Nkọwa okwu represents a significant achievement in the preservation of Asusu Igbo (Igbo language).
In recent years, younger generations of Igbo people have found it difficult to speak their native language due to a lack of education on the language. Nkọwa Okwu is helping to change this by providing resources and opportunities for people to learn and use the language.
"Learning Igbo language shouldn't be difficult".
Nkọwa okwu was launched in the second half of 2020 and the first version was deployed with functionality taking priority over the overall user experience. I volunteered as a UI Designer at Nkọwa okwu where I joined the team as a UI/UX Designer, with the role of improving the website's user experience. This resulted in a redesign of the website.
First and foremost, we sought to understand the needs of our community members by conducting interviews and user testing. What we found was that there are several areas where the website could be improved to create a better experience for users. Our top priority was to use this data to improve Nkọwa okwu. Some problems with the old design include:
In order to gain insights into how best to develop our language-learning platform, we conducted interviews with individuals who had attempted to learn a new language in the past. Based on this data, we created personas that would help us to better understand and meet the needs of our users. Personas are an important tool that helps us to keep the user at the center of our development process.
The study uncovered two primary categories of potential users:
• Those seeking to learn the Igbo language online
• Those who contribute their expertise to teaching the language on the platform.
Having identified personas, we converged to brainstorm potential solutions that could help our class of users. We asked the important "How Might We" Questions that enabled us to focus on the key challenges;
01. How might we retain and engage our users?
02. How might we make publishing courses on the platform quick and intuitive?
03. How might we protect users learning progress data safe and secure.
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Providing answers to these question helped to identify some key features of the app and the solutions that these features could prefer. I went ahead to explore alternatives of our product.
We carried out a competitive analysis of other existing language learning apps and took the time to analyze how their processes worked by doing detailed landscape assessments.
What have other people been able to accomplish with this?
Trying out firsthand experiences with some of these applications enabled us note down the things they had done right and connected with my current understanding of why they had done it, or how they had gone about it.
I designed critical screens of the general interface. Some of them are shown below
Nkọwa okwu is an open-source project, powered by community volunteers.
Currently, we are building a learning management system that will enable anyone to create courses and enroll courses. Volunteering for Nkọwa okwu taught me a lot:
I’ve learned how to adapt to different design constraints.
I’ve developed my user research skills and my confidence in creating non-leading questions.
I the importance of data in designing useable products