Rishta
Rishta is a passion project focused on creating a tool for learning Urdu, a language born from the cultural and political interactions of medieval South Asia. Representing a blend of eastern and western influences, Urdu is spoken by millions today, yet remains unsupported by major language learning platforms.
Role: Designer
Team: Individual
Themes: Passion Project, Educational Design, Interaction Design, User Flows, Gamification
Timespan: 3 weeks (Prototype I & II)
The Premise
This project as part of my Educational Technologies class at Georgia Tech. I am an avid language learner who enjoys talking to native speakers of different languages and learning a phrase or two at least. I also like looking at typography, calligraphy and the script of different languages and it fascinates me that the same ideas can be communicated across the world using different symbols and sounds. This deep interest in language and script led me to choose Urdu learning as the premise of my educational technologies project.
Quick Links
Desktop Research
I read the following research papers to acquaint myself with the history of the language.
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Hindi-Urdu by Yamuna Kachru and Taj K Bhatia, from 'World Languages'.
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The Hindi-Urdu Heritage Language Stream, Institutional and pedagogical challenges by Shobhna Nijawan.
My Experience
Another important contributor to my research was learning Urdu with the help of a friend who is familiar with the script. From these interactions I was aware of the pitfalls and setbacks a learner might experience during their learning journey and could empathize better. Here are some pictures from my learning sessions of the white board me and my friend used.
Design Requirements
From these experiences and after understanding the development of the language through a literature review. I came to the following conclusions about the design requirements for my prototype.
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1. The primary focus should be introducing and familiarizing users with the alphabet and what sounds they make.
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2. After some practice with the alphabet users can move on to small word construction.
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Based on these two requirements, I sketched out a few ideas for what the application will look like.
Sketches
The initial ideas I drew up were inspired heavily by the popular language learning platform 'DuoLingo'.
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For teaching users about letters, I thought of an audio supported format where users can play the sound a letter makes and see it right in front of them.
For learning words, I adopted another duo-lingo like approach where users are required to select the right order of letters to make the word. And the users will arrive at the right word and it's meaning through trial and error.
Design Language
The colors and style were heavily inspired by the culture architecture and paintings from South Asia. Full of earthy tones and emphasis was brought in by dark colors of roses and spices.
From these reference images I created a color palette for the tool and assigned use of colors based on function.
The lighter shades of brown were used to signal inactivity.
The bright pink tones and the deep brown tones were used for indicating activity and drawing attention.
Prototype I
Feedback
I tested this prototype with three fellow Human Computer Interaction students that were aware of Urdu's existence but did not know the language.
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The participants also were versed in interaction design and gave in-depth critique on a lot of aspects of the prototype.
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From the user tests, I decided to make the following updates to my prototype.
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More focus on teaching the alphabet and word construction for beginner lessons.
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An updated user profile and home page, with gamification features such as level indicator.
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Improved alphabet library
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Some additional accessibility measures such as adding a sound playback button next to blurbs.
Prototype II
Feedback
I showed this prototype to three HCI students, one of whom has learned Urdu in a formal school environment. This is a summary of the feedback I received:
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There needs to be a greater emphasis on letter learning before moving onto words.
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An interaction that involves drawing the letter would enhance the expression.
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The resources tab needs an explainer page for each letter.
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Some interaction bugs need to be fixed as well.​
Prototype III
Reflection
The fact that this passion project started out as a class project, impacted the process I adopted quite a lot. And over time with interaction from others and after reflecting on my own learnings as someone who learned how to write in Urdu, without an application, here are the main takeaways for me from this project.
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1. Wireframes can be useful if you have the time and opportunity to test with them. I had to do the first feedback session with a high fidelity prototype and a lot of basic wireframe related changes popped up which I would have preferred dealing with first.
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2. Paying attention to how learning works without technology was super important. Funnily enough, I did not realize that one of the crucial steps is to draw the alphabet until the third iteration! I guess I would note down and adopt real world practices more into my designs henceforth.
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3. Conveying information through state changes, animations proves really helpful and saves the users' time.
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I hope you enjoyed reading about my project, thanks for your patience.