Ayamel (YVideo) is a web-based system for streaming video and audio content especially as it applies to learning a foreign language. It houses a collection of media all with the express purpose of helping people learn languages. I am currently still working on this project and have yet to release and alpha test. Our team’s goal is to release the first version at the beginning of January 2019.
My friend who works as a developer at this place recruited me to do UX for them. I was more than happy to take this job from my previous one which was being a TA for a basic spreadsheets class. The team knew that the UI/UX of the website was bad, but didn’t know exactly where to begin. I didn’t either besides some obvious UI problems. I wanted to practice and implement a proper design process which was to do user interviews to find paint points then do designs to solve those pain points.
Since the website has been out for a few years I knew that there was many using it. Many students have to use it for their foreign language classes. Also professors have their own view of the website as well as tools to manage their content for their students. I reached out to the last 100 users of interviews.
While waiting for people to respond I started to create a new logo and a color scheme for the website.
This was their current logo. A play button in the middle with rounded off diamond CMYK theme.
My design kept the play button idea and used BYU’s current official colors and I added a custom one to match the 3 sides of the hexagon.
I received 11 replies back from the group saying that they would be happy to be interviewed. I was stoked. I learned to first ask general questions about their experience so I did. I first interviewed students I asked them to just step me through their typical process. Then I asked them follow up questions according to their process to dig in deeper. Then I asked specific questions such as how they would improve the website and if they had any last feedback.
I found that students generally never log in to the website directly or search videos. Instead they log in to a school academics portal called LearningSuite and just click on the link for the day’s homework assignment and it pops the video right up.
So I designed a view where there is a view of all their videos according to the classes they are in below the player. This can increase average time spent and and ease of navigation.
The next steps for me is to create a landing page, teacher’s view and their tools for video collection editing, and a view for admins to manage accounts.
My next steps are to do some usability testing to iterate and tweak designs. Unfortunately my team needs me to learn React at the moment so that is on halt for now.
