Lightfolio · Sign Pal

Sign Pal

Sign Pal is a language app that enables and incentivizes users to learn Sign Language.

A team effort was involved in creating this project, which spanned the months of August to December.

To accomplish our design goals, we integrated the Lean User Experience (Lean UX) process.

Role

UX Designer and Researcher

Type

Product design

Year

2022

View Project

Executive Summary

‍‍

‍Goal : To create a Language App that catered to the the ASL community and those interested in learning ASL while utilizing the Lean UX process.

‍Approach : The team utilized the Lean User Experience Process which is a user-centered design process that embraces Lean and Agile development methodology to reduce waste and build products centered around the users.

‍Challenges : Utilizing the Lean UX Process was a new and quite different from previous known methods. It required more research and introduced several ideas that were all useful and relevant. In the end, regardless of how great an idea was, if did not cater more to the user than the designer it was discarded.

‍

Introduction

Sign Pal is an app created to encourage the community to learn Sign Language. During the project proposal process, this specific project garnered my interest as it created a solution to real-world issue. It is estimated that only a minuscule percentage of the world's population knows how to communicate in Sign Language, despite the fact that there is a large hearing-impaired community.

‍
What is Lean UX?
‍
Lean UX is a design approach that allows for the creation of a product or experience as quickly as possible, through the use of feedback as early as possible in order to revise it and to improve it. By using this method, the team builds a shared understanding of the user, defines and figures out their needs, proposes solutions, and creates a product that will meet the needs of the user.
‍
Lean UX encourages revision and repetition in order to find suitable solutions through sprints and user testing. What once was a broad idea is narrowed down with expertise and team work. This page will explain the Lean UX process that led us to ideating and prototyping Sign Pal.

‍

Sprint 1

The design sprint method also known as a design sprint offers a more structured, effective approach to creative thinking after a short period of time, usually a week, through design, prototyping, user testing, and collaboration .It can be described as a design phase, whereby specific goals are set with the hopes of being met at the end of the sprint.

Sprint 1 was the base of the process. The team got to know one another conducted more research on or topic, created a minimum viable product (MVP) and set up user interviews.

‍

‍

Design Week 0

During this week we set out to figure our business problem and propose solutions. In this stage we were not to narrow down but to expand on each other's ideas and recommendations.

As a team we set on understanding the Lean UX canvas that is the guiding pinnacle of the process. Jeff Golthef the creator of the Lean UX canvas describes it as a way to orchestrate your Lean UX process. He states it offers a single-page “at-a-glance” way of framing your work on a feature, an epic or initiative, or even an entire product.(85)

The Lean UX Canvas categorizes the process into 8 stages :

- Business Problem
- Business Outcome
- Users
- User Outcomes & Benefits
- Solutions
- Hypotheses
- Most important thing to learn first
- Least amount of work needed to be done to learn the next important thing

‍

Lean UX Canvas

Using the brain-storm-doting technique our team tackled out first issue, figuring out out problem statement. Here each team member suggested a problem statement and the sticky note with the most votes was the most feasible.

‍Problem Statement :
The current state of Sign Language Learning has focused primarily on providing a standardized learning experience across the board, but doesn’t take into account different styles or learning. What existing products/services fail to address is Create an engaging experience that gathers interest from the population and incentivizes them to continue learning. Our product/service will address this gap by making learning fun/attractive/engaging by incorporating real world experiences and creating a community for users to connect]. Our initial focus will be Young adults.We'll know we are successful when we see users completing challenges, tasks, engaging with content.

‍

After the brain- dot storming exercise it was time to come up with our proto-personas. These are fictional user personas created by a design team to better understand their users. They are assumption based and rely on general knowledge and minimal research.

One persona Katie, was our hobbyist persona. Her needs were based on wanting to learn ASL out of curiosity and acquiring world knowledge.
Our other persona Alex, was a student who would be using the app for educational purposes for a university course.

The need for a persona was to discover what needs and roles they may acquire from the app.

‍

‍‍

The creation of our proto-personas then led to the the examination of user outcomes and benefits.
We had to ask ourselves what our users would seek from our product and how they could benefit from it. In order to do this we had to answer a list of five prompts to come to a conclusion.
The results below showcase our findings:

‍

‍After going through our findings, the team had to come up with a solution. To do this the team conducted a design studio exercise. Each member was given 10 minutes to sketch what their ideal Language App would look like.

Afterwards the members uploaded their sketches and the team critiqued each other's work. The design features that stood out the most were to be implemented in the initial wireframe.

To wrap up our findings after going through our version of the Lean UX Canvas, the team created a Hypothesis table. The table would guide us to create statements regarding the business outcome, the user's needs, the user outcome and the feature we would develop.

To further figure out if we should test the features we came up with, we created a hypothesis prioritization canvas that would be used in the next Sprint.

