LingoAce

"Let's make learning fun & effective."

From livestream courses to a new play-learning app.

My role

Product Designer
Worked with PM & UI designers

Responsibilities

Product Strategy.
User research.
Interaction design.

Duration

2021/05 - 2021/07
3 months full-time internship

LingoAce is a Singapore-based company focuses on Mandarin learning. It started with one-on-one livestream courses and now plans to launch a new play-learning app — Ace Early Learning.

The target audience of the brand new product are 3-8 years old learners & their parents in North America & Southeast Asia.
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Play-learning?

The learning happens naturally when young learners exploring and playing with the app, and there is no teacher needed.
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Young learners can learn via interactive games, videos, storybooks and speaking practices. We believe this learning could reach a larger audience (gain more users) with no time & space limit.‍

Preview of MVP design

The MVP has already launched in the app store. ‍

Challenge

Design from 0 to 1
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By the time I joined, the product was at a very early stage. There was no previous user feedback or any data as references. We have to design everything from zero.
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Design for two groups

Design for both learners & their parents, and they act differently —— different design principles for different interfaces.
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Design for different ages
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3-8 years old is a wide age range. The age gap needs to be taken into consideration.
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Understand Users & Their Needs
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First, we interviewed 12 current users (parents) whose child is taking LingoAce livestream Mandarin courses, trying to find their pain points.

And then we identified three major target groups, and created user persona (both learners & their parents).

What are the problems?

We conclude some pain points for the livestream courses based on the interview.

# 1 : Time-consuming

Course schedule with teachers can be really time-consuming.

# 2 : Expensive

Hiring a one-on-one tutor is expensive.

# 3 : Teacher Quality

Parents don't know where to find good teacher, and there are few great Chinese teachers in the market.

# 4 : Get bored easily

Learners get bored easily in the learning even with an experienced teacher.

Design for Kids

Since designing for young learners is different from for adults, I did some research on how to design for kids and found the following principles:

‍Challenge: Delight in challenges and conflicts while adults don’t.
‍Feedback: Love instant visual & auditory feedback. Every interaction produces some sort of response or reaction.
‍Trust: More trusting than adults. They develop trust easily.
‍Change: Change quickly. Designing for a 3-year-old could be very different from a 6-year-old.
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‍(Debra Gelman, Design for Kids: Digital Products for Playing and Learning)

Competitive Analysis

Before jumping into the product design, we identified some popular early learning apps, and analyzed their features and interfaces.

Insights:
- Landscape > Portrait
Young learners learn mostly on iPad
- Its own avatar to guide learners through learning
Build trusts with learners
- Slidable Main Interface
The feeling of exploring
- Structured learning?
Some chose structured learning while others don’t

Ideation

Based on the competitive analysis, we decided to go with structured course (similar with Homer and BYJU), since language learning is more systematic, we want clear-structured learning system and measurable learning results.

So we break down the learning into different sections, to create a complete learning cycle.

Multiple sections in one day’s learning: Video – Words – Story - Task(Game)- Claim Awards. The Award section also works as learning feedback.

Since our users are less patient, it is important to keep them concentrated while make sure the learning is not beyond their capacity.
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Attention Span of our learners:
‍3-4 years old: 6–12 minutes
5-6 years old: 10-15 minutes
7-8 years old: 14-24 minutes
(Source)
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Due to the relatively short attention span of our users, we make sure that each learning section only lasts for around 3 minutes, which is 12-15 minutes learning in total everyday.
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| Problem: the learning difference between 3-year-old and 8-year-old

The target audience are 3-8 years old learners and it is a large age difference, especially for young learners.

12-15 minutes learning is more than enough for a 3-year-old, but an 8-year-old may want to learn more, so we thought of adding an extracurricular area where learners learn & review through mini-games & maker-space activities.
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| Solution: Adding new feature

Design for Young Learners

Design goal:
We want learners to go through the learning smoothly (avoid quitting halfway)
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①Learning progress bar: Learners can know their position and how close they are to the awards.
‍②Confirmation Pop-up: A sad tiger avatar will occur in the confirmation pop-up if learners want to quit halfway.‍

Learning Interface Design

Considering the users of the learning interface are young learners, we want the information as straightforward as possible, and here are the principles that we came up with:
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- Minimum texts - Use easy-to-understand icons to represent info
- Simple Interactions with Avatar (build trust) - Slidable interface
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There are design variations for each section to make sure it is easy for learners to figure out what that section is about, such as a “play” button for the video section.
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Parent zone verification

‍Since all the purchase activity shall be done by parents, we definitely don’t want learners to enter the parent zone and accidentally click the wrong button.
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When the parents zone button is clicked, an arithmetic problem will appear for users to solve. If there is no valid answer for 5 seconds, the pop up disappears and it goes back to the learning interface (Young learners need instant feedback, they easily lose interest if there is no feedback).

Design for Parents

Before jumping into the user flow for parents, I created the buyer journey map first to identify what needs to pay attention to when design for parents.‍

| Challenge: The primary users are not the ones paying

‍Though kids are our major users, whether to purchase the course or not may still be up to the parents. While trying to create a fluent learning experience for the young learners, I also want to create enjoyable experiences for the parents, convince them that their child's learning is effective.

* Interesting User Research
I had the chance to interview some parents whose children were taking the livestream course at LingoAce. What surprised me was: one parent’s 6-year-old daughter saw the Ads on YouTube and wanted to try the course herself. The decision makers can also be the learners themselves.
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What should be displayed in the parent zone?

I interviewed 7 parents whose children were 3-8 years old and were taking extracurricular courses, asked them what information they want to know the most about their learning. And below are the most common ones:

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‍How is the learning progress?          How is the curriculum designed?
How well has he/she learned?         What can my child learn?
     What has my child learned?   How much time is spent on learning?
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‍Based on the casual interview, I created the information architecture of the parent zone:
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At first we thought about creating a learning data graph, but soon realized it may be too sophisticated for developments. So I kept the information as straightforward as possible by simply showing time duration and stars in the learning report.

How to increase user growth?

‍As a new product, user growth is the key. We figured out a user growth plan: we offer every user a permanent access to a one-week free trial course, if the user shares the referral code and it leads to another successful registration, another one-week course will be unlocked.

We put the notification and the entrance of referral at the top of "My child" sections, since it will be the major interface that parents browse.

Visual Design

The visuals are extremely important for early learning apps and require lots of illustrations, I only did mid-fidelity prototypes and came up with visual style guidance, and worked with UI designers to for the high-fidelity prototypes for different devices (iPad & Mobile).

Key Takeaways

Designing a product from 0 to 1 is exciting while challenging, especially when the major users are young learners. In general, it’s intriguing to design for early learners, who are at the best age of learning languages. And I really hope the app can bring enjoyable learning experiences to them.

From research, ideation to design, I learned to identify and focus on the ‘major’ problems and goals, and stay clear what is the purpose of every design. Every feature/design should serve a purpose. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the chance to test my prototypes with real users during the internship. It will definitely help me to identify problems and iterate.
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→ Next: e-Commerce to-B Design