Improving Speakly’s Learning UX and Greatly Reducing Exercise Completion Time
YEAR: 2019-2020
About Speakly: Speakly is a language learning app that prepares learners for real conversations, by teaching the most relevant language, in real-life context. It's based on years of scientific research and development, helping one to unlock the world to new opportunities.
CONTRIBUTION: USER RESEARCH, UX/UI DESIGN
Introduction
FOCUS AREA
Onboarding
Start of the session
Learning vocabulary
LIVE-situations
Listening exercises
Songs
Review Mode
Level Test
Milestones
Results
PROJECT GOAL
Improving the UX of learning vocabulary which is the main activity on Speakly.
UX METRICS
1. Study card average completion time
2. Number of people who have completion difficulties on a study card
Discovery
The goal was to identify users’ UX pain points in learning vocabulary and benchmark its usability state, to improve the process and make it as smooth as possible.
Research findings
PROBLEMS
Confusion why unlearned phrases are asked
Users felt confused that they had to type phrases they didn’t know.
Correcting phrases took a lot of time and frustration
When users made small typos, re-writing the whole sentence caused frustration. When users didn’t remember the whole phrase, the process of completing the card was long.
Some users said that they don’t want to study writing but just to understand the language
Less writing could also speed up the time to arrive at the daily goal.
Speak-cards were too challenging to complete
Users either struggled to put together the sentences or went through the card without attention.
UX METRICS
COMPLETING MEMORISE-CARD
10 Completed with some difficulties
2:30 min Average time
COMPLETING SPEAK-CARD
7 Completed with some difficulties
2 Completed successfully
1 Couldn’t test
1:50 min Average time
COMPLETING WRITE-CARD
6 Completed with some difficulties
2 Completed successfully
2 Couldn’t test
3:03 min Average time
Chosen solutions
Introduce new word cards to teach words before asking them.
Ask to write only the wrong words again to reduce card completion time and user frustration.
In case of minor typos or “immediate-reveal” allow continuing to make the experience quicker and smoother. Those phrases were asked soon again.
Show a hint as part of the exercise to reduce the difficulty of the speak-card.
Create a version of the memorize-card with multiple choice answers (instead of writing) to support learners who mostly want to learn understanding and speaking.
Play UI sounds to give feedback about the completion of each card. Because sound is the quickest sense to perceive, it speeds up the learning process and makes the experience memorable.
Evaluative research
I conducted another usability testing to see how well we did and how to continue.
UX METRICS
COMPLETING MEMORIZE-CARD (MULTI-OPTION VERSION)
10 Completed successfully
6 sec Average time
COMPLETING SPEAK-CARD
8 Completed successfully
2 Completed with some difficulties
45 sec Average time
COMPLETING WRITE-CARD
9 Completed successfully
1 Completed with some difficulties
31 sec Average time
Impact and summary
Learnings
In general, I'm satisfied with the results and proud of the work our team did – I think it is a considerable improvement to the learning experience.
There were some interesting learnings from the second usability testing, e.g. users tapping the translation feature a lot (we could show translation out by default), tapping on the sentence of the speak-card to continue (we could consider it as a "continue"), some pronunciations being irrelevant to the user, and other small things like these that could be improved in next iterations.
In this case study I focused mainly on interaction design, but in the overall perspective the real value to the user comes from pairing it well with learning concepts such as feedback systems and guidance, reward systems, habit building, the pace of learning, etc., to create the best experience to the user in an educational app like Speakly.
Thank you for reading! 
Let's collaborate!
Write me at elinakapanen@gmail.com