Survival Japanese

I started with a brief competitive analysis of popular vocabulary apps and looked in-depth into two of them.

Goals

• Find out what works for current learners of Japanese
• How popular apps motivate the user to learn more
• Get a feel for the competitive landscape

Findings

• Apps are mostly divided between those you fill up with content yourself or have curated content only, rarely any in-betweens
• Apps do a great job with gamification
• There aren't a lot of apps that aim for travelers and short-time memorization

To get a feel for my target audience, I interviewed a total of 5 participants with 7 questions in total, due to time constraints during my course.

Goals

• Get a feel for my target audience
• Get to know their fears and biggest concerns before traveling to Japan
• See how much time they'd be willing to invest into an app to learn the basics

Findings

• Participants want a basic travel guide that teaches basic phrases
• Some are still relying on paper dictionaries
• Most said they want to look up common phrases
• Drawing or showing pictures was seen as a big help to communicate
• Participants were scared of offending someone due to lack of cultural knowledge
• Learning the alphabets was seen as a daunting and scary task

Before jumping into sketches I created user flows for the most common tasks a user would do within my app. Shown here is my first user flow before I created my first wireframes based on them.

I've started out by paper prototyping my wireframes to get a rough first draft that I made into an interactive prototype with Marvel. It was then used for my first round of usability testing. You can view the prototype by clicking the button below.

Open Paper Prototype

To catch my biggest errors right away, I've put my paper prototype through an initial usability test with 3 participants. Sessions were being held in person and remotely due to the dangers of COVID-19. I scheduled about 15 minutes per participant.

Goals

• Test if users can navigate the app easily
• Test if participants can fulfill the given tasks related to the apps core features

My previous paper prototype was rough and some participants were having problems recognizing elements. So I wanted to step up and do a high-fidelity prototype (I skipped mid-fidelity as the design is very minimalistic) next. While creating the high-fidelity prototype I incorporated the feedback from testing.

Some things that stood out to me:

• Initially, I thought having a special home screen after the onboarding questionnaire was a good idea. It ended up causing confusing for most of the participants, so instead I redesigned the home screen with inactive buttons - but the layout staying the same always - which made everything much more clear.
• I also thought the onboarding should be as short as possible to avoid users to jump off. But most participants said it was too short and they wanted more information. I was honestly surprised at this. I incorporated a 4-step onboarding afterwards.

I've ended up with a HiFi prototype where I had fixed most of the problems. I've discussed my changes with my previous test participants and got positive feedback. You can browse through my high-fidelity prototype by interacting with the Figma plugin below.