Platforms: Web
Employment: Full-time, 2020–2024
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 several tabs open at once and constantly switch between them. Japanese.io processed Japanese text and allowed users to look up individual words with a single 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 understood how hard and inefficient it often is. Consequently, for a long time, they were the main source of information.
In 2021, I started researching the core topic — learning Japanese. In total, I conducted 60 interviews with Japanese learners.
At first, the focus was to identify the problem preventing people from mastering Japanese. Findings showed that the main reason was the lack of motivation. Learning Japanese takes a long time, and it is 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.
Together with the founders, we brainstormed possible solutions to the “human interaction” problem. How could we incorporate human interaction into the product? After a few discussion sessions, 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 at their level, read it, and then discuss it. To ensure all participants get at least some human interaction, we also added the ability to contact “mentors” — team members 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, with the focus on book covers and participant avatars.
The goal was to keep costs as low as possible, so we had to fake some features (e.g., participant avatars) and use existing solutions for others (e.g., a Discord server for communicating with readers).
