Grammar

MEMRISE - LANGUAGE-LEARNING APP

Through videos, practical phrases, gamified tests and immersive experiences, Memrise teaches people to speak a language like the locals. The spaced repetition algorithm presents new words to the user and then tests them at optimally timed intervals.

  • Goals

    Help users understand and apply grammar concepts of the language they were learning. The experience needed to live within the core mobile product loop and be available for all the languages we catered for.

  • My role

    UX Designer for Learning Experiences. I was embedded in a cross-functional team in the Product Dpt. I worked closely with the PM, Product Designers, UX Researchers, and mobile developers. I was responsible for Competitor Research, User Interviews, Prototyping, MVP prioritisation, and CMS specifications.

  • Tools and Platforms

    Main design software was Sketch and prototypes were put together on Framer. Google docs were used for documentation.

    This was a project for both Android and iOS apps.

 The problem

Grammar was the most requested feature from our users, but the product did not teach grammar effectively. The experience that had been previously used had two fundamental issues

  • It did not fit within the core product Learn & Review loop, making the content less relevant to the users’ learning journey

  • It did not allow for tests that were intuitive enough for the users, as it used a chatbot interface with substantial constraints

Understand and Define

Looking at competitors, the main opportunities were

  • Allowing users to learn from their mistakes, by providing actionable feedback

  • Using real-worldly content to allow for immediate usefulness and deployability

The main challenges to achieving this were

  • Working within the constraints of the core product (e.g. test-based learning, review algorithm, paywall)

  • Designing a solution that would work for all in-house languages

“I don’t understand what this refers to, and I’m not sure how to apply it.”

— Participant

Ideate

With these guidelines and constraints in mind, I began to draw a few solutions, defining user flows and prototyping various test types. I knew that

  • I wanted to follow a specific pedagogical paradigm to allow users to discover, hypothesise and experiment with the language they were learning

  • Users needed relevant and timely feedback for their mistakes in order to be able to correct them

Internal Tools

At the same time, I needed to design an experience that was flexible and modular enough to work for all 9 in-house languages we catered for, allowing our linguists to

  • Choose between different test types and layout to answer specific language needs (e.g. Japanese would have very different needs from Spanish)

  • Work with a WYSIWYG interface in order to visualise what the end user would experience

Test and deliver

A series of usability testing sessions brought to my attention, amongst others, the need to

  • Reduce the number of items users were tested on in one session

  • Clarify the information appearing on the feedback screen to make it more relevant

  • Adjust the order of test types to allow for an increasing level of challenge

I organised a series of meetings with the relevant stakeholders to present the design, agree on technical requirements (backend, iOS, and Android), and prioritise and scope for the MVP.

Learnings and considerations

I was able to use my skills to design a complete and functioning feature that was launched onto the mobile apps and available as part of the subscription plan.

I also ensured to keep note of post-MVP improvements and what the next iterations needed to tackle, for instance

  • Adding more test types, to stretch the range of challenge that could be experienced

  • Adding new interactions (e.g. Drag & Drop) which performed really well with users during usability testing, but that were descoped due to time constraints

  • Experimenting with placing the feature at different stages in the user journey

Overall, I learned that designing such experiences requires close attention to not only the end user, but also the internal clients that engage with the feature (e.g. content creators).