coco'sclubhouse — Fang Fang

Coco’s Clubhouse is a voice activated application for kids to enhance English speaking skills. This is a virtual companion with voice interaction function to help kids learn a language.

Project overview

Coco’s Clubhouse is a voice activated iPad app that enhances English speaking skills for kids. It is one of the streams of the Halexa project. The purpose of the Halexa project is to advance academic research work in PK-4 ELL (Preschool to 6th grade English Language Learners) interactive speaking skills in preparation for Language Learning and Assessment effort, and help our organization to gain lessons and experience on converting research to market-facing products.

We checked the old prototype our scientists used, and developed 1 voice activated game and 3 Alexa skills for future data collection needs and provide an innovative way to conduct research.

my Role

I am the UX lead who was focusing on the Stream 2 in this project to iterate the design and lead usability testing of Coco’s Clubhouse. I also participated in the usability testing work with the other UX Researcher on stream 1 to iterate the Alexa Skills.

I led strategic design and execution of UX Research and Design our team when working on developing market-facing spoken dialogue systems.

 How did our team start the Halexa project?

Our research department showed us a legacy research prototype powered by ETS’s NLP capability, and asked “What if your team makes this prototype an Alexa game? We would like to use it to collect data.”

We said, “That sounds good! Show us your game!”

We got a digital game that resembles the physical “Guess Who” game. I think it is more like a practice tool, but not a game game.

This story begins here. The UX researcher in our team designed the following roadmap to show how we plan discovery research and evaluate research into the 3 months of work. Our research includes discovery research with parents, evaluating testing at our lab, and 3 rounds of testing at school.

Our team did not have much experience developing voice-based prototypes in the past, initially there were a lot of unknowns. The UX researcher in our team proposed the following conceptual development method to our team, which laid the foundation for our team’s 3 month roadmap.

Target User

Technology Research

Research Questions

Product: What NLP engine do we want to use? Our own Helef or commercial ones? (Considering cost and proficiency.)
Technical: How to hook the NLP engine with our front end?
Research: How much control do we have? e.g. transcripts?

Sample dialogue

Overall, what do we want Coco to say? Specifically, where do we want to get started?

System Persona

Ideation to answer the question “Who is Coco (our pet who can interact with users) ?”

challenges

We encountered challenges about technology, platform, and data

From sample dialogue to "Blue sky dialogue"

In order to validate the concept, we developed script, designed low-fi wireframes of the core flow and run usability testing with kids and parents.

I used different UX research methods includes survey, interview and wizard of OZ to validate the concept and games. We also visited the school to conduct school study. With these results, we iterated the design.

The outcome

Developed a clickable prototype

Good for Android and iOS devices
Two games with speaking controls
Functional pipeline for using speech as interactive controller for games

Backed up by user research

Discovery sessions with parents
Design was tested by parents and children

01

Home Screen & Learning Path

Different levels and learning path of each game is available for users

02

Performance Tracking

For each game, allow parents and kids to track performance and achievement easily. We want more gamification! Rewarding system is creatively designed for kids based on the user study, kids like stickers and use stickers to decorate their room. The rewarding flow is favored by both kids and parents.