Initial Research

After we received the prompt, we did some background research. First, we targeted understanding “Expressive dialogue.” The key takeaway from the prompt is we noticed that “ People’s expression could be complex.” We also found some facts about communication disorder people and guided us to the follow-up questions.

Current Solution & Deficiency

During the user study, we found a pain point that “ current methods can only communicate basic needs and wants.” Inspired by AAC and How people usually express complex thoughts, we formed our initial HMW question: “HMW twist or combine the current methods to help communication?”

People with communication disorder express themselves by using

*Augmentative and Alternative communication (AAC) devices have been built to help people with aphasia to communicate basic needs and wants. AAC devices mostly utilize icons for communication

People express complex thoughts by using

Pain Point of The Current Solution

Current methods can only communicate basic needs and wants

Users' Actual Needs

Communicate complex and deep and complex feelings, emotions, ideas, and arguments to an audience

Thought

How Might We twist or combine above ways to upgrade our target audience’s current communication methods?

User Interview To Gather Insights

During the user interview, we tried to bring out their intuitive thoughts about the problems. After analyzing the data, we found two insights that could help us build design guidelines.

Understanding Users

To better sum up and help our team understand users, we created a persona and pointed out their pain points and user needs.

Ideation...

We think it will be more natural and intuitive to interact with our solution if we combine our solution into an everyday activity, which is listening to music. Based on how we might solve the problem, we sketch our ideas to brainstorm some key features. We keep their facial expressions stickers while incorporating lyrics, sound, and images, allowing them to make creative collages. We created a digital demo from the sketches about our two main interactions: labeling lyrics & creating a multi-sensory collage 

Information Architecture

We organized a user flow before we jumped into pulling together a practical user interface.

We then tried to get UI improved by amplifying text size and making the visual part popping up to make it more user-friendly for people with the communication disorder due to the information capturing deficiency.

Final Design

Click To Watch Finalist Presentation on Youtube ↗

Click To View Figma Prototype ↗

01 Daily Music Assigning

02 Label Lyrics With Emotions And Add Lyrics To Database

03 Generating Daily Emotional Expression From Lyric Database And Stickers

04 Sharing With Community And Reacting With Doodling

Wrap It UP

LyricLab addresses the complexity of people's expressions and aims to assist individuals with communication disorders, it integrates with everyday activities, such as listening to music, to enhance user interaction with sentiment analysis utilized to detect specific feelings and emotions beyond polarity. Users can build an expression vocabulary database, create collages, react to posts, and join a community.

Reflection

1. Make sure to support design decisions with deep user research.
2. Think wild and of the big picture but stay focused on MVP features.
3. Provide enough predictability and trust on interfaces for users.
4. The UI design should fit specific groups of users' need, the standard is not always the same.

Next Step

- Usability testing for people with communication disorders.
- Design Iteration to better fulfill the user needs.
- Working on the technical resolution of Natural Language Classification.