How Might We Make Practicing New Vocabulary More Successful?

Ask the Learner

I conducted 3 user interviews to understand the environment and needs of our learners and used Otter.ai to transcribe notes during the interviews, so I could focus on the interviewee and high-level themes.

We needed to know when someone would use a flashcard app to learn new vocabulary—are they on a bus, on a coffee break, driving home, walking to the grocery store? This context points to question 1.

And why would they use it? Is the goal to become fluent in another language or proficient with new course material? And what are some pain points? This points to question 2.

Learning can be a challenging—even frustrating, journey.

A deep dive into the pain points to understand what supports motivation and empowerment and what makes a learner give up were the goals of questions 3 and 4.

The vital difference between learning that is challenging and learning that is frustrating was explored in question 5.

Frustrations are dangerous because learners will fail to reach their goals and will stop using the app. We wanted question 6 to specifically address that head on.

After I sorted and aggregated the data, I created our primary persona. Meet Melissa Kabbani, a 35-year-old lawyer from Canada.

The Woes of the Learner

Processes: affinity mapping, defining the problem statement

A major frustration was feeling that there’s simply not enough time in a day to get all the things they wanted done. Learning a new language or diving into jargon never makes the cut. 



When there’s a spare moment to practice, the feeling of having to start over or to put a lot of thinking and effort into deciding what to do was overwhelming and frustrating. Paired with screen fatigue, it was too easy to quit.

Keeping motivated was another struggle. The social aspect is vital.

What Are the Necessary Flows?

Processes: user stories, job stories, task analyses, user flows

From Melissa’s needs, user stories were written that were then converted to job stories to provide more context—an example:

User story: “As someone who gets easily bored, I want a learning stint to be entertaining and short, so that it keeps my focus.”

Job story: “When I’m exhausted from work, I want learning that is fun and doable, so I can have a higher chance of completing it.”

But the project brief also provided requirements for what needed to be built. Altogether, the flashcard mobile app prioritized 4 task flows:

1. Onboarding
2. Learner sets reminders to practice vocabulary
3. Learner completes a vocabulary review (with reduced screen time mode)
4. Learner adds a vocabulary card

I played with our competitor apps and sought out feedback from my tutor, interviewees, and colleagues to improve the user flows.

View all the user and job stories here.

The Trouble With Nomenclature…

…is that you need to find common ground. Otherwise, usability gets swapped with frustration.

For example, some learners considered “Vocab Map” as a way to add a new word or to do a review. Interestingly, some learners didn’t think “Review” was to review, since it sounded more passive next to “Chat Practice”, which was interpreted as review.

The bottomline was the diverse interpretations of “Vocab Map”, “Chat Practice”, and “Review” reduced task completion, namely: 1) adding a new word/flashcard; and 2) completing a review/practice.

After sorting and grouping the usability test data, I gave them error severity ratings to prioritize changes in the next iteration.

A recommendation was given for each error observation, and new low-fidelity wireframes were created, reflecting usability test results.

Find the one-page usability test report here.