UX Case Study: Learning the Lingo: Designing Technology to Help Immigrants Learn Slang

Catherine Guevara, Kevin Yang , Corinne Herzog

Introduction

In our class, CSE 440 Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction, we were tasked to design some form of technology to help a group of people faced with some aspect of “adulting”, which our team interpreted as something involved with coming-of-age and self-actualization. We brainstormed and thought of how many immigrants and people who speak English as a second language have trouble learning and using slang and informal language when learning English. People who speak English as a second language or are learning English tend to learn more formal English from the classroom and thus have more trouble learning informal English due to the lack of exposure and the ever-changing nature of slang. Learning slang and informal English helps people integrate into a culture better and connect to others easier and improve their professional and social lives. We’ve created a design that helps people connect and meet up with native English speakers and also immerse themselves in the culture they’re trying to learn a language in, as we’ve found from our research that these methods have been the best way people have learned English, especially slang and informal language.

Our Research Process

Before coming up with our design direction, we wanted to know — in what ways do people learn informal English already, and how do they struggle with it? What might be the best ways to aid the informal language learning process? As such, we decided to conduct interviews and surveys, which are both self-report methods of user research. The stakeholders that we identified were English language learners and English language teachers, as well as people who regularly interact with English Language learners at work/school. We decided to focus most on English Language Learners and teachers for our research since they are the stakeholders most affected. We conducted interviews with two UW international students who speak English as a second language and one UW Professor who teaches English for English language learners and who has taught English around the world. Additionally, we had 25 survey responses from a variety of people who speak English as their second language, mostly UW students. We chose these two methods of user research because we wanted to have in-depth information from participants about what sorts of things they struggle with and because we felt it was the easiest to carry out in the limited time we had. We were also concerned that if we simply observed people who are non-native speakers speaking English that a) it might seem creepy to them, and b) it would be hard for us to see internally what they are struggling with or feeling anxious about. Thus, speaking to them directly seemed like the best way to figure out how they feel in situations where they are speaking English. We reassured participants that they were anonymous, and since we essentially asked them to tell about their experiences, we don’t anticipate any bias on our data. We chose to speak to UW students and professors because they were the most readily available participants given the time we had. However, we think we were able to get a good mix of professors as well as students of different ages. One of the students we spoke to was an older adult who was married and had children, whereas one was a more traditional student and much younger. Participants in our interviews and surveys also had varying years of speaking English, which helped us learn more about the variety of potential users our solution would have to account for.

Our Research Results

First of all, we observed some patterns among our survey data that were quite interesting. It turns out that most of the people we interviewed started learning English from a pretty young age! The vast majority of our respondents, 84% of them, started learning English before the age of 10.

Throughout our surveys and interviews, we found a number of common themes expressed throughout:

• Many expressed, for example, that learning slang helped them out with learning the language as a whole.
• Many expressed difficulties with figuring out exactly what words to say in a given situation, even if they were taught English formally at an early age.
• This was partly due to social contexts and partly due to potential conflicts with their native language. For example, one interviewee expressed that in a particular situation where they’d use an informal phrase from their native language, they couldn’t find a good replacement in English and thus had trouble figuring out what to say.
• Many discussed how it’s important to connect vocabulary to the specific cultural settings it would be used in instead of just giving its definition.
• Many discussed how the most helpful way to learn the language is through immersion, speaking to native speakers, and understanding the culture because fully learning and using a language involves learning the culture.
• As a result, many of them would like for themselves & others learning English to have more contact with native speakers or at least the way native speakers pronounce words.

In conclusion, we learned that informal English is a hurdle for most users, and they would love to learn better through talking with native speakers and having more practice in situations where informal English is needed.

Proposed Design

Originally, we came up with three potential ideas. The first was a kind of meetup application that would help users find and chat with native speakers to practice English both online and in-person, as well as clubs and community events. The second was a streaming service-like app that had movies, TV, and podcasts available in a format more accessible for English learners. Users could slow down the video, hover over words for a translation into another language, and view easy-to-understand summaries of a scene to make sure that they did not miss anything. The third was a game that incentivized various tasks, such as ordering at a restaurant or giving a presentation at a meeting, with points for a virtual avatar. However, the participants in our user research expressed that more than any technological solution that focuses on a specific scenario or specific phrases, they wish they had a better way to become more connected to American culture and speak with native speakers. The cultural barrier seems to be what users struggled with the most. Therefore, we picked the first design, the meetup app, because it most directly addresses the user’s needs. However, to differentiate our design from other meetup apps, we want to add in some more features specifically for English language learners from our other two designs. For example, adding in videos that go over specific cultural scenarios in order to help users feel comfortable going to specific events, or game-ifying the app to provide points for going to various events. For example, users could have “missions” to attend a certain amount of meetups per week, and gain points for doing so, with video tutorials to help them on their missions. They could also report new words and/or phrases they learned from their meetups and gain extra points. Below, we have three drawings: The first is a high-level user interface design for the meetup app. The second is a storyboard which shows a scenario in which this app would be used. The third is a drawing of a potential UI of the third design, the game, whose aspects we will try to merge with the first design in order to create our next prototype.