ALEA: ESL LEARNING TOOL

As a team of four we worked together towards designing a product or service for the English as a Second Language Learners user group. We met with many users to understand their story more deeply in order to elucidate core principles that matter the most to them. Then we proposed ideas and codesigned with them to further develop the user experiences and receive feedback. The final product, called Alea, is a clip that the user would wear on their shirt collar that links to an App on their phone that would record everything they say throughout the day. It gives real-time spelling and conversational grammar corrections that the user can check periodically throughout the day and in the form of a digest in evening to help them accelerate their goal of achieving English fluency. This product design comes with the expectation that the technology to support this could exist 10-15 years down the road.

ALEA: ESL Learning Tool: Projects

The structure of this course was loosely based off of this compass. At the beginning, we formed teams based on our interest in a user group. Each studio had the same set of user groups so that teams across studios could work together in the beginning to reach out to their users. We began in the lower left quadrant in Phase 1 where our main goal was to go out into the community and get to know our users (ESL Learners). As we got the ball rolling we started hone in on the principles that mattered the most to our users. In Phase 2 we generated ideas for products or services that might meet the needs of ESL Learners. We brought these ideas to our users and co-designed with them to develop the user experience and interfaces. In Phase 3 we toggled between the Ideas quadrant and the Experiments quadrant to refine our product and flesh out the details.

ALEA: ESL Learning Tool: Projects

THE PROCESS: PHASE 1

ALEA: ESL Learning Tool: Projects

LET'S GET STARTED

TEAM:
Lilia Chan
Andrew Deaver
Aubrey Dority
Ian Tang

GETTING TO KNOW OUR USERS

One of the biggest challenges we faced in the beginning was actually just getting to talk to them face to face. Most of our methods of contact was through ESL classes, which involved a lot of red tape because the teachers were very protective of their students. But once we were able to sit down and talk with them, it was eye-opening to hear all their stories. To protect their identities we gave each of our users a pseudonym. After learning more about these people and their experiences we used various design tools to visualize what our user group looks like across different metrics. For example a 2 by 2 to map on two different axes.

DEVELOP PERSONAS

The next step in the design process was to develop personas for our users. In that exercise we identified types within our user group that share common aspirations, beliefs and goals. It was challenging to find the sweet spot where we weren't over-generalizing or being too specific because personas are meant to be a way of creating intermediate representations to identify with and engage with. One of our personas was Ambitious Alex, who is a young immigrant facing the challenges of building their life from the ground up and motivated to one day be able to do what regular Americans can do.

THE PROCESS: PHASE 2

ALEA: ESL Learning Tool: Projects

STUDIO INSTRUCTORS

We worked very closely with our studio professors throughout the semester. Fran Slutsky is a adjunct lecturer from the neighboring Babson College. Her experience in product development and marketing was helpful in giving us the industry perspective. Jon Adler is an Olin professor that teaches courses surrounding psychology so much of his advice were centered on human aspect.

DEFINING CORE PRINCIPLES

In the process of defining main principles that our users care about, we began to realize that they aligned very well with the three basic human needs outlined in one of our summer readings, "Why We Do What We Do" by Edward Deci on understanding self-motivation. These three principles are competency, autonomy, and relatedness. The situation for ESL Learners is that their language barrier is also a barrier to their basic human needs. Our driving focus was to design a product that would give them back their basic human needs.

DREAMING IDEAS

When thinking about ideas we were encouraged to be ambitious and dream up ideas that could have a big impact. For this project our objective was not to have a finished product to hand to our users. Rather we directed our efforts away from the technical aspects (which can be a little hard for us) and focus on the design. While keeping in mind that the technology to actually make this happen could easily exist 10-15 years down the road

CHOOSING AN IDEA

For the design review we needed to narrow down our ideas from a wall of Post-Its to just two. One of our ideas was a Language Critique Clip that would give our users feedback on conversational grammar and pronunciation. The way we discovered this idea was actually during a co-design session with one our users. She was talking about how difficult it was to get her American friends to correct her English, which could have ties to our social culture. So this led to my teammates conducting a quick experiment where they had a little bent piece of pipe cleaner and told her that this is a clip that could give you corrections for everything that you say. While one of my teammates talked to her, the other wrote down pronunciation and grammar corrections to what she was saying. She was really excited to see the corrections and that's when we knew we found something special.

THE PROCESS: PHASE 3

ALEA: ESL Learning Tool: Projects

THE DETAILS

In the last phase we focused in on one idea and fleshed out as many of the details as we could. We chose to run with the Language Critique Clip because we felt that it would have a large impact on our users across the scale of fluency. We looked into the possible life cycle of this product, mapping the interactions, app wireframes, cost, lowering the barriers of access, material choices, physical form, etc.

THE NAME

We had many ideas for the name of this product, but one thing that was clear for all of us was that we wanted this name to hold some meaning related to our users. The name Alea shows up in many different languages, which we thought was fitting as a symbol of connection. The pronunciation of Alea was also interesting because we opted for Ah-LAY-ah instead of Ah-LEE-ah. We realized that most of our users would have the tendency to pronounce it the first way and native English speakers would say it the second way. We thought it would be interesting because it flipped the table on who was saying it right.