Platforms: Web
Employment: Full-time since 2020
Tools: Figma
Japanese.io is the project of the Atilika company. The company specializes in natural language processing, and Japanese.io is a sub-product of the company’s advancements in processing Japanese.
The product needed a face, so I was tasked with developing its logo, style, and user experience. First as a freelancer and then as a full-time employee.
At first, Japanese.io was built to solve a very specific problem for Japanese learners: looking up unknown vocabulary while reading Japanese is inconvenient and bulky. People had to keep open several tabs at once and constantly switch between them. Japanese.io processed any Japanese text and allowed users to look up single words with just a click. Later Japanese.io evolved into the full language learning service it is today.
JIO in the past
JIO today
Japanese.io is based on the vision and experience of the founders. Both of them learned Japanese, and both of them understood how hard and inefficient it often is. Consequently, for a long time, they were the main source of information.
In 2021, I suggested we hire a product manager to guide us through the stagnation the product was facing. Together with him, we did a lot of research on the core topic — learning Japanese. We conducted a lot of interviews with Japanese learners, trying to pinpoint the problem that stopped people from mastering Japanese.
Our findings showed that the main reason was the lack of motivation. Learning Japanese takes a long time, and it was very hard for people to maintain the necessary focus for so long.
Further interviews revealed a few things that kept people motivated: the sense of improvement and human interaction.
Our first bet was “human interaction”. Together with the founders, we brainstormed possible solutions to this problem. How could we incorporate human interaction into the product? After a few sessions of discussion, we chose the idea of a “book club”.
Brainstorming of a solutions for the “lack of human interaction” problem
The idea was to transform the main Home page into a hub where users could choose a book for their level, read, and then discuss it. To ensure all participants get at least some human interaction, we also added the ability to contact “mentors” — people from the team who were on the lookout for any questions.
The first version of the UI was considered too overloaded with information and difficult to understand.
The second version was stripped of all unnecessary elements, and the focus was made on book covers and participant avatars.
The goal was to make it all as cheap as possible, so we had to fake some of the features (for example, participant avatars were fake) and use existing solutions for others (we created a Discord server for communicating with the readers).
The results were lackluster. Not a whole lot of people participated, and those who did were not very active.