User Interviews.

Before going any further, I wanted to learn if this product would be of interest to people, and if so, what their motivations would be to use it. I undertook a series of in-person user interviews with people who had learned a second language in the past (both te reo Māori and others), to uncover how they learned best, what their frustrations were in learning or retaining vocabulary, and what they would want from an app to support their learning journey.

User Personas.

Having a specific persona in mind kept me on-track when I was designing features and functions of this app. From my User Interviews, I developed the persona “Jill”.

“As an ex-pat living in New Zealand, it’s culturally appropriate that I understand and respect the native language of this country I call home”

Task Flows.

Based on my User Stories, I started writing Task Flows that would map out what a user would need to do, in order to achieve their goals. This could be anything from a sign-up process to sharing achievements with friends. Here, I’ll focus on two key features of Tātākī, which help users add/store new vocabulary in the app, and review previously learned words.

Low-fidelity

Rough ideas were sketched out using pen and paper, to start arranging key elements for each of my screens. I wanted to see how each screen would interact with each other, and the type of functionality a user might need in order to get from opening the app, to reaching their goal.

“Add a new word”.

Starting at the onboarding screen as users opened the app, these paper mock-ups explore how a user might add a new word to their personal dictionary, and save it to a new or existing category so they can find it again later.

“Complete vocabulary quiz”.

Again, starting at the onboarding screen, these wireframes helped visualise how a user might navigate the app to find a way to be quizzed on words they’d previously learned. I needed to consider where this feature would live, and what elements users would expect and/or need in order to successfully complete a language quiz.

Mid-fidelity

The low-fidelity sketches were the building blocks I needed to translate my screens into Sketch. I added much more detail in the copy, imagery and functionality of the app as I intended to test these screens with users before moving further.

The mid-fidelity wireframes below, focus on onboarding, adding a word, and completing a quiz.

Onboarding.

For each of my User Tasks, I began at the Onboarding process. I felt this was a necessary place to start building mid-fidelity wireframes, as the information both provided to and requested from the user, helps inform the rest of the app. I also wanted to see how this flow felt to users when it came to usability testing.

Add a word.

Next up, I digitised the low-fidelity wireframes for the “add a word” feature. I wanted to explore the different ways users may want to add a word to a personal dictionary. whether that was adding a new word to a brand new category, or adding it to an existing category. I wanted to create enough steps to give users flexibility on how they saved a word, yet not so many that it became a laborious task. I toyed with the idea of typing or speaking the word into the app, in order for it to be captured/translated.

Interactive Prototype.

I created an interactive prototype using Marvel, and then conducted usability testing with a variety of different users. This helped me understand if the flow between screens was working, if I was missing any crucial steps, and if users required any additional features or functionality in order to understand and navigate the Tātākī app.

Usability Test Plan.

Prior to testing, I put together a testing plan to capture the details of what I wanted to test, and how I was going to test it.

I set different direct and scenario tasks for users to complete (all related to my key features). I wanted to make sure the flow not only made sense to users, but that they had everything they needed to complete the task efficiently. See the Usability Test Script here.

Jakob Nielsen’s error severity rating scale (0 - 4) was used to rate/rank the issues flagged in the usability tests.

Usability Testing Results.

After conducting in-person usability tests, I analysed the results and identified some urgent fixes that needed to be made (particularly around how to add a new word - which is a key feature of Tātākī) and other “nice-to-haves” if I have time. See testing result details here.