Beelinguapp Redesign - Community Stories

Beelinguapp provides stories in target languages translated into users' home languages, tagged by difficulty levels, but has significant shortcomings in personalization and cultural depth. Users, particularly English learners (EL students), faced challenges with:

• Lack of culturally relevant storylines.
• Absence of community-driven content and user-generated cultural narratives.
• Limited context for available stories, making content engagement superficial.

These limitations contributed to disengagement and stereotype threat, negatively affecting language acquisition and student motivation.

My initial sketch focused on the core “Community Stories” flow, with:

• Placeholder cards for each story entry
• Basic navigation tabs (“All Stories” / “My Stories”)
• Simple “Add Story” button in the top-right
• Minimal legend for metadata (date, author, language)

This low-fi version helped validate the information hierarchy before moving into mid-fi mockups.

As UX lead for Community Stories, my responsibilities included:

• Designing an initial concept based on language inequality research.
• Conducting iterative user testing to refine usability and inclusivity.
• Analyzing feedback through affinity diagrams to pinpoint key user insights.

Primary methods of data collection:

• Contextual inquiries with diverse bilingual users.
• Think-aloud usability tests for the mid-fidelity prototype.
• Competitive review of similar apps (Duolingo, Memrise, LingQ)
• Interviews with 3 language-instructor stakeholders
• Heuristic evaluation of existing community-sharing workflows

Analysis methods included:

• Qualitative thematic analysis of user feedback.
• Affinity diagramming to cluster insights into actionable improvements.

To ground our design in real user needs, I led an affinity‐diagramming workshop to synthesize qualitative insights from our contextual inquiries and think‐aloud sessions. This helped us:

• Cluster user quotes & observations into thematic groups.
• Surface recurring pain points around cultural relevance and engagement.
• Identify key opportunity areas for community storytelling features.

The resulting affinity map became our north star—driving feature prioritization and informing the initial prototype.

High-Fidelity Prototype (Final Design)

Final iteration included:

• Advanced filtering options (date of submission, popularity).
• Improved UI with carousel display for homepage preview component.
• Contextual enhancements such as tags, brief descriptions, and story synopsis.
• Verification and confirmation states for story uploads.