Visualisation & Prototyping
Being UX students, I believe we designed a great UI for our final outcome. This was done through a long process of experimenting and prototyping. We started with rough sketches and simple drawn animations, moved to cardboard and paper prototypes, back to sketches to finally get to the result of an interface. I believe we made use of both digital and physical dimensions, experimented and presented our ideas very clearly through them. They weren't always museum-worthy, but they worked and helped us move forward, iterate and understand where are the strengths and flaws in our designs and ideas. Furthermore, we considered a different device to place our interface on - the apple watch, which was very new to me but worked great. Overall, we managed to present a very complex and sophisticated system in an interesting and beautifully organised way.
Teamwork & Communication
Since I worked in a team once again for this final project, I believe there were some improvements in my teamwork and communication. Firstly, having worked with Maria and Tatiana before on a 6-week project I knew what to expect. I knew they were hard-working and talented designers as well as great people. Being in a team with them for 4 months was as great as for 6 weeks! We definitely faced a lot more bumps on the road, because it's a bigger project. Furthermore, all of us had different ideas at different stages and sometimes we wanted different things. However, our communication was always clear, straightforward, understanding and respectful between each other. We always listened to one another, found compromises and moved forward as a team. If I were to ever start my own design company - I, without a doubt in my mind, would start one with Tatiana and Maria. We all learnt to communicate in a manner that, prioritises progress and personal goals within the project, yet considers other points of view and opinions, which I believe is key.
Research
Throughout the project, we managed to employ a lot of different research methods - user testing, bodystorming, behavioural mapping, questionnaires and directed storytelling. Although I used some of them before, I believe the user testing is where I made the most progress. Not only we came up with and developed the idea of doing such a test from scratch, but we also adapted another method of research - behavioural mapping - to synthesise it, which worked great and was very fruitful for our project. Furthermore, it was the first time I used the bodystorming method. At first, I didn't think it would help us as much. However, it ended up being the most insightful and eye-opening method to me as it highlighted an aspect of our project I didn't think of before.
Conceptual Thinking
The topic of language learning is very complex. It encompasses many different things and elements that need to be considered and for best results implemented into a system, you are designing. Having done extensive research, we managed to incorporate a lot of ideas people mentioned throughout our research to satisfy their language learning wants. We managed to make a system that allows users to both add and retrieve things in an organised manner, save and share them, and most importantly combine them into a scenario to better understand it, connect with it and learn the language, which hasn't been done before within language learning.
