Asst. Lingo
A mobile application that helps International students overcome the main living obstacles caused by the Language barrier
Type: Individual Project
Skills: Interview, survey, persona, wireframe, architecture information, hi-fi prototype, usability test
Tools: Figma / Adobe Xd / Adobe Ps
Timeline: Sep / 2020 - Dec / 2021
OVERVIEW
THE PROBLEM
How might we help International Students who currently live in an English-speaking country and have a language barrier overcome the living obstacles caused by understanding and expressing issues in English?
PAIN POINTS
Completeness and Politeness of Conversation
Are not able to complete a comprehensive conversation properly, always too ‘straight to the point’ without polite salutation.
Pronunciation Accuracy
Suffer from the lack of confidence to ‘Speak-out’ due to their low self-esteem on their foreign accent and pronunciations.
Listening Comprehension
Cannot fully understand the content of an English lecture and have difficulties with taking notes, which affects them absorbing the knowledge and information
Daily Translation
Cannot find an efficient way to figure out how to call some items in English.
SOLUTION OVERVIEW
Asst. Lingo: a one-stop platform that helps International students overcome the main living obstacles caused by the Language barrier
Onboarding & English Quizzes
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Clear onboarding visuals introduce the functions to users
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Survey questions to better understand each user's specific needs and daily vocabulary base
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English quizzes to test on users' English level
Coach Me Now Function
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Input conversation location, conversation purpose, and conversation objects for more accurate translation on a real-world conversation
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Add proper opening and ending to complete a comprehensive conversation
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Watch the instantly generated AI video to better understand the way people speak & behave in a real-world scenario
Speaking Correction Function
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Check the script and listen to the correct pronunciation
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Read out the script and record their speaking
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Get the mark-up script with intonation, pronunciation, and word connection mistakes highlighted in three different colors
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Click on the highlight spots to listen to the correct version specifically
Dictation Function
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Record a real-time lecture OR import an audio file OR or to get the transcription
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Save the transcription locally for review or note-taking purpose in the future
Smart Dictionary Function
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Look up words and get the translation with the example of real-life scenario video clips
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Take a photo with an AI camera:
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Choose the 'scan text' mode to translate the text on the photo
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Choose the 'annotate items' mode to annotate the English name of items in the photo.
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MY APPROACH
01 Research
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State the problem
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Define the scope
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Find the needs
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Analyze the competitors
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Discover the differentiators
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Creat the personas & scenarios
02 Design
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Brainstorm
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Quick sketches
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Wireframe
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Hi-fi design
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Interactive prototype
03 Evaluate
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Usability testing
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Iterations
Research
NEED FINDING
To better understand what specific living obstacles caused by the language barrier international students may come across, I conducted user interviews to understand target users' actual needs. I interviewed 6 International students who have studied in the U.S. or U.K. for a different amount of time, ranging from 6 months to 6 years. From my in-depth interviews, I found that four pain points:
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English is such a polite language, more or less, international students have been accused that they are not polite enough because the way they speak is always too 'straight to the point', without considering the completeness and politeness of a conversation
"You cannot just say I want something; instead, you have to say, can I have something. Although they are exactly the same meaning."
"The tip is to always start your sentence with 'Excuse me' and finish it with ‘please’."
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Even those who have lived in an English-speaking country for a long time struggle to speak out in English confidently because they know they have a foreign accent and not very accurate on pronunciation
"I know I have an accent, and I'm afraid that people would laugh at me."
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International students may not be able to fully understand professors' speaking. It is even harder to take notes while listening to the lecture in their non-native language
“I had a professor in my Junior year, somehow I just couldn’t understand a single word of his lectures for the entire term, so got a B for that class”
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They have difficulties figuring out the commonly used English name for some items in real-life scenarios. Because either the concept does not exist in their native culture, or it is hard to look up the proper translation in a dictionary
"I vividly remember the first time when I came to the U.K. I saw a potato couch, I was wondering how to say it in English, but I couldn’t look up the dictionary, because I didn’t even know how to say it in my native language."
To summarize, international students mainly suffer from living obstacles from four aspects, which helped me specified the scope to do further research and design:
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Completeness and Politeness of Conversation
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Pronunciation Accuracy
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Listening Comprehension
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Daily Translation
COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS
I looked into the existing solutions in the market that cover the four pre-specified aspects before diving into designing solutions.
By examining what services are currently provided and what are still lacked, I sorted out what we need to focus on each aspect:
Completeness and Politeness of Conversation
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Lack of solutions in the market in general
Pronunciation Accuracy
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Provide customizable practice content based on users’ specific needs in real life
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Give immediate feedback that corrects users’ specific mistakes in detail
Listening Comprehension
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Transcribe lectures/speeches immediately
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Save the transcription in multiple formats that are easier for editing afterward
Daily Translation
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Maximize the ways that users can input their translation content, eg: AI camera, etc.
