How can someone express deep gratitude in the presence of a language barrier with friends and family?
Through an interactive learning environment that fosters connections and encourages language practice, soLang tackles the issue of a language barrier by making the diversity of languages an opportunity to grow even closer to others around you.
Learn
Translate new material with our Learn function and save vocabulary to review later. Quiz yourself by toggling definition visibility.
Practice
Connect with other users learning the same language, and put your new skills to use while making new friends.
Connect
Play interactive games to test your language skills while getting to know your family and friends.
User Analysis
Meet our users
Our target population is college students who have a language barrier between themselves and their loved ones.
Ideation
Persona
Ideation
Scenarios
Task 1: Language Acquisition
Task 2: Messaging and Calling
Task 3: Activities
Prototypes
Low-Fidelity
Preliminary Designs
Design 1
A design modeled after typical messaging and calling apps, focused more on the communication functionality and less on the review and game features.
Design 2
A design based on the idea of home-screen widgets, displaying more information at first glance. This design places equal emphasis on all the different app functionalities, shown in the bottom menu bar.
Prototypes
Wireframes
Prototypes
High-Fidelity
Evaluation
A summary of our project
Errors
Users generally made no errors - the only errors they made were due to the scope of the prototype (clicking on links that weren’t implemented, etc).
Efficiency
Test users were generally efficient when navigating through the app. They completed tasks quickly and weren’t confused very often.
Satisfaction
All of our test users were quite satisfied with our final interactive prototype. They felt it was easy to use and had some interesting interactive features like the games. Most users said they would use the app.
Overall Takeaway
This prototype app addressed our problem statement of struggling to express gratitude to loved ones in the presence of a language barrier. Users were generally satisfied with the app and felt it was a fun way to interact with family and friends while overcoming language barriers. Some improvements we hope to implement in the future are changing the color of the game icon on the call screen to maintain contrast with any video background and having a label for the toggle in the learn tab so that people know it turns the definitions on/off. We could also extend our app to support the learning of multiple languages by adding a feature to switch the language the user is currently in.
Team
The soLang Team
Bernice Sun
