Overview

What is Tonguage? It’s a vocabulary App made for busy people, business professionals, students and adventurers to assist them in learning a new language as they travel.

Many people struggle to communicate with the locals when they travel to foreign countries. Whether it’s for business, school, or just for visiting, most of the time people carry a dictionary or a list of popular phrases. There has to be an easier way to quickly learn a foreign language than memorizing phrases from a piece of paper.

My Role

This was a short project that started in May 2020 and ended in June 2020. My role as the lead researcher and designer of the project consisted of doing user research, creating personas, wireframing, prototyping and usability testing.

The Process

Discovery

Understanding the Problem

Learning a new language can be intimidating for many people. Saying the wrong word or being unable to communicate efficiently in another language can be embarrassing. Just changing the pitch can mean ‘to know’ or ‘fart’ in my native language so trust me, I can understand the frustration. How can we make this easier?

In order to create a vocabulary app, I needed to understand what was going on with similar apps and the pain points of users.

I started the project by doing a competitive analysis of 3 vocabulary apps, GRE Vocabulary Flashcards, Baby Flashcards, and Flashcards – Study, Memorize & Prepare for exams.

The next step was User Research, where I conducted interviews to understand the pain points of 4 users: Chom, May, Green, and Crystal.

User interviews were conducted to gather information on their motivations and frustrations.

Frustrations:

“It’s hard to memorize [scientific terms/vocabulary]. There's too many words and some of the words don’t look or sound like the definition.” - Chom

“I think learning new vocabulary is difficult because words are so much more than themselves. Words are attached to complex systems, experiences, and contexts, and without that knowledge, they are simply just words. Words need meaning to a person in order to be used and understood. This takes a lot of mental and emotional work for the individual.” - Crystal

Motivations:

“I find that my vocabulary increases the more I read whether it's literature for leisure or professional or academic. I also found that engaging in communication with folks will introduce me to new words.” - May

“I am a life-long learner so I love to open up my mind and inspire people to keep challenging themselves and get out of their comfort zone to learn something new” - Green

After the interview, I summarized their answers into 3 categories: Do, Think, and Feel.

Define

Who is the User?

The next step was to create a user persona for the vocabulary app.

Once I created the persona, I created the user stories and job stories for her.

By creating the User Stories and Job Stories, I was able to come up with a great problem statement and hypothesis as the backbone of Tonguage.

Ideate

After I got an idea of what Tonguage was going to answer for users, I proceeded to the next step by creating a user flow of how users would use it.

I created 2 flows that the user could perform using Tonguage.

Flow 1: Creating a new Flashcard

Flow 2: Reviewing an existing deck

With the flows in place, I drew out Low-fidelity Wireframes for rapid prototyping.

Link to the Prototype - Click Me!

High Fidelity wireframes

Once I received feedback from my rapid prototype usability tests, I created the high fidelity wireframes to bring my work to life.