uptone
Elevate your language skills with the power of music
Class Project • Fall 2023
Uptone is a music-based language learning platform designed to enhance the language learning experience, making the process fun and engaging while listening to your favorite songs. Curate personalized playlists with lyric translations to follow along, start conversations with other language learners to gain insights on dialect and slang words, and sing karaoke with advanced AI technology that analyzes speech for pronunciation improvement.
THE TEAM
Chloe Au Yeung
Angelia Legaspi
Soojin Kim
MY ROLES
Interaction Design Lead
UI Designer
UX Researcher
3D Model Designer
TOOLS
Figma, Adobe Suite, Rhino 3D, Keyshot
TIMELINE
Sep 2023 - Nov 2023 (10 Weeks)
Final Concept
Problem Statement
Learning a new language can be difficult. As a team of students coming from diverse cultures and languages, we personally have experienced the struggles and noticed a rising trend of language learners discontinuing their language studies, due to challenges such as time constraints, lack of quality resources, demotivation, and lost of interest.
Goal
Uptone strives to help our users stay motivated, engaged, and confident when learning a new language.
Combining the concepts of language and music into one, Uptone reinvents the traditional way to learn language that is both convenient and fun.
User Research
Competitive Analysis
We analyzed 9 language-learning related apps and compared their features to find out each app’s strengths and weaknesses. We then compared these apps by making a perceptual map to find any possible areas of opportunities.
Include a karaoke feature with speech recognition to help users work on their pronunciation
Personalized learning styles and flexible learning schedules
Interactive and fun features to engage learners to complete the courses
Community features for learners to talk to native speakers, with safety features
Survey and Interviews
We sent out a survey to inquire about people’s experiences with learning a new language and listening to music in foreign languages, in which 52 participants responded. We also conducted nine one-on-one interviews where we were able to ask more in-depth questions about their experience with learning languages. Some key takeaways include:
Users stopped learning a new language because they didn’t have enough time, eventually prioritizing other things and not picking it back up.
Users felt like what they’ve learnt from language classes or books were too formal. They wanted to learn more about slangs and dialect to sound like a local speaker, but there weren’t any extensive resources about those.
Most users learnt a new language from school, which they felt was boring and tedious, making them lose motivation to continue learning.
50 out of 52 survey participants showed interest in our idea of learning new a language through music.
User Journey
After collecting the data from survey and interview responses, we created a user journey map to fully understand the current language learning experience and the pain points of the experience.
How might we...
make the procress of learning a language more engaging, fun and convenient?
Lo-fi and Mid-fi Wireframes
Lo-fi
With all our insights from our primary research, we decided to create an app prototype for our solution, with a website prototype that helps users understand more about our app. We started sketching out app and website wireframes and find ones that fit our solution the best. We also had an idea of creating a karaoke machine as the physical prototype to further enhance our user’s learning experience.
App
Website
Physical
Mid-fi
We started building our app and desktop screens based on our lo-fi wireframes. We developed the layout, functionality and information architecture of our app, along with exploring different shades of grey for visual hierarchy. For our physical prototype, we 3D modelled a basic structure of our karaoke machine.
App
Website
Physical
User Testing
We conducted 2 different rounds of user testing among 6 users. We created a set of tasks for users to complete within our app and asked them for feedback about what they liked, and what they think can be improved on.
Tasks
Continue learning a song
Go through the listening practice
Go through vocabulary practice
Look at translations for the lyrics
Play karaoke
Check the karaoke leaderboard
Do a video call with a friend
Round 1
Round 2
Takeaways
Needed to focus on making the karaoke feature a fun experience
Fix wording and icons of some content
Make it more clear that the translations for each verse are interactive
Make spacing more wider and add more content
Hi-fi Wireframes
App
Website
Features
Where learning a new language is made easy
Practice your vocabulary, grammar, listening, and pronunciation skills to your favorite songs and gain a deeper understanding of the lyrics.
Engage in conversations with people around the world
Chat with native speakers to unlock the secret of speaking like a local. Talk to other language learners to improve your language proficiency.
Sing your heart out with our special karaoke mode
Using cutting edge AI-technology, our AI system utilizes speech recognition in order to help you work on your pronunciation skills.
Final Prototypes
App
Website
Physical
Reflections
It can be more than just an app
In this project, we were able to explore app, website, physical designs for our solution. Each part was crucial for our solution to make the experience more interactive and welcoming. Offering different platforms for users to interact with your product can help users understand your product better.
Teamwork is essential
As this was a class project that lasted for only 10 weeks, our team didn’t have a lot of time for each required deliverable and we had to constantly communicate with each other to make sure things were being done before the deadline. Fortunately our team had good teamwork and we successfully completed this project within the 10 week period!