The project brief was to empower people to learn new vocabulary and creating a mobile application with that principle. I decided to start with the initial direction of a flashcard app where users are able to create custom flashcard decks for learning new words.

I started by doing an analysis on vocabulary learning techniques and looking at popular apps already on the market. This helps me understand what solutions already exist. I looked at the pros and cons of 3 language learning apps and wrote down some improvement suggestions. These three points (pros, cons, improvements) helped me guide me on my design solution.

The competitive analysis can be browsed through in the following presentation:

To understand the user needs, I started by doing user interviews. I created an interview script and questions, and interviewed 4 people who were interested in learning new vocabulary.

I then analyzed and collated the data into a proto-persona. This would then help me whenever I needed to make decisions for the app's design. The persona gave me something -- or better yet -- someone to refer to when going through the design process.

To get a better understanding what tasks the user would like to complete in the app I created both user stories and job stories.

It's possible to come up or update the problem statement at any point in the design process. For this project, the problem statement revealed itself after creating the user stories and job stories.

You can explore the problem statement and the stories below:

First, I identified the most important tasks that the user needs to be able to complete. For this I aligned with the previously created user stories and persona.

These two user flows helped with coming up with a primitive sitemap and to help creating lo-fi wireframes.

To be able to test the user flows and overall how the app works in the hands of a real person, I created both lo-fi and mid-fi wireframes.

Equipped with the wireframes, I made them into a clickable prototype. This was used for the usability test with 4 people. The scope was to test the 2 main user goals of the prototype.

After analysing the interviews, I prioritised all the needed changes with Jakob Nielsen's error severity rating scale.