INTERACTION DESIGN
The goal: To allow students to participate in a “conversation” to practice their newly learned Chinese vocabulary. This activity appears at the end of a unit, so the vocabulary should be familiar at this point.
The challenge: Since this activity is aimed at students in kindergarten through second grade, it can’t be assumed that they can read, so the instruction and vocabulary hints cannot rely on text.
My role: I designed the template using a combination of in-house software and CSS, gathered feedback from other designers and the curriculum architect, and finalized the design. I added a generic version of the template to our template library, created a storyboard for production, and when the storyboards were ready, built one vocabulary review activity based on this template for each unit of our elementary Chinese course.
Where we started
The intent to portray a back and forth conversation isn’t clear.
The audio instruction lists six steps, and user research suggests a high likelihood the user won’t remember all of them.
The layout is confusing, it’s unclear whether to interact with the boxes left to right or top row then bottom.
This is what the curriculum architect originally requested based on templates we already had. The interaction was less than ideal.
Improved interaction
Characters with speech bubbles make it clear that this is a conversation.
Instruction audio is broken into segments and plays at the right moment to guide the student step by step.
Each piece of the interaction appears in turn, reducing confusion for the student on where to click next.
Within the constrains of the system this was built with, I’m proud of how much clearer, more engaging, and user-friendly this interaction feels.
Rachel took immense initiative and completely owned the World Languages project all while creating new improved processes. I was able to step back to focus on other strategic initiatives because of her leadership and am immensely grateful.
-Amy Velasquez, Creative Director, Stride