At SCAD, students whose first language is not English are required to provide evidence of English proficiency. Students who cannot meet the school requirements will need to take the ESL Courses in their first year. For our project, those students are our primary users. To design a product that fit their needs, we wanted to understand their:
1. Current learning experience in class and outside school
2. Motivations in learning English
3. Key challenges and difficulties
We used multiple approaches to conduct the research and collect data from different stakeholders to understand the problem.
To expand my knowledge about language or English learning, I read online articles, journals and watch videos on Youtube and TedTalk. This process is to let me understand what I know and what I don't know so I could find a focus point in developing my solution in the later stage.
We visited one ESL class and observed closely how and what students learned English in the lesson. The interactions between teacher and students helped us to build a broader understanding about the problem.
We also conducted individual interviews with students from different background. We designed a discussion guide to get to know each student how they learn English and their challenges or needs.
We also conducted an online interview session with the ESL Professor through zoom. Through the Q&A session, we can understand the students’ challenge from a teacher’s perspective. She also shared a lot about her experience in teaching English and the tools she would use for teaching.
We organized the data by using affinity diagrams that we put them into groups under different themes. The whole process were completed on the Miro board.
After reviewing all the information and data, I started the concept development. Given that there are many potential opportunities to improve the students' learning experience, the very first task to me was to decide where to start?
Considering the students' needs, their current learning methods and main challenges in learning English, I believe helping students to expand their vocabularies is the most important. Building rich vocabularies could help learners in all areas including reading, writing, listening and speaking.
I listed out the HMW statements as the guiding questions for me to develop the potential solutions.
I brainstormed different ideas and put them together to review them one by one. Some of the ideas are not exactly a product but they are the interesting features or concepts that I would like to incorporate them in the product.
I decided to make a learning app specifically tackling vocabulary learning. I stated 3 key directions how I would develop the product:
1. Incorporate with videos
2. Interest- based Learning Platform
3. Mobile friendly (Dictionary + Notebook)
After I confirmed my initial idea, I sketched out the scenarios how a user may use the app in the daily life with some sketches.
After that, I started create the lo-fi wireframes on Figma for prototyping.
Before finalizing the design, I conducted two rounds of user test through zoom and ask the students to use the prototype and complete a few tasks. During the process I acted as a observer to see how they use the app. After that, there will be a feedback session to collect their opinions.
After listening to the feedback from the testers and professor, I made some iterations and finalize the design.
Understanding users have different needs in learning English, Quick Flip allows them to select the topics that they are interested in to learn the vocabularies.
The collection page allows users to save the vocabulary list(s) so they can review them anytime.
Once the user finishes one chapter, there will be a small quiz exercise to access if he/she have learnt the vocabularies.
Quick Flip offers flexible learning experience. If the user couldn't find a suitable list in our library, they can create their own list in a few seconds!
Learning is a life-long journey. Once users completed a vocabulary list, they can always update the lists by adding new vocabularies or removing the old words.
In 2021 Summer, I spent time to remake the visual design of the app. I attempted to use a different colour combination and refine the details to make the app visually looks more fun and appealing.
