Role
User Researcher
Product Designer
Time
Team
Jianna So
Hannah Pingol
Trisha Litong
Language-learning app for Tagalog, the Filipino language.
The Challenge
As the culmination of the Product Design degree at Stanford, my team and I wanted to create a gamified language-learning experience for Filipino-Americans. As Filipino-Americans ourselves, we wanted to ease the difficulty of learning a language.
User Research
To better understand the functions of language learning, we spoke to a Filipino language professor, Cynthia Agnes Aban, who teaches Tagalog at UC Berkeley and Stanford University.
During the interview, my team and I gained insights to the basics of learning Tagalog in order to inform how we may shape our solution.
With a basic understanding of how the language should be engaged with, we interviewed students who aren't fluent in Filipino, much like many other second-generation Filipinos.
A similarity that we found with second-generation Filipinos is that just knowing simple words and phrases bridges generational gaps that younger Filipinos may have with family, and helps them feel connected to the Filipino community.
Branding & App Design
With a clear set of goals to achieve, we prototyped different experiences and solutions. We found that the best way to facilitate bridging a gap between generations was a digital solution.
However, how were we going to differentiate ourselves from apps like Duolingo, Mango Languages, or games like Wordle? The functionality of this learning app should have the utility caliber of language-learning apps on the market, but also encourage our users the same way Wordle entices players to come back every day.
While the goal was to enable language learning, the key difference was rooted in Lukas was the goal of learning Tagalog.
We named our application and guided our brand direction from the Filipino saying of "lukso ng dugo."
By itself, the word “lukso” means “to leap or jump” which embodies the hesitance that users might feel when they first open our app, but will later turn into joy and pride when they start to learn more Tagalog.
Final Deliverable
Lukso
Lukso allows people learning Tagalog to not commit to fluency, but to learn certain phrases and words in a more casual sense. With more words in your knowledge, you can better relate with your community. When people learn a language, the goal is often fluency. However, this often makes people intimidated to learn a language because of the overbearing end goal. Lukso wants people to learn Tagalog at their own pace and learn words and phrases to better connect with their family. With Lukso, a bridge between younger and older Filipino generations.