‍

Sprint Week 1

‍

‍For our Weekly Sprint the team had the following tasks to complete in order to continue with our research before prototyping :
‍
Three , "2 day" stand up meetings : These meetings were held to create a list of tasks we had to accomplish in order to finish our sprint on time as well as touch base with our team progress. We held our stand up meetings on Monday, Wednesday and Friday of that week.

‍

From the first stand-up meeting we realized the we could test out our avatar and point system feature by creating an "I-spy" game. The game consisted of the participants of whom each group member recruited to participate in a 7 day I-spy challenge. Each day consisted of the participants sending their recruiter pictures of the items asked. At the end of the seven days we calculated the points gathered by the users during our time.

From this game we came to discover that participants would enjoy a point system as it encouraged competitiveness but did not necessarily care for having an avatar. This led us to scrap the avatar feature that we had initially wanted to include in our final prototype.

‍

The second stand up meeting was used to ensure we had recruited our participants as well as send out consent forms, and the third stand-up meeting was to touch base with the team and their participant's progress.

‍

Sprint Week 2

‍

During this sprint the I-spy game was still ongoing. In our first stand up we prepared interview questions for the participants who would have scored the highest at the end of the game as well as create questions for the student version of the app.

Our second stand-up consisted of us interviewing one professor and two students regarding D2L, a third party system used by Kennesaw State University. The system is similar to other third parties used by the University of Georgia Colleges System, and acts as a means of communication, assignment submission and grading feedback between students and teachers.

From our interviews we concluded that students would prefer a more customizable interface while professors would prefer a less tedious and more accurate system. We conducted these interviews over the phone and in person. We took turns being the moderator as the rest of the team would take notes for the Sprint's affinity map.

An affinity map is a sticky note map that contains comments from user interviews after a test. It is then used to find similarities from our findings and assist us with decision making according to our user feedback.

For our third stand-up and at the end of the game, we decided to interview the participants who had shown the most interest in the challenge and who were available at the time of interviewing.

We held our interviews during the meeting on zoom and recorded it using Otter.Ai. We took turns being the moderator as the rest of the team would take notes regarding the findings of the game. With the results we were able to complete week 1's affinity map.

‍

For our last meeting we held a retrospective. This is a meeting that the team holds to discuss their findings, figure out what went right and wrong during the sprint and how they can plan more effectively for the next one.

‍

‍

Sprint 2

‍

In Sprint two we focused on the low fidelity wire-framing and prototyping of our app. Our decisions pertaining our final prototype were based on our findings and initial assumptions. During this sprint we conducted interviews concerning the usability of our app and sought for suggestions from our users.

‍

Design Week 0

‍

During the design week we began to create a low-fidelity wireframe. Aside from wire framing we revalidated our previous assumptions. This is where we looked back at our Lean UX Canvas and either drew new conclusions or affirmed our past conclusions through user research. Our initial proto-personas did not change and we managed to get adequate feedback to backup our initial assumptions.

‍

Sprint Week 1

‍

During this sprint we held our 2 day stand up meetings as well as meetings after to wireframe virtually as a team. We used discord as our source of communication while online. The aim behind wire framing was to create a low fidelity version of our app and figure out what features were needed. During this sprint we also completed the weekly affinity maps to further help us during our final prototyping process.

‍

‍

‍

Sprint Week 2

‍

After completing the wireframe we asked three of our previous participants to walk through the wireframe and give user suggestions . Their feedback was quite useful and assisted us with putting together our final prototype. We also ensured to ask them their opinion on premium features and user needs as we planned to add a premium section in the final prototype.

After conducting the interviews we decided to move forward with prototyping the final product.

‍

‍

‍
Week 3 consisted of us completing the prototype and again asking the previous participants questions regarding the final prototype and any changes that they would suggest before wrapping it all up.
‍
The questions we asked during the final walkthrough included :

- Is there anything that doesn't make sense on any of the pages? If so, please explain.
- Is there anything that you found distracting? Does the app match your expectations of what a language learning app should look like?
- Why or why not? Does the community feature match your expectations of what it should look like?
- Do you think too much of the content is hidden behind a pay wall?

From their final feedback we were confident enough to draw conclusions, make adjustments and finish up the final prototype.

‍

Outcome

This project helped me expand me knowledge of Lean UX and the Lean UX process as well as other Agile methods. Through conducting thorough user research and making constant revisions my team and I were able to create a wonderful app. My prototyping skills have improved tremendously and so has my ability to work with others.

Challenges faced during the project included setting user interviews virtually and having to restart our ideation process at different points of the project.

I learnt how to work with failed attempts and receiving unexpected feedback from users, especially during the wire framing process.

Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed working on this project with my teammates, participants and creating aesthetically pleasing designs in Figma.

‍

Other work

Artist Website

Digital Design

RideX

Product design

Want to create something awesome? Drop me an email.

→ almasigathoni@gmail.com