↤ Previous project | Next project ↦

English Bite

Client: Education First (EF)

My role: led UX design, helped facilitate client workshops and user testing

Team: collaborated with the UI designer, Anthropologists, developer lead, product manager, and Account from Nurun, and the product owner, Creative Director, UX Director, and Educator from EF.

Creative tool: Adobe Illustrator

Timeline: 6 months in 2014

Context

Engish Bite is a mobile app that focused on daily English learning. It provided short interactions on mobile that taught English ‘chunks’ (phrases and collocations) in entertaining and contextual ways. By following the best practices of learning behaviors from EF’s learning experts, English Bite provided both audio and textualized learning resources, spaced repetition, and short-term and long-term rehearsals.

Design process

Empathize & define

User interview, learner insights, design principles

I participated in the 15 1:1 user interviews, and each interview was 60 mins long. We interviewed the English learners who were 12~35 years old with low to medium English level, and keen to learn situational phrases for daily life.

After the interviews, 9 key design principles were generated to meet EF’s business needs. For examples:

The App needs to subvert the traditional education method
The App should provide people with ways to express how modern they are (through vocabulary, cultural references, and trends …) generating a feeling of belonging & social savvies

Create

Co-creation workshop

The client co-creation workshop was a daylong workshop in which the Nurun team and EF stakeholders brainstormed meaningful potential functionalities and narratives.

Activities:

Inspiration presentation with case studies and competitors analysis
Warm-ups to get the group comfortable with working together and shared golden rules
Crazy-8
Voted on the ideas that had the strongest beliefs and valuable solutions

Based on the generated ideas, we came out with the design concept of the mobile app we would be designing:

This app should provide short, low-impact interactions on mobile that will teach ‘chunks’ (phrases and collocations) of language in an immersive way, followed by spaced repetition

Prototype & test

Storyboard & user testing

After we got a lot of exciting ideas from the workshop, I started to draft some storyboards to bring out the key potential features and themes of the app we were designing. Some key themes were:

5 minutes/day of English learning
Storytelling-based situational phrases learning
A virtual character helped navigate the journey
Scientific-based learning modules
Gamification and global social features throughout the activities

One idea we had was that the app user (English learner) just moved to a new town (English Town), and the residents in the town were excited to meet him/her. While visiting different places in the town, the user learned situational phrases through the conversations with the people there, followed by gamified quizzes to help the user practice the learning.