SpeakEZ
Project background
Prior experience
As a recent graduate, I started to notice a few gaps in the education system that I felt needed more attention.
During my EdTech internship, I had the chance to address some of these issues by developing a software solution that identified skill gaps in curricula. This experience deepened my passion for EdTech and sparked my interest in exploring further solutions.
Given my growing enthusiasm for the field, I knew it would be the perfect focus for my final Capstone project.
Challenges
I handled every aspect of this project on my own, from conducting the research and developing the branding to designing the entire prototype.
I had a short timeline of 100 hours to complete everything.
Problem
Imagine two people standing on opposite sides of a river, unable to reach each other. The river represents the language barrier between teachers and non-english speaking parents. Without a bridge, they can only shout across, leading to misunderstandings or missed connections.
Solution
A mobile application that creates courage and confidence between both parties by allowing for easy message translation, voice memo translation and options to save conversations to create actionable plans to improve the student’s learning journey.
How it works: key features
Translating Voice Memos
Send and translate voice memos to have more in depth conversations with each other when a more serious matter is at hand.
This removes the stress users may feel about making a phone call and struggling to translate and communicate effectively.
Translating Messages
Translate messages directly within the chat feature for easier comprehension.
This eliminates the need to visit a separate translation website, streamlining the process and saving time.
Translate Documents
Use the document scanner to translate documents such as report cards into preferred language.
This eliminates the hassle of sending documents to an external organization for translation and demonstrates to parents that, as a teacher, you genuinely care about sharing their child's progress.
Finding the right materials: user research
Narrowing the scope
Before delving into my research, I needed to narrow down what my focus would be.
Casual conversations with teachers revealed a critical need to improve teacher-parent communication.
Competitor analysis
What problems teachers have when attempting to communicate with parents.
Findings
User interviews
Through these user interviews I wanted to find out:
I started my research with a competitor analysis where I researched popular edtech platforms to understand how they address similar challenges. This background research was invaluable in shaping my approach, guiding me toward designing a straightforward, user-friendly app without unnecessary features that might overwhelm or confuse users.
How teachers manage problems communicating with parents when they arise.
I conducted 5 user interviews with teachers who taught k-12 in order to dive deeper into the problem and empathize with the users.
My approach for these interviews was very specific. In order to get strong insights, I made sure that each interview was at least 40 minutes long and involved 7 core questions that elicited stories.
The stories allowed me to get many insights and uncover a problem that I had not initially thought of.
Unexpected Findings
A lack of strong communication methods that translate information easily is creating a disconnect between teachers and non-English-speaking parents, ultimately impacting student success.
User Persona
Why teachers feel that it is important to have strong communication with students’ parents.
Both Bloomz and ClassDojo address a variety of problems, which is beneficial in theory, but their robust feature sets can overwhelm teachers and parents who lack the time to navigate and learn them effectively.
Users like Remind because it uses similar UI patterns to Imessage and WhatsApp, reducing their cognitive load.
Bloomz limits its translation feature to paid subscriptions, which significantly reduces accessibility for non-English-speaking parents.
Identified language barriers as the primary factor creating communication gaps between teachers and non-English-speaking families.
5/5 participants said that parents of English Language Learning students are the hardest to get in touch with.
5/5 teachers said that there are currently not many standardized methods across schools to communicate with non-english speaking parents.
5/5 participants said that they often see a direct correlation of poor behavior from the student when the communication with the parent is weak.
THE MAIN PROBLEM
How Might We bridge the communication gap between teachers and ELL families to reduce fear, build confidence, and eliminate miscommunication, ultimately supporting student growth?
Create strong learning environments by having strong communication with parents.
Make the students and parents feel comfortable to reach out to her.
Utilize any resources to make this communication easy for both parties.
Meet Melissa, a second-grade teacher with ten years of experience. While she has had few communication issues with parents, she struggles to connect with non-English-speaking families. Despite using tools like the Language Line, she still feels a disconnect. Melissa aims to:
Creating the Blueprints
Brainstorming
To kickstart my ideation, I conducted a 15-minute brainstorming session to see how many different ideas I could come up with in that designated time.
Having a timer set helps me crank out more ideas than I do when I’m just sitting and thinking for a longer period of time.
Feature set
Once I had a group of about 25 ideas, I looked at which ideas aligned most with my users based on my interviews and which ones were in scope for the minimum viable product.
My feature set included:
Language preference
Message translations
Voice memo translations
AI suggestions
Document translations
What I did not include and why
Profile page for the student: While this could have been an addition to fostering community between families and parents, it was outside the scope of my main goal which was creating quick and efficient communication.
Exchanging photos: Although this feature was popular in other apps, there were a lot of privacy concerns that arose with taking photos, even if they were just being sent to the parent.
