VocabMi is a vocabulary building and retaining app for language learners. Let’s save your vocabulary one search at a time!
This project was initially started as a 1 week passion project but I’m now pursuing this as a potential startup idea through Propel (Fall 2021 Cohort), a mentorship program in The Garage, Northwestern’s startup incubator space.
[THIS CASE STUDY IS CURRENTLY IN PROGRESS ⚙️]
In 2020, I took a gap year to focus on learning German intensively. I began to realize that the biggest problem that my classmates and I faced with language learning was vocabulary: being able to build and then retain our vocabulary.
As one progresses in their language learning journey and advances from learning grammar, a lot of the learning comes from reading and listening comprehension - where one encounters so many new vocabulary words with each story/reading. I could learn around 100 new words from each story! A lot of readings were on specific topics, with specific vocabulary to learn. There seemed to be no easy way to keep track of all this vocabulary! I noticed that I wasn’t the only one facing this problem. My friends and I frequently had rant sessions complaining about the difficulties of learning German vocabulary! After a few too many rant sessions, I realized this was an actual issue that could be affecting not only me, but a lot of other language learners. To take this to the next step,. I wanted to see if other people (classmates from the German course and at Northwestern) faced this problem too.
My solution is to create a tool that will help intermediate language learners retain their vocabulary and actively review it.
[Feel free to play around with the Figma ⚙️]
To see if other people had the same problem as me, I interviewed individuals who were also passionate about learning a foreign language to understand their problems and pain points when learning a language. In total, I interviewed 27 people and synthesized my key findings:
I did a competitive analysis of current solutions that I and/or the interviewees used or mentioned throughout their language learning journey.
From my personal experience (which was shared by a majority of the users), I have tried several methods to solve this problem, ranging from keeping a long cluttered Apple Notes list of every word I didn’t know (which, let’s be realistic, would still be longer than what I already have because it's a hassle to record words when you're in a rush), a Google Sheets spreadsheet, or Anki decks. All of these solutions only solve part of the problem.
From the key findings from the user interviews and the competitive analysis, I identified the main features that the MVP would have to have.
