November 2021
Group: Tatiana Bohsali, Maria Shuttleworth
Collaboration
Following from the feedback we received about people's understanding of what to do and how to be if they only have their personal experiences to rely on, we decided that this could be solved in two ways. One is to create a collaborative view feature where people can share their scenarios, create them together or add to each others'. This would be a great way for people to learn and meet like-minded people who are also learners. However, there are some issues that would need to be addressed if the feature was to be implemented. One of them is that there would be no way to check what people are inputting and how accurate it is. This may cause the design to be weaponised or be misleading. Therefore, we came up with another way of how people might also learn new things on top of keeping track of their knowledge and experiences - through downloadable packages of different scenarios made by other people. Upon downloading or saving it to your library, learners would then be able to build upon that and remove things they don't need. This could also be strengthened, as Mor mentioned, through having suggestions, similarly to Spotify's suggested playlists. "If you use this scenario, this one might also be useful". 
SCENARIOS 
The next step was to gather data from people to input into our app. Thankfully, each of us had friends who are in a foreign country learning a new language. We asked them to take pictures, make recordings, videos, anything that is representational of their daily lives where they have to use/know the language. My friend Milena who is currently in South Korea on her year abroad was very helpful and shared some audio recordings of herself asking for directions in the streets of Seoul.
Streets of Seoul, South Korea. Pictures taken by Milena Mkrtchyan.
Similarly, Maria and Tatiana got some stories from their friends. In total we had three different scenarios that we input into our app: 
- Taking the subway (MTR) in Hong Kong
- Getting lost and asking for directions in Seoul, South Korea
- Discussing a weekly meal plan in Beirut, Lebanon
These were very different scenarios, but we were very glad to see how nicely each one of them could be inserted into our interface and become a helpful tool for learners with all the different phrases and words. This once again showed how the flexibility of our app as it can organise and structure conversations and situations to be a learning aid.
FINAL TOUCHES
As we started inputting the scenarios, we made some final touches to the app to make it look more uniform as we had a lot of colours, elements and fonts going on as well as some gaps in the interactions of the prototype.
Prototyping the chaos. Prototype developed collaboratively. 
To test and present the app we prototyped the getting around the MTR scenario.
As we weren't happy that our outcome took the shape of an app we decided to consider other devices and made an Apple Watch adaptation. Developed Tatiana.
USER TESTING
In order to ensure that our prototype is flowing well and makes sense to not just us, we thought it was essential to test it. In order to make it less complicated, we decided to only present one scenario - getting around MTR in Hong Kong. Although we were trying to simplify the task, we also made it a little bit difficult for ourselves because we realised that only people who are learning Cantonese or can speak it are able to test it. However, we were lucky to find three people who agreed to help on such short notice: our friend Sylvester from the course who is fluent in both Mandarin and Cantonese, Maria's brother and father who both live in Hong Kong and are learning the language. Next, we came up with a set of questions we could ask them after they try out the prototype in order to understand what they think about it.
The prototype our participants used when testing the app. GIF by me, prototype developed collaboratively.
Overall, user testing was successful and all of the participants said they would be interested in using the app and that they haven't seen anything like this before. However, naturally, there were some things that were brought up to our attention that needed developing. Furthermore, there were also some suggestions on what we can implement in order to improve it. One thing that the participants noted was that the application is very complex, it has a lot of layers and at first, it is difficult to figure things out. Therefore, we needed to provide more explanations than we hoped we would need to. People struggled with understanding and distinguishing between scenarios and situations, which made us feel a little upset because it took us ages to figure out this structure. However, I believe these issues with understanding could be due to the fact that we had to build the library to have some existing input in order to show all the features. And since the participants didn't build this library themselves, like it would have been if it was implemented, they saw it as someone's library which might be why they struggled. Furthermore, some said that the community aspect was missing and asked whether there would be a way to share this with friends. As previously mentioned, we did consider this aspect so we felt like it was a shame that we didn't have time to properly incorporate it and show how it works. It would have definitely added more depth to our project. If we had more time, I believe we could have improved our prototype by making an empty library as a starting point. This would lead to showing the 'add' feature and consequently show a scenario that was just created. This could have made more sense and made the flow easier to understand. Furthermore, it would have been great to work on adding the collaboration feature. Although we acknowledged these issues, we simply didn't have time to work on it any further, so we got to filming.
MAKING THE VIDEOS
Finally, after all the interface related issues and last-minute iterations were done, we needed to show Retrio in action. Therefore we decided to create 2 videos. One, that shows the app in use through a storyboard/user journey and the one that reveals its most important features. To make them we divided the tasks. Maria is great at illustration so she created the visuals and Tatiana has experience in animation. Meanwhile, using the skills I got from Micro UX, I was in charge of recording the voiceover. To do so, I initially thought of visiting the voice recording booth in LCC, however, it was all booked so I had to improvise and use my wardrobe which was suggested as a quiet space by multiple tutorials online. We got all together to write a script and after we finished I began recording and Maria and Tatiana got to drawing and animating which resulted in the outcome you can see in the next blog post...
Recording the voiceover for the videos in the wardrobe.
Photo by me.
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