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Give users real-life scenario examples to better understand the usage in the real world
Therefore, I hope to create a tool that can fill the market gap and tailor it to international students' needs in the four aspects to help them overcome the living obstacles they may have.
PERSONAS
To better guide the design process and enable me to empathize with the target users, I further synthesized the interview results and came up with the following personas:
Design Process
IDEATION
With the research findings and personas in mind, I carried out my design process, I firstly made a few quick sketches to brainstorm and initialize my solutions.
LOW-FI PROTOTYPE
I synthesized and reshaped my initial ideas into four key features, targeting the four pain points. I created the following wireframes to visualize these features and get prepared for the high-fi prototype.
Coach Me Now
Speaking Correction
Dictation
Smart Dictionary
Completeness & Politeness of Conversation
Pronunciation Accuracy
Listening Comprehension
Daily Translation
ITERATIONS
After self-evaluation and revision on the low-fi prototype, I transferred the low-fi to the high-fi prototype and carried out the user testing process. My primary goal for the high-fi iteration is to validate if the interaction flow can functionally & efficiently work for users. I also hoped to test the preferred options for two pages I created for 'Coach Me Now' and 'Dictation' features. I used Adobe Xd to create the interactive prototype to illustrate enough functionalities to users.
With the goals bearing in mind, I conducted five user testings and collected valuable feedback. Here are the iteration results:
Iterations for the Survey Question Page
Observation: Does the user freely and efficiently navigate between pages?
Improvement:
Make the 'Go Back' and 'Continue' button symmetrical with other. Users can easily find and click on both of them.
Issue:
The 'Go Back' button and 'Continue' button are not symmetrical on the page. Users hesitated to click on the 'Go back' arrow since they needed time to find it.
Symmetrical button layout
Asymmetrical button layout
Iterations for the Quiz Page
Observation: Does the user freely and efficiently go to the next quiz?
Improvement:
Make the next quiz page automatically show up, so that users can go through the quizzes more quickly and efficiently
Issue:
A user did bother about keeping clicking on the 'Continue' button to see the next quiz
Automatically go next
'Call To Action' to go next
Iterations for Coach Me Now Landing Page
Observation: Does the user quickly figure out what information needed to be input?
Type in & chips for input
Only type in for input
Improvement:
Add the chips under input fields so that
1. Users can quickly select, save their time
2. Users look at the chip examples, quickly figure what information is asked for
Issue:
Users couldn't figure out what information should be filled in for the input field, especially when they use such a function for the first time.
Iterations for Transcription Page
Question: Transcribing content show-up VS. not show-up?
Conclusion:
Users prefer the 'not show-up' version because they think the transcription keeps showing up can distract them from the real lectures, which is more important for them
Not show up the transcription
Show up the transcription
Iterations for Smart Dictionary Page
Question: If the icons are intuitive to understand?
Improvement:
Combined the two icons into one and added two modes in the camera site so that users can switch between more quickly
Issue:
Users confused about the difference between 'Camera Icon' and 'Scan Icon'
Combined icon
Separate camera & scan icons
Final Solutions
INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
After the in-depth research, creative design, and valuable evaluation process, I finalized the user flows and key features. The optimal user flow is shown below：
OVERALL INTERACTIVE FLOW
Based on the finalized user flow and iterations on the hi-fi prototype, I optimized the interaction flow
HIGHLIGHTED KEY FEATURES
I formed my final features primarily based on users’ needs and pain points. At the same time, I prioritized ‘Coach Me Now’ as my 'WOW' function and the landing page when users start the app. It focuses on completing a comprehensive conversation in a good manner. Because the existing solutions targeting to same pain point remain blank. Here are my final key features:
Coach Me Now
Speaking Correction Feature
Dictation Feature
Smart Dictionary Feature
Reflections
Innovative solutions
The idea of adding extra context to a situation and feeding in more information to the ai to provide a more accurate and contextually appropriate response is innovative. It is useful and unique to have a tool that tells users exactly what users are doing wrong (intonation, pronunciation, word connection, etc.) since that's never highlighted in traditional online learning tools.
Technological limitations
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Lack of audio training data
While the product design would be useful, the limiting factor is the technology. The 'Speaking Correction' function would be desirable, but one of my peers who worked with NLP and audio data pointed that it would be technologically difficult to do. It's difficult to even assess what a lot of words mean when people have accents now due to the lack of training data. Sound is one of those data inputs, especially words, that is really messy and is hard to break down into features that can be classified and analyzed.
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Computationally expensive AI videos
Furthermore, generating videos from AI that suit specific needs would be computationally expensive and take an extremely long time to develop an algorithm to make a video, if even currently possible. The pre-existing solutions have the design limitation that they have primarily because of the technological limitation.
Future improvement
We could incorporate geolocation tagging into the design. That way, the system could understand which English speaking country and region users are in and adjust the language suggestions to incorporate regional dialect and culture.