Developing an original solution for teens to learn languages online: a UX case study
Language summer camps are a great way for teenagers to dramatically improve their language skills. However, these are not accessible to everyone because of the amount of time and money they require.
In this article, we think of a digital solution for teenagers to improve their language skills online during summer holidays, as an alternative to attending a summer camp.
Exciting topic, isn’t it? Now let’s dive in a little deeper on the Design Thinking process that we’ll use to understand the scope of this problem and come up with an innovative solution! 🌟
Introduction
The client
Smart People Inc. is a fictional educational company that offers in-person language courses for kids and teenagers from 15 to 18 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, humour, 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.
→ In this regards, Smart People Inc. needs an alternative for students that cannot attend the summer camp, by providing an engaging 100% online experience at a lower cost.
To start thinking about the problem and define the scope of our project, we first started to ask ourselves a few questions:
- Why would teens use an online learning platform?
- What type of experience do they expect? Of engagement?
- What is their level of technology knowledge?
- Do kids want to study in summer or do they want to have fun while studying?
- How can we make kids keep the pace, learn and engage while learning?
- What are our users’ goals?
- What are our product goals? How do we want someone to feel while experiencing it?
…
Our approach
The final objective of this exercise is to build an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) of the app. I had the pleasure to work on this project with another UX Designer, Amélie M. Feel free to check her work and her own case study on the project! 📖 We organised our approach as following:
- Plan and execute research to identify user personas and pain points
- Ideate on a solution and design the HCI (Human-Computer Interaction)
- Use Sketch to build mid-fi wireframes and create a prototype
All of this in…one week!
1. The user research
User Interviews
We interviewed five teenagers, from 15 to 18 yo, 2 girls and 3 boys, in order to learn about their relationship to apps, education and what they think about the current existing educational solutions (at school as well as outside of school).
Here are examples of the questions we asked them.
“What languages do you study at school?”
“What do you like in your language classes? What do you dislike?”
“Do you think learning languages is important?”
“What’s the app you use the most? What do you like in this app?”
“What do you think makes an app or an online game addictive?”
“What motivates you the best for learning?”
…etc.
Through the interviews, we found out that the main pain points they’ve encountered when it comes to learn languages are:
- the lack of interactions, especially when doing exercises on their own with books or apps
- the feeling of learning old-fashioned stuff at school: vocabulary little used by natives, lecture topics that don’t match the students’ interests…
- the difficulty to find people to properly communicate with in other languages
Our interviewees also provided us with very useful insights about what is important to them, which helped us understanding their needs and their state of mind. In that way, we learned that:
- They all emphasised the importance of learning foreign languages: to be able to communicate or meet people when abroad, for future professional opportunities or just to better understand our globalised world…
- Interactivity is what teens are the most looking for when using an app: inviting friends, texting, sending pictures, video chatting, playing online with others…
- Competition spirit is something that genuinely motivates them. Many of them, when asked about what makes an app addictive in their opinion, mentioned the desire to surpass others and be the best — should it be through sport online games, or Clash of Clans-like online games where you have to build your own environment better and faster that the other players.
- The visual aspect of communication is also very important to them: citing Instagram and Snapchat as their favourite social media — or even favourite apps in general — , pictures and short videos appear like a particularly convenient format for them to use and appreciate content.
We used this data to build an Empathy Map — classifying these insights in the different categories: what our users THINK & FEEL, what they SEE, what they SAY & DO, what they HEAR — , and clearly define their main goals and pain points to start shaping what will be our user persona:
Problem statement
In order to define our problem statement, we wrote down “How Might We” (HMW) statements: these are short statements that start with the phrase “How might we…” and end with an opportunity. HMW statements were developed at Proctor & Gamble in the 1970s and are promoted by design agencies and professionals including IDEO as a way to quickly turn problems into opportunities.
“Every problem is an opportunity for design. By framing your challenge as a How Might We question, you’ll set yourself up for an innovative solution.”
- IDEO
Following a first ideation session together, we managed to formulate these:
“How might we make remote students proud to live the summer camp experience, by nurturing a healthy competitive spirit and interactions with physical attendees?”
“How might we foster remote students’ self-improvement in their languages skills, by encouraging teamwork and interactions with teens physically attending the summer camp?”
After discussing what could be the best approach, we agreed on working on solving the following problem for our persona:
➡ “Enzo, the outgoing connected teenager, needs an interactive and playful way to live a ‘Smart People’ summer camp experience, in order to improve his English skills and challenge himself, because he can’t physically attend the summer camp for time and money reasons.”
