BILINGUAL MOODLE
The goal
The main goal of this Project was to create a bilingual (Portuguese and Brazilian Sign Language) social media for educational purposes.
My ROLE
My role in this project was to act as a Visual and Interaction Designer. I also acted in some stages of the User Research.
The problem
Social media can be an impactful resource for education, as it can provide the opportunity for people-to-people and people-to-content interaction from a variety of features. However, most of social media content is text-based. It means that people using it have to master the writing and be literate.
The problem is that hearing impaired people are not usually proficient in writing and understanding texts because of their lack of literacy in the formal language, since their first language is sign language.
About Moobi
“There was Brazilian Sign Language and Portuguese then both listeners and hearing impaired users could learn a new language.”
User research
User Personas
Daniel
36 years-old
Listener
Professor
Karen
20 years-old
Hearing impaired
Student
Ian
28 years-old
Listener
Student
Daniel is a university professor who speaks Brazilian Sign language. He would love to use a bilingual social media to integrate his listener and hearing impaired students.
“Unfortunately, schools don’t have interpreters for all classrooms with hearing impaired students. So, a social media that can integrate Sign Language Recorded Videos or a Translator can be a good addition to facilitate education and integrate students”.
Karen is a university student who lost hearing when she was a baby. She speaks Brazilian Sign Language and it’s hard for her to read long texts in Portuguese. She would like to be more web represented.
“Even though I can read texts, sometimes I need to understand the main idea, not just the word. Videos in Sign Languages help me to understand the logic behind the text.”
Ian is a college student who doesn’t speak Brazilian Sign Language. His frustration is not to collaborate with his hearing impaired colleagues, because of the language barrier.
“We write tons of texts in social media every day, but we don’t think so much about how hearing impaired people access that information.”
Pain point
Too much text
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Pain point
Lack of Sign Language videos
Pain point
Lack of a webcam integrated on feed
Pain point
Poor interface
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The TEAM
The team consisted of two researchers with computer science degrees, an interpreter and me. The coding phase was given to a third-party company.
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We had a weekly meeting to organise the work, define the scope, do some brainstorming and make decisions. As this project was part of multiple doctoral researches, each one of us participated in some stages of the research phases.
After defining what the problem was, we brainstormed the list of resources to improve the interface and integrate Sign language videos. We also used a collaborative platform to design the user flows. I was responsible for designing the interface, but we discussed together the behavior of some components. We tested the prototype beforehand (each one of us did our individual research according to our doctorate path), which allowed us to improve some functionalities.
Constraints
A constraint of designing a bilingual interface video-based is to handle video streaming, that needs good internet quality, without losing resolution. To achieve this goal, we had to compress the videos into mp4 formats.
Another constraint was to translate the whole page into Sign Language, even comments written by listeners in real time. For that, we decided to integrate a third-party translator called Prodeaf.
UI DESING
Prototype and features
Sign language interface based
integrated avatar translator
(third-part software)​
Recorded Sign Language Videos
Drag and Drop videos​
Videos speed control
Option to resize and maximize the video
Creating Groups: Anyone logged in the platform can create a group.
Chatting (with a videoconference option): one-to-one or in group
TESTS
Occupation: University students and professors
RESULTS
84% liked drag and drop videos
"Many times I didn’t know the words written on Moobi, but there was an interpreter there, so everything was clear."
“It is unquestionable the importance of this tool for the communication of hearing impaired users.”
“Integrating a webcam to the social media makes it a lot easier. Before that, I had to record videos with my camera, upload it on Youtube, and then include it on Moodle”.