The goal of this Flashcard app is to provide students with a tool to help them learn quickly, any time, and anywhere.
How does the mind evolve and grow to understand new material? By digging into the experience of learning and figuring out how people gain understanding, I’ll build a mobile app to help people grow their knowledge so they can grow their lives. This means in the mix of life, students will get help to juggle school on top of everything else in life.
When going through the process of learning there is a ton of vocabulary and terminology to remember. Often there are several categories of terminology to remember at the same time. For students who are taking several classes at once, it can be tricky to keep all this material straight while learning.
The first step when taking on a new project is to build my knowledge. To gain a better understanding, I conducted a competitor analysis on three different flashcard apps.
I looked at successful direct competitors to learn what they were doing well and what could be improved upon. I looked at the company, the product and an in-depth UX analysis. When doing the UX analysis, I focused on four parts of their app: the onboarding experience, navigation, flashcard creation, and flashcard usability.
All three of the apps featured used a familiar flashcard structure but varied in their presentation. Here are the main takeaways from the three apps as pros and cons.
The second step of the project was to gain a more intimate understanding. To do this, I conducted interviews and surveys of how people learn new vocabulary and the difficulties that come with learning.
I did a total of 3 interviews with young adults in their 20's and 30's who were current students. For the survey, there were 20 participants who were all currently part of a learning program but not necessarily enrolled in college courses.
I gained insights into what most people's difficulties were and how they overcame them.
The third step was to create user personas based on the research I had done. A user persona is a representation of the goals, pain points, and behaviors of the potential users of the app.
The goal is to generate empathy for the people you are designing for. It is easier to keep a face, name, and a personal story in mind when designing than the details of the target audience.
For this project, I created three proto-personas based on the students I interviewed.
With the research and the user personas completed, the next step was to look at the information architecture. This meant a task analysis to figure out all the steps a vocabulary app would need and the surrounding navigational issues.
Once I figured out all the steps, I worked on a user flow to figure out how Ronnie, Christine, or Mary Ann would go through the app.
I focused on two features for this step: creating a flashcard deck and practicing with a flashcard deck.
The next step is to bring the ideas to life in the tangible form of wireframes. Wireframes are two-dimensional illustrations of a screen's interface.
I followed my user flows when creating wireframes and kept Russel, Christine, and Mary Ann in mind.
With all the wireframes done, I put them together to create a prototype of the app in Marvel to test it. The next step was to get some feedback to evaluate its usefulness.
It was time to see how people would interact with the app and if it was functional.
I had scheduled 5 user tests, 2 in person and 3 online, however, 2 of the online appointments fell through. Need to send out a reminder the day before and the day of to help counter this issue.
The in-person tests had a much different feel to them because I could watch what the participants were doing and looking at. I could see both them and the screen.
In the online test, I could see the screen share but the person was tiny which made it hard to see their facial expressions and reactions. It would have been better with another person to help observe.
Participants started sharing memories of using flashcards in the past which I didn’t expect. Their past experiences influenced how they interpreted the app. They expected the app to work like index cards.
This project completed the objective, which was to create an app to facilitate the process of learning new vocabulary. It is flexible enough to work with several subjects at once. It allows users to learn by traditionally using flashcards, matching, and writing both sentences or short answers. These are the methods that 65% of participants in the survey said worked best for them.
Since the purpose of this project was for me to learn the fundamentals of the UX process it was an incredibly valuable process. I was able to go through all the steps of the design thinking process to get a feel for each one and what each entails. This gave me first-hand experience and helped me realize ways that I can improve. For example, I found out that it's difficult to get participants for interviews or usability tests even when I sent out reminders. I also learned the difference between conducting a usability test in-person versus online through a video call. I will be able to take these experiences and continue to grow my UX skills in the future. As I learned during this project, learning comes from repetition and exposure and now I have a taste of the UX process.
The next steps for this app would be to implement the changes and suggestions that arose in the usability tests as well as creating a high fidelity prototype. There would also need to be more usability tests to make sure the changes work smoothly.
