Voibook Training App

The Challenge

There are 3.6 billion hearing-loss people around the world, nearly 90 million in China. How might we help them do listening and speaking rehabilitation through a mobile App?

“I am a hearing-loss person with a cochlear implant. Now I need to practice listening and speaking skills... Most Mandarin learning apps assume that users can understand Mandarin directly and easily, also the hearing-loss are not their target users.”

— From a hearing-loss user

Hearing loss people are easily getting into trouble in their lives because of the adverse effects of hearing on them. So they can’t get into mainstream society very well. In fact, people with hearing impairment have the same vocal organs as normal people. Therefore, as long as they get suitable training, the hearing-loss people can possibly speak in the future.

Exploratory Research

Understanding the market, existing solutions, and most importantly, the actual needs and pain points of our target users.

Literature Review

I began by reading a lot of thesis about characteristics, language recognition, and rehabilitation of hearing loss. Through this research I discovered some initial insights that guided us moving forward:

Although people with hearing impairment can gain certain phonological awareness through lip reading, language training, and hearing aids, their vocal ability is still much lower than normal people.
Listening and Speaking are both important for language rehabilitation.
Hearing-loss people are better at using visual and kinesthetic cognition.

Competitive Analysis

Most of the current foreign apps are developed by speech therapy companies, and many applications are designed for speech-language therapists... There are no apps for both hearing and speech rehabilitation in the domestic market.

I also learned some devices for speech rehabilitation, such as Changzhou Qianxi, Shanghai Taiyige, and COGNI. Those devices are expensive and mostly designed for schools, hospitals, and language rehabilitation institutions. Many features can be fully applied in mobile apps instead.

Previous Design Review

Reviewing previous pinyin training I did at Voibook company to understand what can be improved.

Survey

To understand our targeted users, requirements, and solutions, I collected 135 survey results.

User Interview

I conducted interviews with 5 hearing-loss people and concluded several core pain points.

Need hearing persons' help to correct pronunciation.
Greater need for voice correction.
App should instruct how to improve pronunciation.

Personas

Ideation & Structure

With the goal of sparking ideas to overcome difficulties, we transitioned into generative research to define the core solutions and system structure.

Solution Mapping

Information Architecture

Iterative Feedback

Developing iterations of key features, gathering feedback from expert and development teams, and refining the wireframes.

Key Takeaways Implemented

Instead of a large number of cards sliding, we designed a more efficient system to locate practice content.
In the listening part, users can easily return to the original question page to listen to the difference after selecting answers.
A progress tracking system was added to help users monitor their daily training journey.