MY ROLE
Research, User Flows & Stories, Sketching, Wireframing, Visual Design, Prototyping
TOOLS: Adobe XD, InVison, Miro DURATION: 4 Weeks
Praxis: A Language Learning Tool
As a language learning student I wanted to explore the struggles and pain points that others are experiencing during their studies. I have always struggled with keeping myself accountable, setting and maintaining a schedule and finding ways to practice. Praxis was the perfect opportunity for me to research this topic.
USER RESEARCH
The first step was to conduct user surveys to discover user behaviors in learning a language around self discipline, habits and routines, and identifying the pain points and frustrations in those areas. I sent out my survey to a subreddit for language learning students, as well as to my fellow students at Springboard, which gave me insight into a large variety of students learning styles, pain points and success stories.
I got as much face time as I could with some other language learners to uncover their pain points and find the root of their struggles.
The user interview phase of my journey yielded some very interesting results. While some were what I had expected most of the stats that I found came as quite a shock to me. I learned that a lot of people were struggling with the same problems I am having as a language student no matter the language they were learning. I thought I was the edge case of having a hard time learning a new language but it turned out that others were experiencing this as well. I found that 64% of those surveyed found reading to be the easiest part of learning while 73% said that speaking and listening are most difficult. Every person that I interviewed wished they had a study group of similarly skilled learners. I was surprised to find out that all interviewees had moved on from textbooks as quickly as possible once they had the basics down, quoting one student as saying "I want and authentic experience rather than a textbook one." I really connected with this and I think most others would too.
"The biggest help to get over my own struggles was finding a study group to keep me account-able. The group gives me everything I could ever want for immersion and accountability."
ANALYZE
The next step was to review and sort my insights. First, I used affinity mapping to identify common pain points and struggles.
Affinity Mapping the information from the User Interviews to identify their pain points.
DEFINE
Through all the information gathered and the insights I made I was able to narrow it down to these two major paint points.
PAIN POINT #1: People have a hard time with setting up a proper schedule and having the self discipline to stick to it.
HYPOTHESIS: Giving people visual feedback on their progress and gamifying the statistics will encourage growth and help with accountability.
PAIN POINT #2: People are overwhelmed with available resources and not knowing which are going to work for them.
HYPOTHESIS: The language learning spectrum is overly saturated with resources, recommendations, apps, etc. which makes students have to try various tools to find the right fit. This process is very time consuming and can lead to people feeling discouraged or make them give up altogether.
"How might we encourage students to establish good habits & routines for language learning?"
"How might we provide a healthy and encouraging environment for people to learn without feeling overwhelmed?"
UNDERSTANDING THE LANDSCAPE
Research was conducted to understand the competitive field. I was able to distill the data to extract insights, user pain points and foundational functions to create a clear benchmark to design Praxis around.
COMPETITIVE RESEARCH
Audits of other apps were conducted on other language learning apps to extract specific details.
Below are some screen grabs from Duolingo, Pimsleur, and Memrise.
IDEATE
Now that I have identified two major pain points, I designed the Red Routes to accompany them. I sketched out several potential screens and solutions to how these screens might flow. The images below draw inspiration from a common notebook style habit tracker called Bullet Journaling. I wanted to give users a way to see their progress very clearly as the center focus of these screens. Users can easily mark a habit complete on this screen with a few quick taps.
STYLES, BRANDING & IMAGERY
I developed a Style Guide to make sure all of Praxis’ elements were the same on each page.
PROTOTYPING & VALIDATION
Using Adobe XD and InVision I crafted my prototype. This version was tested on 5 participants to get feedback. After testing my first prototype, I found that people were having trouble with backwards navigation, some of the tasks assigned didn't flow as expected, and that the iconography was not easily recognizable.
THE REDESIGN
Where we ended up
REFLECTIONS & LEARNINGS
Through my research I was able to discover the pain points and struggles that the average language learning student go through every day on their journey. Praxis aims to reduce cognitive load on people by putting all their resources in one place while tracking their progress and gamifying their progress to keep them excited and engaged. Improving the user experience for these tasks would mean that people are more easily able to locate and search for helpful resources, and create and maintain better habits for learning a language.