LinguaPal

What are learners’ pain points and what features do they need?

To understand the problems learners were facing in their study process, we distributed 106 surveys and conducted 8 interviews with college students who are currently learning at least one foreign language.

Based on the results, I learned that language learners are primarily concerned with the following problems:

• Unconfident about their speaking skills

• Lacks perseverance and motivation

• Have difficulties in using the language in daily life due to lack of practice

While most participants never had a language partner, most of them are eager to find one.

Surprisingly, most participants believed that having an enjoyable socializing experience is more important than getting improvements. While some participants wanted a partner who was more proficient, some also expressed the need for a partner with a similar proficiency level as themselves, as it is less intimidating and provide motivation through healthy competition.

Identifying user’s needs

Based on the results from user research, I discovered several key user needs that we wanted to focus on in our design.

Need #1 Lacks the environment/partner to practice the language with in daily life

💡 Helps users find online language partners whom they can practice regularly with

Need #2 Want more engaging conversations and long-lasting partnerships

💡 Match users with commonalities based on personal info

Need #3 Some learners prefer partners with similar language levels as themselves

💡 Allow users to search for partners based on their native languages

Need #4 Highly values an enjoyable social experience with their partners

💡 Include recreational features to increase bonding between partners

What do existing language learning apps do?

To gain more insights, we compared four existing language learning app in the Chinese market. After analyzing the four language learning apps, we found that only Hellotalk met most of the user needs we identified through user research.

However, Hellotalk only connects users with native speakers, which fails to meet the needs of users who want to practice with learners like themselves. In addition, the search process was inconvenient, as only VIP users can filter the search results by language. The format of the app also present challenges in forming stable partnerships between users.

The observations provided us valuable insights for our own design approach.

Discovering different possible matching patterns

After brainstorming, we created storyboards for three different matching patterns and derived feedback for each of them.

1. Recommendation List

Users get a list of suggested users on home page

❤️ “Time-saving“ “quick and easy“

🩶 “Users are too passive“ “cannot change search criteria“

3. Random Matching

Match users randomly in real time

❤️ “Exciting and entertaining“ “saves time“

🩶 “A bit cringey“ “Inefficient for finding an ideal partner“

Building the MVP feature

Based on the user feedback from storyboarding, we ended up adopting a combination of Recommendation List and User Search, where the user can edit their search by adding/deleting tags in the filter page.

Given the limited time, we chose to prototype our MVP feature, Partner Matching, which is the very first step and the most crucial stage in helping users find their ideal language buddy.

Key Features

Filter

The system will suggest users that share similarities with the user on the home page. Users can also edit the search criteria by adding/deleting tags in the filter page.