear idea of the solution we were going to build, we produce the User Flow of our solution so that we have a more precise idea of how the solution will work.
User Flow: A user flow shows the path or paths a user takes to complete a task. User flows depict the primary ways your users will interact with your product, its help define how your user can accomplish a task.
4. Prototype
We start with the low-fidelity prototype. We sketch the main flow, and quickly start the mid-fidelity prototype, while we iterated on the main features, the lesson and the in-real-life game.
Once we finish the low-fidelity prototype, we worked on the mid-fidelity before testing it with a user. We used marvelapp.com to build the prototype.
5. Test
After building the prototype, we interview two user to get some feedback and iterate on the solution. We run two usability test that helped us take a look back to the project. It allows us to iterate and improve the solution.
After those tests, we understood that we needed to be more clear in the wording we have chosen, in order for the solution to be more easy to use. We also understand that certain path of the app was misleading, so we iterate on our buttons wording and emplacement.
Discovery and what I learned
This project was very interesting, we run the all Design Thinking process in one week and come up we a realist prototype of the solution. Iterating on the project was very helpful, I learned to take a step back on a project and listen to ideas and propositions and how to merge them with the solution already built.
It was very interesting to work on a e-learning project that needed to be both digital and traditional, so that the user could practice and not download another boring app that propose only content. We had to think and try to build a product that was using the 5 senses of the user.
Creating an e-learning app was challenging since we were asked to produce a product that meet user and client expectations, but also try to make more accessible and playful.
