Vocabulary App
UX/UI Methodologies & Techniques:
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Competitive Analysis
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User Interviews
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Personas
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Information Architecture
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Low Wireframes
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Usability Testing
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Prototype
Software used:
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Sketch
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Marvel
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Skype (Interviews)
Project Overview
BRAINTASTICS is a vocabulary app that enables you to learn a new language in a natural way. Whether you are a visual learner, auditory, or scribbler with Braintastics, you can learn a new language with ease. Successes and challenges motivate you to stay on the ball.
The goal of BRAINTASTICS is to allow users to learn in quick 5-10-minute study sessions anytime and anywhere. Whether for your next holiday in Hawaii, your Au Pair year in South Korea, or future communication with clients from Mexico.
The project is about a vocabulary app that helps empower people to learn new vocabulary and find out what learning methods are beneficial in memorizing.
Design Question
4 Weeks
Duration
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Conducting competitive analysis, and user interviews
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Define the product strategy
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Create user persona, analyze task flow, and create information architecture
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Create low-fidelity interactive prototypes for user testing
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Conduct usability testing (planning, writing test script, and conduct testing)
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Report analysis
My Role
How might we design a mobile app that empowers people to learn new vocabulary for their pace of life? To stand out among competing apps, what values our app should provide that no other apps do?
In any age its difficult to keep track of all the jargon when studying a new discipline. In order to stand out as a vocabulary app the focus will be to find each users learning methods and ease memorizing more vocabularies in their free time. Studying should be comfortable with using mobile applications and it should come naturally.
Solution
Following the problem statement, I conducted a competitor analysis to get insights into the vocabulary app market. This allowed me to identify the opportunities, weaknesses, strengths, and threats. To develop my understanding further, I analyzed three competitors: Brainyoo, Repetico and Quizlet.
Competitive Analysisis
To find out the answers to the design questions, I chose to conduct competitor research and user interviews.
Research
With my script and interview questions prepared, I conducted 3 user interviews with my participants via Skype. This gave me some insights into their experiences with vocabulary apps and identify their pain points when it comes to learning a new language.
Afterwards, I gathered my notes and quotes from the interviews and laid it all out into 3 blocks, Doing, Feeling, Thinking. This allowed me to sum up and visualize the information more easily.
User Interviews
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Based on my user research, I created user personas to give my users some human elements and to better understand their behaviors and goals.
After giving my personas a face and name, I began creating User Stories and Job Stories to further understand the goals of my users and plan out my design decisions to meet their needs. This allows me to see the bigger picture and focus on putting myself into the shoes of my users.
User Personas
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Jack needs a way to be able to study with multiple repetitions so that he can stay motivated by memorizing more words in a faster time.
He needs an App that allows him to study words or icons/signs not only by reading or writing but also by hearing the pronunciation as well as seeing the facial expression.
Problem Statement
Hypothesis Statement
I believe that creating an app that allows users to not only read and write but also to see and hear how words are pronounced, will help Jack achieve his goal of learning Italian.
According to the hypothesis statement, I focused on two user tasks:
User Flows & Task Analysis
Usability Testing
The usability testing aims to assess the learnability and errors of the application. The purpose of observing the participants is to measure how successfully can people complete the task flows with the key features.
For measurement, I used Jakob Nielsen's error severity rating scale.
Wireframes
Prototype
After conducting the usability tests and carefully reviewing the feedback using the Jakob Nielson severity meter, I made the following revisions to my Wireframes.
Wireframes were made in Sketch.
This prototype is a recorded click-through version.
Learnings
This project was my first personal project focused on user experience design.
User interviews helped me to empathize with the users. Having good-quality questions can go a long way.
Having a test plan and script ready can help better prepare you during the usability tests, keeping the interview straightforward so I can focus on the observations.
Don't be addicted to perfectionism in wireframing. Focus on testing the ideas.
