App for learning

Created to help hospitality workers

What I worked on

— User interviews

— User definition

— Competitor Analysis

— Interactions

— Prototyping

— User Testing

Role

UX Designer

The project was a collaboration with Startup Airlingo , Barcelona

Field: Startup, App

Timing: 10 days — Dec. 2022

Team: 3 people

Overview

Airlingo is a startup, based in Barcelona and founded in 2022, which provides its users with a safe space to practice customer service skills while improving their English.

The startup was born when the co-founders wanted to start a new business and realized the low level of English of hospitality workers in their experience. This turned into a new business idea: an app that allows employees to practice customer service skills while also increasing their English level.

— The Challenge

Create an MVP to promote customer service skills and improve the English language skills of workers in the hospitality sector through a “guest simulator”.

Understanding the problem

Beginners in the hospitality industry are trying to improve their customer service skills, but they are not fluent in English due to lack of practice and this makes them feel weak and insecure.

How we started?

Secondary Research

The importance of English in hospitality

We started by searching on the internet to gather quantitative data about the importance of languages in the hospitality sector.

La Opinion de Málaga

Nativos.org

La Opinion de Málaga

Users interviews

What do workers in this sector think?

According to the client's specifications we started with the hotel sector starting with the receptionist position.
Therefore, we conducted a qualitative search, interviewing a total of 11 receptionists.

“I had no specialised English training
from the hotel”

— Max

“I want to become more professional so that I can respond to emails and communicate with clients more effectively”

— Eric

“I developed my accent and pronunciation by practising with native friends”

— Miquel

Define

Establishing the main outcomes that can add value

After conducting the first part of the research, all the information was synthesized to identify issues, opportunities... to improve the customer service skills of receptionists.

— Affinity diagram

An affinity map was created to identify high level themes and group similar insights gained from the user interviews, since it is an effective way to synthesized and classified qualitative data.
As a result, after the vote-doting, we found that the most important issues to be addressed were the following:

— Insights

Meet Marc, our user persona

Taking into account all the above information, helping us by the empathy map, different possible personas emerged.
After discussion with the client, we decided that a more junior profile was the best fit.
Let me introduce you to Marc, our user persona for Airlingo:

“I enjoy talking with my clients but I find difficult to learn more about them”

Marc

Age: 28
Profession: Product Manager
Tech: Industry

Wants

Speak fluently
To grow professionally
Fell valued

Fears

To be misunderstood
Not feel valued
Not seizing the opportunity

Needs

Develop his language skills
Be efficient in order to achieve his daily tasks
Become more professional and closer to his clients
To learn from his errors and get quality feedback

Goals

Be able to pay his expenses
To be independent and live on his own

What difficulties does Marc face during the journey?

In the data collected, we saw that there are many tasks that are repeated throughout a receptionist's day, such as check-in and check-out.
However, as we can see in the journey map, Marc is having trouble with the tasks because he is just starting out and has not had the opportunity to practice enough.
Once he has tried to get out of it by checking out customers, he searches the internet to find out what would have been a good answer.

Competitor analysis

What others are doing and how can we take advantage?

After the competitive analysis, we saw that the only language app that allowed to practice through a conversation was Loora, so we took it as a reference base, adding some features of others that could add value.
However, the Loora app follows meaningless conversations and does not guide the user to improve their language skills.

Ideate

Our app must have

We are using 3 ideation methods:

Brainstorming with the client, in this way we agreed on the general guidelines to be followed.
Worst Idea, to gain clarity on what path we not have to take.
Crazy 8s and 3x6x5 to generate as many ideas as possible in the least amount of time.
Having done that, we will map those feature in a prioritization matrix to find out what we need to build in our MVP.

User flow

We implement the changes until we achieve a much simpler and more effective organization.

Prototype

Lo-fi Wireframing - First Steps

Focus on the Marc’s path:
First, all elements and features for the MVP were configured and tested with users. The biggest complexity was in the conversation screens, so we had to make several versions.
This one was the first version of the main path:

Mid-fi Wireframing - Continuous testing

In the first prototype, errors in grammar and pronunciation appear separately in the conversation, but as the user can continue speaking without correcting them, he or she does not stop to see what is wrong.

In the next version the conversation stops and you have to choose a better version of the wrong answer, in order to improve not only your English, but also the customer service.

In the latest version, they stop these two options and only show one, because according to testing it caused confusion. Grammar and pronunciation have also been unified.