In Wo Hui Mandarin, I had the opportunity to work in various roles, including working with clients, doing UX design, supporting developers, and occasionally doing UI design. Although the role was intense at times, it provided me with valuable perspectives on the product development process as a junior designer.
Wo Hui Mandarin has its mobile app and web app built by two different companies. While the two share the same database and some similar features, their experiences, product design, and even style guides are vastly different.
My task was to redesign the existing web app, which included creating a new design system, adding new features, and mirroring the mountain-climbing concept from the mobile app.
💬 Client-facing
📐 Wireframing
🎨 Working with Visual Designer
🔍 User testing
👩💻 QA & developer support
Wo Hui Mandarin has such great vision and guiding principles for the product. The product turns Chinese learning into ⛰ mountain-climbing journey, which is visualized with beautiful illustrations.
In addition to its courses, Wo Hui Mandarin also helps users connect what they have learned to the real world by constantly feeding media (texts, images and videos) that contain words they have learned, using their own text detecting technology. Repetition helps learners commit words to memory better; while seeing the real Chinese world through diverse medias helps learners to partly understand the rich Chinese culture and then inspires them to learn even more enthusiastically.
Wo Hui Mandarin offer access as both a mobile app and a web app. Their mobile app (built by Swagsoft) visualizes learning a course like a mountain-climbing journey.
Doorway - one of the features I explored earlier with Wo Hui Mandarin team. It adds to user’s Feeds media that contains words they’ve learned. Engaging with the media trains the brain muscles while consuming the content can be a joy in and of its own.
Before Wo Hui Mandarin, most of the projects I worked on were either workplace or consumer apps. These apps somewhat present the same challenge of helping users accomplish tasks as easy and efficient as possible.
But designing educational products puts me in such a different space of mind. Working on Wo Hui Mandarin provoked such questions as: How do we create curiosity? How do we make things exciting? How do we maintain a ‘just-enough’ challenge level? How do we help learners get into a state of flow? How do we celebrate progresses and inspire continuation? And how do we keep learning a joy in and of itself even without any external rewards? Exploring these questions has certainly helped me grow as a designer and experience the unique elements of designing for learning.
One major task of the project is to create a new design system that ensures consistency and cohesiveness across its diverse range of features. To achieve this, I worked with a UI Designer and used the Google Material framework as inspiration.