Dual - Learn a language with your favorite content

Dual is an innovative language learning platform designed to revolutionize the traditional approach to language education. Unlike conventional courses that follow a structured curriculum, Dual immerses learners in a diverse world of authentic content, ranging from engaging texts to captivating videos in a variety of languages. The approach is simple yet effective: learn the language by exploring content that genuinely interests you.

Project Context

As someone fluent in more than 4 languages, my enthusiasm for language learning is boundless. I'm always on the lookout for more effective ways to learn. After experimenting with various textbooks and language learning apps, I realized they weren't quite right for me. Textbooks felt tedious, and the apps didn't match my intense learning goals. This led me to a decision: I would create my own method, one that's more effective and enjoyable for learners like me.

My Role

UX designer, researcher

Individual

3 weeks

2022. 8

Team

Duration

Time

Research

In order to design a satisfied product, I carried an online interview with 12 language enthusiasts within the language community. This outreach aimed to gain insights into their language acquisition journeys, understand their perspectives on conventional learning methodologies, and explore their experiences with various language learning apps. Furthermore, I sought to identify more efficient and impactful learning strategies that resonate with learners' needs and preferences.

Link to the interview questions and response data: :https://www.pollfish.com/dashboard/results/330126656/-794748440

Prioritization

Features
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In order to decide whether the feature is essential or not, I conducted a secondary research to measure the importance of the feature. I asked users to rate the importance . The assessment of importance is decided by the average score.
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To figure out the importance and relations between numerous features, I divide the features based on whether the feature is new or existed , and whether the feature is essential or good to have.

Content

In spite of platform features, it’s also important to prioritize the content since various content are required by learners. The priotization of the content is based on 2 factors, popularity and reliability.

Swim lanes

Swim Lanes helped me to map out the user journey of essential features, with every step involved. This would help the designers and developpers be clear with the job. The swim lane would prevent the designers from forgetting any functions when translating the feature process into visual content. This helped me to consider the relation of user flow and UI pages. After analysing the listed features, I selected out four essential features with higher complexity process, and drew out the swim lanes.

Information Architecture

I planned the information architecture while sketching the low fidelity wireframes. I carried on these two parts at the same time. With the help of the swim lanes and information architecture, I could easily decide the design for the key features, and with the design solution is illustrated, I could verify if the information architecture is properly planned.I aksed couple of my friends who are multilingual to test out the design and their suggestions . After several iterations, I set the key functions for the header, which commands the overall User flow of the project.

Low fidelity prototype

The content page where learners browse and learn the language is the core feature of the project, it involves lots of interactions to help learners browse and learn. The content sector provides various kinds of language content from text to videos. The notes sector records all the vocabulary and phrases that the learner is learning, and help learners to review.

Content

Learning page

Vocabulary Review

Final Design

Contents

The home page presents all kinds of content for the learner, all contents are updated , learners could get the fresh and authentic content.

For each kind of sector, learners could browse the contents according to their interest. The categories above is customizable.

The design of the content tab is different from home page, in order to differentiate the page level.

Content browsing

Video content
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When learning with video content, the learner could watch the video, read the manuscript and the translation or explanation of the content. This would help the learners establish the connection among all senses.
The interactive text would help learners learn and remember the content.

Text content
The layout of text content is similar to video content. The tab on the side gives the bilingual definition of the vocabulary. Learners could add notes to the vocabulary and save.

Vocabulary revise

Reviewing process
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For the immersive vocabulary reviewing, the system presents the vocabulary context instead of giving the explanation or translation all at once, this is to encourage the leaners to think and learn with the secondary language.

The page presents the vocabulary the the context where the learner first learn the word. The learner should try to recall the explanation without any help.

If the learner could not recall the meaning, he could see the definition in the language that they’re learning, this encourage the learner to learn with language.

If the learner couldn’t understand the explanation, he could switch to the translation in his own language.