My Role (A personal project)
UX Research, UX Design, Interaction Design, HTML Prototyping, User Testing
Illustration credit to Hsuan-Tzu Shen
Concierge MVP helped by Hsuan-Tzu Shen, Hou-Jun Chen
Method & Tool
Method: User Interview, Persona, Lean UX, Concierge MVP, BJ Fogg's behavior model, Nir Eyal's hook model
Tool: Hand Sketching, Figma, Webflow
Context and challenge
This is a class project on designing behavioral change product. The whole development of this project can be divided into three phases. The first phase focused on motivating people to keep self-learning every day while the second phase set the product’s goal specific to practice English speaking. Finally, the third phase modified the experience of practicing English speaking.
Phase 1: How to help people build a habit of keep self-learning every day?
Phase 2: How to help people keep practice English speaking every day?
Phase 3: How to make the experience of practicing feel good and prevent people from quitting?
The Outcome
An affirmative result on motivating people to practice English speaking every day.
27
13
5
"The activity gave me a reason to speak English every day. I like the interaction with partners. This motivated me more." ─ Participant who finish the challenge
Detailed UX design on improving Englishs peaking.
Phase 1:
Research on behavioral design and test early concepts
Online field observation: Many people failed on the Daily Challenge
I found that many people really want to improve their skills by learning and practicing every day. However, it's hard to form the learning habit for many learners.
What triggers people to take action to learn?
According to BJ Fogg's behavior model, people need more motivation todeal with things that are hard to do.
Test on early concept:
Let users set their own learning goals. And track if they can persist.
After researched on behavioral design techniques, I tested one of my design concepts: Let users set their learning goals on wunderlist, and I would leave inspirational messages to motivate them to keep learning tomorrow if they finish their tasks on time every night.
5 users were recruited to join the first test which lasted for a week. Later, I did user interviews to learn from them as much as I can.
The reasons why users failed vary from person to person and case to case.
The hypothesis of the first MVP ended up not working well. The reasons why the participants can’t commit to their goals are all different. Different learning goals require different motivation.
Phase 2:
Refine the model and choose a specific learning goal - Practice English speaking
According to Nir Eyal's hook model, people get motivated when variable reward is offered. Further, people get hooked when external triggers (cue) turn into internal triggers such as emotion.
Partner’s feedback as a main variable reward along with other gamification techniques
In the second phase, I chose English speaking as a specific practice goal. The main idea in this concept is to have a partner review your practice and give you feedback. Each day, you’ll have a random partner to give you feedback. It ensures that someone would definitely listen to your practice. I also added other gamification techniques such as levels and rewards. Each time you level up, you’ll gain gifts to decorate your characters, and Native speaker would review your practice if you achieve the final stage. A sense of achievement would also accumulate during the process,that would make you eager to go back to practice.
Concierge MVP:
Put user testing as real as possible
In the second test, I want to see the most genuine result of users’ behavior, so I turned the design concept into an activity and build a website for it. I then did a Concierge MVP (with the help by Hsuan-Tzu Shen, Hou-Jun Chen) to see if participants can keep practicing for 7 days in a row as they committed in joining the activity. First, we published our activity news at school’s FB community and other English learning platforms. 27 people signed up for the challenge in just two days. And I sent invitation to those who rated their score of motivation on practicing English speaking 4 or 5 (out of 5). 13 people started the challenge, and 5 of them succeeded practiced for 7 days in a row.
Phase 3:
Find out why some people still failed?
Interviewing the participants:
Why some participants succeeded while others still failed?
I interviewed 6 participants, 3 of them finished the challenge while the rest three failed. The interview scripts focus on their previous experience of practicing English speaking and how they behaved during the activity.
A summary of the participants
All the participants I interviewed can be categorized into 3 personas. They hold 3 different attitudes toward practicing English speaking, and have different pains and goals on English speaking. It turns out that the design concept satisfies the persona of Yi Wun the most.
Two participants in this persona. One succeeded while the other one failed.
Two participants in this persona. All of them succeeded.
Two participants in this persona. All of them failed.
Insights of previous experience in practicing English speaking
- Language exchange partner is not as helpful as they thought. Most participants tried to practice with language exchange partners, and they found that not helpful because partners didn’t commit to practicing or didn’t know how to correct them.
- Users have similar experience of practicing English speaking, such as shadowing, ‘say’ diaries, recording conversations with native speaker teachers.
- When thinking of speaking with native speakers, it causes them a little bit of nervousness consciously or subconsciously. They need a safe environment to practice.
- Most participants do not know a holistic learning model of English speaking.When it comes to English speaking, most of them think the best way is to practice with native speaker teachers. However,some people still felt their speaking didn’t improve as much as they think. Most of them do not know how to improve speaking effectively. According to Professor Karen in NTU, you need to “store” a sound database in your brain at first (input), which she recommends “Echo Method” to practice this. Then you can leverage those sounds into different sentences you want (output). This way, you can speak fluently with clear pronunciation.
The main problem of the design concept
- Partner mechanism works for persona of Yi Wun well. They said they liked the mechanism, but they (along with other participants) wanted a partner of same level or higher level.
- Almost all the participants found feedback not helpful. They didn’t know how to give feedback. They also thought that feedback they received was too vague and general.
- They started to see recording their speaking as a difficult task and wanted to quit after 3 or 4 days. All the participants practiced at least 3 times to upload their recordings, some even practice over 10 times. However, this process triggered frustration easily if they couldn’t feel a sense of achievement.
- They didn’t find it helpful to shadow sentence. They thought maybe talk to their partner directly would be more useful.
- Participants want practical challenge. Most participants mentioned that they looked forward to have a conversation with the native speaker coach which the challenge didn’t offer.
- They didn’t gain a great sense of accomplishment in the end.
Final Design
