Q4 2020 – From research to prototype
Originally, Lockcard was only meant to be a case-study. I was passionate about the problem and wanted to solve it outside of just design.
EMPATHIZE
June 2020 - September 2020
Problem Context
Xinyi had been learning French for a while, but her initial enthusiasm was dying out as she became increasingly preoccupied with other activities. She found it increasingly difficult to take in new language data, especially memorizing vocabulary.
Project Hypothesis
We believe the journey to learning a language is long and arduous, making users feel like they are progressing very slowly after a while (aka the learning plateau). We are also aware from secondary research that young learners have an increasingly lower attention span, making it very hard to recall information.
Project Goal
The goal is to understand vocabulary learners more holistically, their motivations and fears in life, then to investigate their experience with existing apps so that we can remove those painpoints and make the learning experience more meaningful and effective.
User Interviews
We conducted 12 user interviews with people who had reached an intermediate level in their secondary language. You can view all our user research on Figma.
From the interviews, we were able to dress three personas that would help us empathize with our future end-users beyond their experience on the app: life-long learners, casual learners and exam-oriented learner. They are distinct in motivation, cognitive activities (e.g. planning, reviewing, solving problems and measuring progress) and behaviours. You can view all personas on Figma.
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Some of the key learnings for the focused personas are:
- They have been learning the language for a long time, and have reached an advanced level.
- They are busy with a job or high-level studies.
- They are not focused on actively improving their vocabulary, but are used to searching in a dictionary when in doubt.
- They are addicted to their smartphones.
Here's their journey map
Competitive Analysis
We have learnt a lot about our competitors' products, especially Duolingo which has an unusually high 30 days retention rate (20%) compared to the average language learning app (8%).
Apps like Duolingo tend to position themselves as one-stop-shops to learning languages, for absolute beginners; we call these 'proactive' apps. Their teaching relies on gamification to keep users' attention high. Using a mix of pop-up notifications, rewards and social features, these apps play on our laziness and sometimes feel like they could replace the need to go outside and expose ourselves to organic learning in uncomfortable environments, like abroad or among a group of foreign friends.
Our approach to this language learning problem is more specialized and therefore complementary to existing products [Read our full story here].
DEFINE
HOW MIGHT WE MAKE VOCABULARY LEARNING MORE EFFECTIVE FOR USERS WITH LOW MOTIVATION?
Provide context
Many apps, especially Standard Language tests (e.g. IELTS/TOEFL), push a lot of information we feel disconnected from — nouns we don't need, adjectives we'll never know when to use — and in that process, they lose us because we don't create as meaningful an association as when a friend uses a word we don't know in a private conversation.
Offer a workspace
When our target users encounter new words, they lack a method for organizing them (printed notes vs note taking app vs dictionary). They end up losing track of what they have and haven’t reviewed, creating only more frustration. View our UserJourney Map in the Appendix.
Help Memorize
As a combination of the above two pain points, we lack the energy or the time needed to review new vocabulary consistently, resulting in a never-ending cycle of Googling the same words every time.
DESIGN
September 2020 - Ongoing
The very first sketches of the app were made by @Xinyi in summer 2020. In November, we had completed V1 design, which was made accessible via our public beta. In that process, we collected extensive feedback through user testing sessions and our public Bug / Feature Request page. Iterating on that feedback, we completed design of V2 in January 2021, and will be officially launching in the App Store sometime in February 2021.
Captivate with Onboarding
User testing has repeatedly shown us that many of our users ignore the most important feature of Lockcard: being able to interact with notifications. As a result, those users perceived Lockcard as a simple dictionary, as opposed to a workspace and memorization system that adapts based on your answers to notifications.
For Lockcard V2, we decided to solve that problem by redesigning the onboarding using a more visual and coherent story.
[Read most recent diary for why this still failed]
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Enable to Search Fast
The foundation to a good user experience is delivering what the user needs as quickly as possible. That's why we focus on eliminating any friction when we search for words, and to embed Lockcard into the everyday life of our users. By reducing the amount of effort needed to learn, we hope to increase daily app sessions per user.
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Reduce Cognitive Load
Traditional dictionaries tend to push a lot of visual cues and text all at once, and offer a lot of what our users label as 'unnecessary' information; types of English, origins of a word, related phrases...
We know that searching is very contextual, and that users need to approximate a word as quickly as possible to respond to a situation they are in. Searching a word always precedes a more urgent and important task. That's why Lockcard is designed to display only the information that matters the most. Any secondary information can be accessed via an additional press.
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Train to Recall (with Interactive Notifications)
We use notifications to flash searched words back to users’ phones, following a Spaced Repetition Schedule based on ACT-R, a modelling system introduced by Anderson & Lebiere that maximizes learning and retention. The notifications are uniquely interactive; your answers (Easy, Medium, Difficult) make the algorithm smarter which in turn optimizes your notification schedule.
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Organize and Measure Progress
When we encounter new words, we lack a centralized method for organizing them (printed notes vs note taking app vs dictionary). We end up losing track of what we have and have not reviewed, creating only more frustration in the learning journey. Following the CRUD principle, our Progress page serves as a workspace for tracking, measuring and updating the words we are currently learning.
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Increase Trust in our Method
User testing has shown us that some of our users question the efficacy of Lockcard's teaching method. Some of the questions that pointed to that idea were: 'How do you know if I actually mastered a word?', 'Why do I need to use notifications?', 'Is it proven I’ll learn with the repetition?'...
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