Motivation
Language is the baseline of any social structure ever created. Without the ability to communicate with one another, where would we even be. Yet, when speaking our mother tongue, we take it for granted. There are so many nuances and hidden meanings to different words, that it can takes years, even decades, to fully master a new language. When someone goes to a new country, no matter how good that person is at learning a language, they will always be flagged as a foreigner because of small contextual clues or slip ups that are common in a non-native speaker. Being so prone to mistakes can be scary for a new speaker. As individuals, we are scared of making mistakes and are shy when we try to jump outside of our comfort zone, and therefore leads to a slower learning process, as when someone is less prone to make mistakes, they also learn much more slowly. That's where TalkNative comes in. The goal of TalkNative, is not only to teach a language such that one can communicate with the outside world, but also to provide context for when different phrases are appropriate in different cultures. While one may say "No problem" as a response to "Thank You" in English, saying the same thing in Chinese, for example, may yield unintended results. TalkNative attempts to remove the shroud of doubt that haunts new language speakers as they attempt to learn a new language. Thus, TalkNative tries to connect the dots between the user, language, and context, to make the user feel as native as possible when trying to communicate outside of their home country.
Process
Firstly, had a solid idea of what we wanted to do and set some goals. From the get-go, we wanted the app to have 3 different uses: one for selecting a situation and getting sentence suggestions based on the situation, one for giving suggestions based on location, and one more open ended use where the user could type what they wanted to say and the app would do it's best to interpret the sentence and give translation suggestions based on the user input.
Once we had a solid outline, we then interviewed 3 different people from 3 different age groups who were not fluent in English. Our aim in these interviews was to define our problem more concretely and be able to address the difficulties non-native speakers were having. Our main take away from these interviews were that cultural innuendoes were difficult to distinguish from culture to culture. For example, in Dutch, swimsuit is literally translated as “water pants”, or in other cases in other languages, things as simple as telling someone the time (10:00pm vs 22:00) can lead to some gaps in understanding. This helped us in understanding what facets of language learning led to difficulties in fluency and loss in translation, which in turn shaped our goals and objectives to suit the needs of the user.
We sketched up a few prototypes and tossed a few ideas around in terms of what we wanted our final app to look like when implemented. We then designed a low fidelity prototype on Figma which we then showed to a group of potential users and ran a heuristic evaluation. We got some notes based on our implementation, such as displaying the location of the user at all times and having the navigation process be more intuitive for the user. Overtime, we kept refining our model until we got to our Final Prototype.
Final Prototype
It is simple to get started and experience the beauty of TalkNative. By clicking the "START" button and allowing location access, you can almost feel the burden from the language barrier be lifted.
If you are facing a typical situation but do not know how to express your urgent needs, check out the "Situation" option. This option contains many common expressions. For example, if you are in an emergency situation and require assistance, choose "Emergency," and you will find out what you need.
Allowing location access provides the flexibility for you to get suggestions anytime you want. We will provide updated real-time recommendations. If you are at a coffee shop and would like to order a coffee, check this option out, it will save you time.
If you would like to ask something specific, but you do not know how to express, we are here to help. Tell us what you would like to say, and we take care of the rest.
