Sign Translator
SignTranslator is an app allowing to translate text, speech, images and live video into a sign language.
Challenge
Around 466 million people worldwide have disabling hearing loss, and 34 million of these are children. They are more likely to have poor mental health and suffer from depression and anxiety. According to National Deaf Children’s Society 78% of deaf children attend mainstream schools, where other children don’t know sign language, which makes interactions much more difficult.
Solution
I created a translation tool which will help them with those communication challenges and grow into confident adults able to communicate with others despite the language barrier. At the same time, other children will get familiar with this communication method and won’t feel uncomfortable in approaching a deaf person in their adult life, resulting in more welcoming society.
User Interface
Simple yet bold. The user interface is kept to minimal as the goal of the app itself is not to be in the centre of attention but to be a tool to help with the conversation of two children. That’s is why I didn’t use a rich illustrative interface, which could distract them from the original goal. I focused the creativity on the avatar which is the most important element of the app.
Other Features
Since my users are still young and don’t know or are in the process of learning the sign language I decided to include the basic educational games and an ability to save the translated text into phrasebook which hopefully will help children with their studies.
User Journey
My biggest priority of the user journey was to limit the steps the user must go through to minimum. In translation it is important that the tool itself does not get in the way and doesn’t interrupt the conversation too much. Therefore, I tried to contain the translation process to 3 / 4 steps and thanks to simple interface design and standard navigation elements, already known to the user, I ensure that the actions are fast and without any unnecessary distractions. The extra settings and features are contained in menus available when needed.
Sketchbook
Before working on user journey and wireframes I listed the most important features I wanted to include. I used this opportunity to explore how those features could work and look like.
Wireframes
Once happy with the features and user journey I began working on wireframes to test how those features would look and work together. The wireframes gave me a good understanding of the space I was working with and how I should use it to maintain correct information hierarchy. It also allowed me to see how easy and hard it is to follow the layout, which I could improve in the development stage.
Project Tags
Companies
D&AD New Blood
- Events