2. Designing a solution and the HCI
Ideation
We started by using the Crazy 8s method in order to generate as many ideas as possible.
By reviewing and discussing them, we began to have a clearer idea of possible features to include in our MVP.
To ensure that our users would benefit from the best of them and to help us generate even more and accurate ideas, we decided to conduct an online survey and asked them more oriented questions, mainly about potential app content and structure. For example, we asked them how they felt about fixing clear goals to reach, being paired with other students for team challenges, or what motivates them the best to learn in term of schedule…
We got 30 answers in total, which provided us with interesting insights and additional ideas — very helpful for us in order to then work on feature prioritisation.
Feature prioritisation
We used the MOSCOW method (which stands for Must have/Should have/Could have/Won’t have) in order to organise and prioritise all the feature ideas we came up with.
Our solution
➡️We thought of an original and interactive app for our persona, based on 4 main criteria:
- Team Belonging: Enzo belongs to a group of other people of his age also using the app, with whom he can communicate through a chat, play or challenge with quiz or educative online mini-games. The group of students is moderated by mentors. The app would contain a Facebook-like “group” timeline, on which are posted updates, learning tips, and various real-time challenges.
- Fun & interactivity: the spirit of the app is to have fun while learning, so that Enzo doesn’t even realise he’s improving his skills. To do so, the app would feature lots of mini-challenges among teens, similar to the ones on social media. Some ideas: a TikToK video-like challenge, where the students would have to film themselves repeating a famous scene from an English movie. Other example: a picture without any caption, posted by a mentor on the timeline, that teens have to send back asap with captions of what they see in English. These challenges, also based on rapidity, would bring users to check the app often as they would be posted (by mentors or other students) randomly during the day.
- Motivation: the app would include a question asking Enzo about his interests when signing up, in order to generate accurate recommendations of various medias and resources (articles, videos & series, music, games/quiz/”exercises”) for him. Also, the above-mentioned challenges would enable the winners to get a certain amount of “stars” (as score points) — in order to foster a healthy competition spirit among teens, and encourage them to win and take part in as many challenges, quiz, mini-games etc. as possible.
- Self-improvement: the app would contain a self-assessment test, to be done when signing up in order to evaluate Enzo’s level in English. The results will be a basis for his progression stats that he can check through the time he uses the app. Also, the app would include tools such as a real-time transcriber & translator, that could be used during video-calls, or while watching videos. In the same way, the music player would offer the possibility to look at the lyrics while listening to a song.
3. Interactive prototype
Excited to bring these ideas to life, we started by creating low-fi wireframes and a prototype that we had tested by some users. The goal was to determine if they could realise specific tasks without difficulty, and what are the potential blockers and areas of improvement.
We asked them to realise three specific tasks through the app:
- “Complete the sign-up process”
- “Write and send a personal message to a mentor or a teammate”
- “Go listen to a random song and have a look at the lyrics”
Following the testing and the the users’ helpful insights, we refined our low-fi wireframes before creating the mid-fi ones with Sketch.
Below is our last version of the interactive prototype. We did our best to make it consistent and as complete as possible, especially for our 3 main “happy paths” (that we expected the users to follow when testing) — however, we didn’t have time to have all the features fully developed in a week!
Feel free to play around with our prototype on InVision, and to try the 2 happy paths just like our testers! ⬇️
Conclusion
This project was super intense, but very exciting! I learned a lot about adapting the research plan and interview tone, since we were this time targeting a different and very specific age range. I also realised how hard it could be to reach users for the research.
Regarding the working process, I really enjoyed working with my teammate and found very interesting how we could came up with such an elaborated idea of solution from scratch, by ideating together and adding on each other’s ideas. This is, for my part, one of the most satisfying things in the UX process!
Since we only had a week to develop a MVP, we also thought about what could be the next steps. I would have liked to work on the secondary features we mentioned above, for example the Slack-like group timeline (accessible through the icon next to the “Home” button, and also by pressing the “see latest updates” button on the home page — see prototype 😉). It would also have been super interesting to create another user path, and make them do one of the mini-challenges we invented for the app. Finally, creating the hi-fidelity wireframes and prototyping them after defining brand guidelines would have been an exciting next step to work on.
Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this challenge as much as I took pleasure working on it! 😊 👋
