My Role
I worked on this project in a cross-disciplinary team as a UX Researcher and a UX/UI Designer.
Deliverables
User personas, low-fidelity wireframes, high-fidelity prototype
- The preservation of native languages is an integral part of maintaining cultural identities.
- For immigrant families, it is especially important to pass on the legacy of their culture and language onto their children.
- The transition from in-person learning to online learning has made parents and instructors desperate for a new way to keep their children and students engaged.
The creation of a platform that allows language instructors to create engaging online and offline activities, while parents are assured that their children grow up learning their mother tongue.
- Preliminary research and personal experience.
- Interview with 3 online language instructors.
- Interview with 3 parents.
- Parents have limited access to respective linguistic communities.
- There is a lack of high quality technologies that support native languages.
- Parents and teachers are concerned about keeping their children and students engaged and focused.
- There is a need for online resources that can replicate online interactions.
Maria Miranda, 39
Project Manager
“My busy schedule does not allow me to spend enough time interacting with my child in our native language.”
FRUSTRATIONS
- Incorporating her native language into the everyday life of her daughter.
- Has limited access to linguistic communities.
NEEDS
- To spend more time with her daughter.
- To pass along Farsi traditions to her daughter.
James Moore, 47
French Instructor
“I am passionate about teaching French, but there are very few tools that make it easy to teach toddlers.”
FRUSTRATIONS
- Keeping toddlers engaged for more than 20 minutes is difficult.
- There is a lack of high quality resources for less commonly taught languages.
NEEDS
- Needs a tool that makes it easier to teach toddlers.
- Wants to create activities to grasp attention of toddlers.
After translating our paper prototype into a high fidelity prototype, we conducted a usability study that included both user interviews and usability testing.
Interview with 3 online language instructors about:
- Experience teaching toddlers.
- Challenges when teaching online.
- Engaging toddlers in activities.
- Application usage.
- Usability test of the activity section with 4 toddlers between the ages of 3 to 6.
- Follow-up discussion with toddlers and parents.
- Separate audio icon confused toddlers.
- Accurately clicking on icons was challenging for younger toddlers (age 3).
- Activity was too easy for older toddlers (age 6).
- Children found the activity to be fun.
- Parents found it easy to to use and learn.
- They liked that the images used had the right balance of between realism and animation for the children.
- Add more engaging activities for toddlers.
- Add difficulty levels for activities.
- Include an option for instructors and students to engage simultaneously.
