Need-finding
Our Goal
The goal of our need-finding is to learn features that would be most useful and informative for international travelers. We wanted to understand the perspectives from those who travel internationally and struggle with local languages. Need-finding tools can be divided into four categories: contextual inquiries, surveys, observations, and interviews. For the purpose of building Prevesti, we intend to employ interviews and surveys as our research techniques.
Interview
The main purpose of this research is to gather insight and understanding of how we can develop our product to be useful to those who are looking to learn another language. The interviews will help us learn what situations our participants went through as it relates to language translation, which includes what resources they have utilized and under what context did they need to understand or speak something in a different language.
Prevesti: User Interview ProtocolWe intend to find four students from the University for interviews. The students that we intend to select for an interview must have traveled to at least one country where their primary language is not their native language. We intend to find students from four different racial categories for diversity purposes. We intend to interview one student of Asian origin, African origin, Hispanic/Latino origin, and European/White origin. We also will require two participants to be of Female gender, and two to be of Male gender.
Prevesti: User Interview NotesSurvey
Benefits of using the survey technique for Prevesti are multiple. Firstly, by using surveys, we can cover demographics beyond the University of Rochester. Because our target audience are international travelers, we intend to find respondents that fit into that criterion. Secondly, surveying allows us to gather data that are large in quantity and easier to analyze. It also is more monetarily sustainable and flexible. Thirdly, surveying allows us to neutralize Hawthorne effect that may be triggered in some cases of interviews and contextual inquiries. We obtained 32 survey responses and present the results.
"I may not be so accurate with pronunciation and translation, so I want some feedback" (Respondent #1).
"I hope while I am looking at the translations in google translate, there is a direct corresponding highlight between the two sentences from left and right, so I could quickly locate the corresponding sentence .... I really want to quickly locate the corresponding sentence in my non-native language area, especially when the translation material is relatively long" (Respondent #2).
"Help me improving my pronunciation and dictation" (Respondent #3).