I Hear You

Project Type

Design Development

Timeline

3 Days

Tech Stack

HTML CSS Bootstrap React JavaScript

— Overview

As part of Queen's University Belfast's three-day Insight Into Management programme, my team and I designed and presented a mobile app idea, I Hear You, which would allow users to record people and translate sign language to text in real time. Our solution won first place.

— Challenges

One of the main challenges we had was the limited time and resources at our disposal. Our team was composed of students from completely different courses at the university – ranging from Psychology to Law to Business Management to Biology – who had never collaborated before, with completely different backgrounds as most of us were coming from various different countries. With little time on our hands, we needed to build relationships fast and move forward in our project quickly.

In order to mitigate a lot of these challenges, we first established a team charter to determine what our goal was as a team and clarified what problem it is that we want to solve. We also set up a group chat so all eight of us didn't constantly need to be in the same room for us to work on tasks but still have a line of communication when needed.

We chose to split into smaller teams and then regroup in order to complete set challenges in the programme quickly without a huge sacrifice in quality. For example, I was in the sub-team that prepped the pitch and presented the idea to an initial panel of judges while another sub-team worked on budgeting resources for the project.

Our diverse backgrounds and knowledge were our greatest strengths. Our varied skillsets combined together helped us all contribute to the project meaningfully.

User Persona

Katie

Katie is 20 years old and lives in the UK. She has profound deafness and uses British Sign Language in her daily life as her first language.

Pain Point

She finds that people's lack of knowledge of British Sign Language can cause issues in her day-to-day life. Due to this, she prefers to talk to people over message on her phone, however feels frustrated when she suddenly has an urgent query in person and someone can't understand her.

Wants

Her family and very close friends are able to communicate with her but outside of that, she finds that no one else seems to know British Sign Language. Katie wants more people to know British Sign Language.

— The Making of I Hear You

Our aim was to bridge the gap in understanding sign language between those who are deaf and use sign language, and those who don't.

Our team decided to focus on enabling users to translate sign language into text and vice versa, translate from text to sign language, through a mobile app. We believed this would meet Katie's goal of wanting more people to know sign language.

— Branding

We kept our branding simple as we wanted our app to be as easy to use as possible. We also wanted to ensure our solution was accessible so it needed to be WCAG AA Compliant.

Blue (#26ADE4)

Green (#C7D66D)

Dark Grey (#31383A)

Light Grey (#F5F5F5)

White (#FFFFFF)

— Prototype

In under 4 hours, I quickly took the initial sketches that I had created with my team and then developed a prototype of the app concept using React to use as a demo when presenting to businesses so that they could have a better idea of how the app would work.

I utilised React for this prototype as it was quick an easy to set up a working app and I wanted to use React Router to allow users to flow from page to page without actually refreshing the entire website in order to simulate how a real mobile app might work. The ability to split the app by components (e.g. header component) also made me lean towards the use of React.

View Prototype

— User Journey

Scenario 1

John realises Katie uses British Sign Language, however he doesn't know British Sign Language.

John uses our app, I Hear You, and selects the option to live translate from sign language to text.

Katie allows him to use the app in order to understand what she is wanting to communicate to him.

John and Katie now have a better understanding of each other, thanks to I Hear You.

I Hear You user journey diagram for Scenario 1

Scenario 2

Alice wants to learn American Sign Language. Although she has an general understanding of basic phrases like greetings, she would like to quickly translate specific phrases from English to American Sign Language on the fly.

Alice uses our app, I Hear You, and selects the option to translate from text to sign language.

Alice types in a phrase, submits it, and then is immediately presented with diagrams showing her how to make the correct gestures in American Sign Language.

Alice is now further her knowledge of American Sign Language, thanks to I Hear You.

I Hear You user journey diagram for Scenario 2

picture of my team presenting our solution

— The Outcome

On the final day of the Insight into Management programme, my team and I pitched our solution and gave a demo of our app prototype to people from firms like EY, KPMG, Deloitte, PwC and BT, as well as answer any questions they had about the project.

We received compliments on the originality of our solution, our excellent use of story-telling when showcasing our app, our ability to work together as a team and the prototype app itself.

We were so amazed when we won first place! It was great to see our hard work and efforts acknowledged!

— In the Future

If we had more time and resources available:

More User Research

We would have conducted more research on the experiences of deaf people who utilise sign language on a day-to-day basis and on what common obstacles people who are learning sign language face through the likes of interviews or surveys. This would allow for a much more tailored solution and would allow us to improve upon the user experience.

More Market Research

We would have conducted a much more thorough market research in order to determine the demand for such a product. We only did enough to find who our competitors might be. In the future, we would like to better understand the market that our app is in and how realistic the feasibility of our app is.

Create a Functioning Prototype

We would have created a fully-functioning prototype of the app and then allowed users to test this in order to improve the interface and functionality of the app.

Queen's University Belfast