DP4204 Interactive Product Design Assignment
Duration: 2 months (8 meetings)
Team members: Ratriana Aminy, Karina Oktavia, Bethari Maria P, Vidia Anindhita, Arum Adiningtyas, Fitri Indah Cahyani
About The Course
DP4204 Interactive Product Design is an elective course from Product Design faculty. The course is taught by Mr. Slamet Riyadi. In this course, we will learn how to create successful interaction between user and product through meaningful communication. We learn about the elements, approaches, law, and characteristics of good interaction. We also learn about usability and user experience and its stages and tools to create good UX.
The course is divided into two parts. The first part is we learn the theories and concepts I wrote above. The second part is a workshop where students are grouped to work on the 2 months assignment. In the middle of the 2 months working on an assignment, each group present their work progress and get input from class members. We also have final presentation of our design. Overall, this course is very useful and interesting since it provides good portions of both concepts and practice.
Introduction
In this assignment, we were asked to create design solution for people with disabilities using steps we learned in this course. We chose to create design solution for people with hearing impairment. People with hearing impairment have harder times in learning than normal people in general. For learning language, especially foreign language, they have even more difficulty in understanding words since they communicate with sign language which has fewer words than spoken language. In addition, sign language for foreign languages, such as English, has different pronunciation or sign than how it was written (not like our Bahasa Indonesia where most of the vocabularies can be read as it is).
We focused our users to people with disabilities who were teenagers since they had high interest in learning. Based on an initial study, teenage with hearing impairment realized that learning foreign language is important, especially English. They like to browse the internet, play games, but most of the websites and games are using English. In order to understand the websites and games, they need to understand English. They wanted to learn many things that not only things they learned at school, but also things from the internet which could increase their skill.
Research
Firstly, we did research in order to gain user insight and gather user’s problem.
User Insight
We gain user insight by doing an interview with students in Special Needs School. The insight was used to know more about their condition so we could imagine being in their shoes more accurately. By imagine being in their shoes, it supposed to help us create a solution that has high empathy for its users. Here is the user’s insight that we gained.
User’s Problem
After gained user insight, we imagined ourselves as our users and gathered user’s problems by brainstorming in order to get as much problem as we could. Below are user’s problem we had gathered. The box with red background are the problems which are specifically about learning English.
The problem we aimed to solve are:
- Help user to understand English syntax
- Help user to understand English grammar
- Create a learning solution that is fun and not conventional (such as learning in class)
Persona
Based on user’s insights and problems we created a persona. This persona helped us to keep our user in mind while designing for user.
Design
Based on the insight and problems we had gathered in research phase, we designed our solution to solved the problems. Our proposed solution is Eacular, an app to learn language like Duolingo adjusted to our users. The app was designed like Duolingo since Duolingo was one of the best mobile app for learning language. Besides it is one of the best apps for learning language, Duolingo is fun to use and make it easier for people to learn language than to enroll in a language class or courses. That also helps our user whose facility to learn language is more limited than normal people. The choice of designed application for mobile phone was based on user insight which they often to use mobile phone, just like many teenagers nowadays.
Touch Point
Below is the touch point or user flow of our application. Steps in blue box are the main feature of our application which is learning English. The other features are dictionary, profile, and setting. In profile, user can see their badges collected from finishing a lesson. The badges were used to motivate user to learn more.
Pain Point
The pain points of using the app for users were user not only learn the vocabularies and their meanings, but they also need to learn about lip reading and sign language of the foreign language which need to be presented in a motion picture. The user needs to learn about lip reading so they can understand what other people who cannot use sign language saying (such as people in television, video, or live situation). To accommodate those needs, the app provides motion graphic for lip reading and sign language for each vocabulary.
Interface Design
Here is the prototype of our app. Before getting into learning, user can choose level and topic. Then, in its main feature, user will learn about vocabularies, lip reading, its sign language, English grammar, review the lesson, and get a score.
Conclusion
We designed a language learning application for teens with hearing impairment based on steps we learned in Interactive Product Design class. Though the interfaces are not perfected yet, the application can answer the problem we aimed to solve which are helping user to understand English syntax and grammar and creating a learning solution that is fun and not conventional.
For myself, this assignment is challenging in a good way because of the topic given. It reminds me that in doing design, I need to put a great care to the users who have their own uniqueness. By doing this assignment with the steps given, I learned that in designing things, I need to look both of the big picture (such as the user insight) and the details (such as the pain point, the need to learn lip reading). I also became more aware of how a person interacts with a system, their needs, and emotions.
Thank you for reading and if you have any thoughts about this post, please leave me a comment 🙂
