CONNECT WITH
SOLANG.
PROJECT FOCUS
User Experience // Prototyping // User Research
An app focused around the theme of gratitude. soLang works to help people who have a language barrier with loved ones to fully express their gratitude.
Mockup from Freepik
ROLE
Lead Product Designer
TIMELINE
3.5 months
RESPONSIBILITIES
User Research
Usability Testing
Ideation
Prototyping
Front-end Web Development
UX/UI Design
Presentation
Graphic Design
TEAM
1 product designer
Overview
For my HCI design course, I created a mobile app centered around the theme of gratitude. I targeted the growing population of immigrant families who experience the difficulties of not understanding other family members’ primary language.
As the lead product designer for soLang, I collaborated with 1 product designer to invent a 0-to-1 product. We went from research to creating a design system and branding, ultimately leading to high-fidelity interactive prototypes.
Final Project Link: https://cs.wellesley.edu/~solang/
Context
PROBLEM
People from multicultural backgrounds frequently experience difficulties communicating with loved ones, losing opportunities to connect with one another.
SOLUTION
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. By gamifying language learning, soLang promotes more digital interactions with loved ones, supporting conversations with translation tools and visualizations, all in one place.
Research
We conducted in-depth research to investigate the needs of our target population of college students who have a language barrier between themselves and their loved ones.
IDENTIFYING THE PROBLEM
Lack of connection
Students often felt separated from their family, with distance making communication even more difficult.
Language limitation
Without opportunities to practice their heritage language, students did not have the language ability to share their feelings with loved ones.
Absence of activities
Conventional calls and messages restricted students from having other activities to do besides talking with loved ones, creating awkwardness and repetitiveness during interactions.
Ideation
By first interviewing members of our target audience, we discovered trends, particularly that frustration was common when trying to express feelings. Physical language and actions were unable to fully convey meaning for these people.
From this, we created ‘Isabella’, our persona representing our target group and created scenarios that our users might experience.
User Analysis
Persona: Isabella
Scenarios
Design
Prototyping
soLang’s design emphasized ease of use and engaging functionalities to adapt to each individual’s needs.
The design process first focused on the app’s features to prioritize our users’ primary desire of connecting with others. Then, we moved into refining the design flow and visual aspects of our app.
LOW FIDELITY
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.
This design draft was independently completed by me.
WIREFRAMES
MID FIDELITY
HIGH FIDELITY
Redesign coming soon!
Final Solution
A mixture of language learning and social networking: Bringing people closer together through personal learning, gamification, and direct interactions.
Offers a natural way to build language skills, encouraging users to practice without becoming an added stress.
Engages users in diverse formats to provide a comfortable space to interact in new ways with loved ones.
Website Presentation
Summary
To culminate this project and effectively summarize our work, we coded a website describing what soLang is.
This website was ultimately used to display our work in an organized manner, conveying the goals of soLang to our peers and mentor. We carefully designed the website to reflect soLang’s values and target audience.
Reflection
What Did I Learn?
This was one of my first major end-to-end projects where I was involved in various aspects of the user experience, leading ideation, user research, and the design prototyping process. From my constant interactions with users throughout the project, I realized the importance of always empathizing with my users and having a deep understanding of their needs. Designing is a conversation between user and designer, not just a one-way path from the designer.
Areas of Improvement
One area to explore was extending our app to support the learning of multiple languages. By adding a feature to switch the language the user is currently in, users could adjust conversation and language features to different people in their lives.
The design system and branding visuals could also be refined to better illustrate features for users. Although the app has diverse functionalities, the overall look could be modernized and further improved. I would create a more full design system with a broader range of UI components as well as focusing on details in the design aesthetic such as extended colors and customized icons.