Why having a feature set helps
Figuring out the feature set before diving into building the flows helps me create a clear plan for the MVP and reduces stress for by narrowing down what I need to focus on rather than trying to pile on everything at once.
Laying down the foundation
Sitemaps
Once I had my features determined, I went in and constructed a sitemap to lay out the pages of the app.
Problem: I’m someone who is very visual, so creating sitemaps is a little challenging for me. However, once I had my low-fidelity frames built out, I was able to go back in and add additional pages to the sitemap.
Wire flows
Prior to creating my user flows I created wireflows for each of the tasks.
Creating these helps me visualize every page of the flow so that I don’t miss any crucial interactions that would lead the user astray. This is a method that I learned during an internship that had been very beneficial throughout this course.
User Flows
Now that I had all of the interactions mapped out into wireflows, I went ahead and completed the user flows. Having the visual aspect made it a lot easier for me to successfully complete the user flow interactions since I was essentially translating the visual interactions directly into the written user flows.
Taking the extra step and creating both wire flows and user flows ensured I didn’t miss any interactions and allowed me to see the full picture of how everything connects.
Translating a message
Sending a message using AI
Using voice memo translation
Translating a document
Constructing the bridge
Building out the frames
Low Fidelity Testing
My Approach
Since I had already built out all of the wireflows, I went ahead and used those for my low-fidelity testing. I gave each of my participants the scenarios for each task and had them point to and verbalize their choices.
Pros: Using these wireflows allowed for a bit more accuracy since there were no hints about what steps to take next.
Cons: It doesn’t look as realistic as the Figma prototype which caused some confusion like when the user was supposed to type in their name.
What went well
Overall, people were able to navigate through the app easily with minimal problems and they felt the solutions would be beneficial.
100% success rate on all tasks
0% error rate
“I think the voice memo part will be a great solution to help parents and teachers communicate better.”
“Reminds me of a typical messaging app.”
“Overall this was very easy and intuitive to follow.”
“These are great solutions for this problem.”
What went wrong
The most friction happened on the first screen when having to change the language preference. 5/5 users skipped over the language icon initially to navigate to the language preference page, indicating it was not obvious enough. I used this feedback , and made iterations on my high fidelity mockup.
Branding
Color Palette
I chose various shades of blue because blue is often associated with calmness, trust, focus, and intelligence, which are all qualities considered beneficial for learning.
I also included the the pop of orange to add some contrast and it demonstrates confidence and sociability, which is essentially the goal for the users.
Typography:
I chose Noto Sans because it is a clean and easy to read digitally across many screens.
Since the goal of the app is to easily translate messages, I needed to make sure that I chose a font that would be easy to read and align with this goal.
Logo:
For the logo, I used speech bubbles and dual-colored text to simply convey the app's purpose: easy communication.
UI kit
Final Touches
Iterations
After incorporating my branding into the UI, I conducted another round of user testing. The goal of this testing was to measure what features were intuitive after implementing all of the UI elements.
The feedback from these sessions directly informed the following iterations. Here are the changes I made based on the results.
#1: Ability to save conversation
4/5 participants expressed a desire for a feature to save or pin messages, allowing them to take actionable steps to support their child’s success in school. To do this, I added a feature to save selected messages and tag the message into a specific category for easier filtration.
Before
After
#2: Ability to send translated document
3/5 participants had made comments such as, “where does it go” or “what now” after translating the report card. I saw this as a less impactful solution, so I added the option to directly send the translated report card. This shows that the teacher is being thoughtful and taking that extra step to help parents understand their child's progress.
Before
After
Why these iterations are important
Giving teachers the ability to act on translations helps them work with parents to support a child’s growth. By staying on the same page about both school progress and home life, they can team up to make plans for improvement or celebrate successes together.
Final High Fidelity
Construction Complete!
Success Metrics
Adoption rate
Engagement rate
Retention rate
User satisfaction
User growth
What’s next?
For my future roadmap, I have several features that I would like to build on based on research, testing, and outside feedback. These features include:
AI summaries to help filter and sort saved messages.
Built out the saved conversations page.
Tooltips over icons to explain the function to minimize confusion
Create and test prototype from the parent side.
Calendar Feature
Final Thoughts
What I learned
Overall, this project was incredibly rewarding to work on. I set out to focus on accessibility and inclusivity, and this topic emerged unexpectedly. Key takeaways from this process that have impacted me as a designer include:
Open-ended questions to encourage storytelling during user interviews, resulting in deeper insights and more meaningful data.
Insights need to influence every aspect of the persona.
Looking at other designs for UI inspiration isn’t copying, it’s learning.
While functionality of the application is important, aesthetics and the UI are what draw people in.