VOGO MOBILE APP

COMMUNICATE WITH THE WORLD

Vogo is a language learning app that adapt’s to you as you build your vocabulary from complete beginner to basic conversations.

Research - 01

COMPETITIVE ANALYSIS

I started by gathering research and evaluating a few existing mobile applications for learning vocabulary.  After evaluating a couple of apps, I conducted a competitive analysis of 3 mobile applications focusing on their attributes, strengths, weaknesses and features.  The 3 apps I analyzed were: Duolingo, Quizlet, Drops.

RESEARCH GOALS

• Understanding and knowing what is currently on the market and discovering what is working and what could be improved.

• Understand my audience and the demographics of my target audience.

• Research design patterns and solutions used by competitors.

Research - 01

USER INTERVIEWS

With the information gathered about current vocabulary learning applications on the market, this gave me a starting point to dive deeper to better understand my target users and gain direct insights into their experiences and how they currently learn new concepts & vocabulary.  

I conducted 3 user interviews and asked each participant 6 questions, which lasted about 15-20 minutes each.  

INTERVIEW RESEARCH GOALS

• Understand the participants current learning methods?

• Understand what features users are using to learn new vocabulary?

• Understand what keeps users motivated to keep learning new vocabulary?

• Identify similar applications that people are using and what they like and dislike?

Key takeaways after conducting a competitive analysis and user interviews, I found that users want relevant information that they can see and use in their daily life. Users also want to learn about the culture and history of the language that they are learning. Lastly, users want to see the words and context used in different mediums such as movies, books, pictures and tv series.

Define - 02

USER PERSONAS

Taking the information from the interviews, I then created a user persona which allowed me to narrow down the type of person I am creating for and to make it more relatable when making design decisions.  A user persona is a fictional but realistic portrayal of the target user.  

Let’s meet ‘Anthony’, a 35-year old Apparel Product Manager who lives in Shanghai, China.  This is the first time Anthony has lived in a different country and needs a language learning app to learn basic Chinese to communicate with locals and with his team at work.  

Define - 02

USER FLOW

To empathize with my user persona ‘Anthony,’ I created two user flows and thought through the different decisions and tasks the user might take to complete a task. One of the user flows was to register and complete the first course of Chinese, as shown below:

REGISTER AND COMPLETE THE BASICS OF CHINESE:

Ideate - 03

WIREFRAMES & PROTOTYPE

With user flows created and an idea of what the user would experience to complete a task, I then created low-fidelity wireframes with pen and paper.  My goal during this phase was to get my ideas out on paper and create different layouts.  

Below are sketches of the onboarding process:

Testing & Revisions - 04

USABILITY TESTING

With a Low-Fidelity prototype created, it was time to test my design!  Before testing my prototype with actual users, I created a Usability Test Plan to use as a guide to define what objectives and goals I wanted to achieve.  

The goal of this study was to assess the learnability of new users interacting with the application for the first time on mobile. I observed and measured how users understood the app and if they were able to complete the main functions.

USABILITY SCRIPT & TESTS

After creating a plan of what I wanted to accomplish and how I was going to measure the results, I proceeded in creating a usability test script to brief the participants before conducting the usability tests.  

I conducted 3 usability tests that lasted about 10-15 minutes each, and  I presented four scenarios and tasks for users to test:

• Scenario 1: You’ve downloaded the app and you want to sign up and register a new account, How would you do that?

  Task 1: Sign up and register for an account.

• Scenario 2: You’ve created a couple of flashcards that have been added to ‘mydeck,’ how would you add these cards to a new a category?

Task 2: Add new cards to a category.

• Scenario 3: You decided you want to learn a different language. Where would you go to change your language?

  Task 3: Change the language you want to learn.

• Scenario 4: You recently changed shifts at work/school, so you have to change when you study. How would you change your daily reminder?

  Task 4: Change your daily reminder.

Ideate - 04

REVISIONS

All three participants were able to complete the tasks they were presented with, but there were a few issues that needed to be addressed and changed.

• Create a profile screen that provides more information to the user and allows them to change the language.

• Removing the language icon in the top left and creating a setting that allows users to change the language in the profile tab.

• Create a ‘create category’ icon under the explore categories.

The most severe pain point was not having a profile screen and not having an option to change the daily reminder. With this feedback I added a profile screen that allows the user to edit their name, user name, and password. I also added an option to allow the user to edit the language, set the days of the week, daily reminder, and the time they would like to study.