An app 20 years in the making

Founded in 1996, EF has 1 000 000 paying subscribers studying and hires over 2 000 teachers.

My contribution to the project was to:
  • Adapt desktop interactions of English lessons for mobile,
  • Build mobile interactive prototypes of lesson ideas,
  • Design activity templates unique to mobile,
  • Create UX designs to be used in 17 languages,

Compay: EF Education First (Shanghai, China)
Team: User Experience & Design
Role: UX Designer, Prototyper
Timeline: April - October 2014
Status: EF English Live is available on Google Play and the Apple App Store.
   

The challenge

To expand a successful (but legacy) English learning web product to mobile, across platforms, while maintaining educational value.

From this

To this

Structure

To better suit a mobile form factor and the context of our students, our team devised ways to break down existing web content into smaller, bite-sized morcels of learning. Here is an overview of the learning flow of the app, organised in these shorter burts of learning.

The goal of this project was to leverage the existing English Live platform on desktop Web and rethink the design and interaction patterns of the e-learning templates in a way better suited to mobile platforms.

My involvement was to rethink these interactions and create wireframes and interactive prototypes for more than 10 activity templates. Expanding beyond the original scope of the project, I also designed some activity templates unique to mobile.

Framing this work, our team also took into consideration our target customers, the existing language barrier, mobile OS design consistency and even 17 supported UI languages. The work covered in English Live for iOS & Android: ideation, sketching, wireframes, user testing & research, visual style exploration, interactive prototyping.