Overview

App Statement

Duration

KataKanji is my last project at Apple Developer Academy. This project lasted for 3 months from 6 September 2021 until 2 December 2021.

My Role

Our team, Weeboology, consist of 6 people from various backgrounds. 1 as a product manager, 3 as iOS developer, and 2 as UI/UX designer. In this project, I am responsible as the UI/UX designer. Here is my job description:

• Desktop research
• User interviews
• Concept testing
• Create Lo-fi (wireframe), Mid-fi, and Hi-fi design
• Prototyping
• Usability Testing

Tools

• InVision, Mural, Notion : for empathizing, defining, and ideation phase
• Figma, Sketch : for designing the UX and UI
• Marvel : for interactive prototyping

Process

Empathise

This team was formed to continue our project to solve difficulties when learning Japanese. We found out that one of our team members, namely Aldino has a problem. Aldino is a Japanese language student in Indonesia. He is studying Japanese because he planned to work in Kyoto, Japan. However, he faced difficulties when studying the language. To solve Aldino’s problem, we need to empathize with his problem.

Problems

Based on our research, Japanese is one of the most difficult languages to learn in the world. It takes 88 weeks or 2.200 class hours to master Japanese.

Apart from the complicated grammar and diction, Kanji is frustrating for the most Japanese language learner. Here are the reasons:

• The writing system is frustratingly difficult to learn and memorize.
• One kanji character might have a few ways to read and has different meanings and as a learner, they need to know when and how to use kanji properly
• Japanese language learning apps are mostly in English which makes it more difficult to learn for people with Bahasa Indonesia as their native language.

<aside> 💡 In short, Aldino and other 1 million Japanese language learner in Indonesia has problems in learning Japanese, especially learning kanji and its context.

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Key Findings from Interviews with Experts

After discovering the problems, we interviewed experts: Japanese language experts and Education experts. Here are the key findings from the interviews:

• Japanese language experts recommended learning kanji by finding their individual meanings and figuring out how to put them into context that is acceptable by Japanese standards.
• Education experts suggest that learning has to be personalized in order to create better improvement to the learners. Everybody has to start somewhere and they start from a different point. It’s also suggested that people tend to develop affinity to find information upon topics they are interested in the most.