<aside> 🔥

Now imagine if a pair of walkie-talkies become an app that could be used by two people speaking two different languages. One would press a button speak and see their words instantly auto-transcribed, translated and spoken in the other language. If designed well, this app would enable two people, who couldn't speak each other’s language, have a conversation in a way that would almost feel natural.

</aside>

You can play some music in the background while reading this case study if you’d like 😄

https://soundcloud.com/rasmusrekyl/garbicz-festival-ambient-acid-sunday-session

1. Brainstorm

I used a brainstorming tool called SimpleMind to jot down whatever questions i had in my head.

I had a lot of thoughts and i basically use this to question from different angles. It necessarily doesn’t have solutions but general thought process of the statement analysis.

Here’s a screenshot of the mind map:

I initially explore the idea of how this can be implemented on live calls and got slightly deviated from the problem statement. I decided to focus on the app to app translation activity, be it for international customer support or booking cabs internationally where the you don’t know the local language.

I didn’t take the example of Language learning above because it would require for me to design a screen where i show both the original and the translated text. In other cases, it is quite unnecessary to show the original text. Only the text/language that the user has opted for will be displayed. This is to avoid distractions and speed up the process because in specific case of customer support, the response rates are an important metric in determining the CSAT score.

2. Research & Analysis

I have a personal experience, somewhat related to this. When i visited Thailand for the new year’s 2019, I wanted to take a cab to my hotel from the airport. To my surprise, Uber was not functional at all and got introduced to this beautiful app called Grab which is predominant in SE Asian countries. So, after booking a cab, I received a text from my driver stating that he was on his way.

After our conversations, I was picked up by the driver and to my surprise, he didn’t utter a word of english and i was shocked because the whole conversation on the app was in english. This is when i found out about the translation layer inside the messaging system of grab and found it brilliantly executed.

Coming back to the task at hand, I tried to first understand how a walkie talkie works. User A has to push a button, speak & signal the other user(B) the end of the sentence(say Over) and the same is performed by User B. They are on the same frequency which means that a group of people on the same band can get access to the conversations. That’s probably what police officers work with to stay connected.