Rosetta Stone Mobile Projects

TOTALe Mobile Companion: our first iOS project, the Mobile Companion app is free to Rosetta Stone TOTALe subscribers. We worked with the TOTALe product team to simplify and reduce functionality to the bare essentials that would translate well to a mobile experience. For the iOS this app, we focussed on speaking, pronunciation and vocabulary development.

Once a lesson starts, the experience is driven forward by the user's voice; its even possible to go 'hands free'. This is in keeping with Rosetta Stone's philosophy of immersive learning.

Not visible in these static screen shots are the custom transitions and animations we specified for the product. These were prototyped in Flash, and previewed on the device using LiveView.

ReFLEX Companion for Android: ReFLEX Companion is an Android app that provides stories and reading activities to subscribers of Rosetta Stone ReFLEX.

Rosetta Stone ReFLEX

Smackerel recently finished a big project for Rosetta Stone, that we've been working on steadily for nearly 2 years. The product is called Rosetta Stone ReFLEX, and its currently available only in Japan and Korea, so we'd like to share a few screens with you here. Rosetta Stone ReFLEX is a new language learning product, made for developing advanced conversational English skills.

We started working on ReFLEX back in August of 2010, when we met with ‘Labs’, Rosetta Stone’s internal R&D team, to learn about some rough ideas they had for a new product. The product would be for learners who have some English, but lack the confidence and spontaneity to speak it in the real world.

The Labs team aimed to build the learners' confidence by exposing them, repeatedly, to conversation scenarios. In each training session, the learner rehearses a conversation with the computer, then s/he performs a similar scenario with a live language coach.

From earliest stages, we visualized ideas with the Labs team, gradually turning their pedagogical philosophy into a design language.

As we continued to refine the product, the interface began to disappear. We realized that, at certain points in the product, graphic interface is unnecessary. Below, the learner experiences a completely voice-driven interface; the conversation progresses as they speak.

Later, when Labs turned the product over to Rosetta Stone’s internal development team, we stayed with the project, smoothing the transition from exploration to development. The emphasis was now on developing a viable prototype, to test to core pedagogical ideas, and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the product. The alpha went live in September 2011, and for the next 10 months the roadmap has been informed by user feedback. One notable addition was the ‘report card’ features, allowing users to track their progress, and identify areas to work on.

From one thing to the next

We enjoyed the article Mission Transition, in which Mark Cossey explores and illustrates the role of transitions in user experience design. One example shows iOS transitions in slow motion revealing subtle choices that are simple but not obvious.

In the pre-web early 90s we were very focused on creating short simple transitions that helped users move from one state to the next, maybe even with a smile. We had a VHS tape of SIGCHI demos exploring the role of animation in user interface.

From that tape we pieced together the following truthy guideline:  "It takes the brain about a second to move from one state to the next. Any animation that takes about a second and helps the user understand the relationship between the new state and the previous state creates greater user confidence and satisfaction. Any animation that takes much longer is wasting the user's time."

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The web shifted the focus of interactive media design away from niceties like animated transitions to clearly designed pages and navigation schemes. The browser handled transitions completely. Initial interaction with hypertext was snappy but once you clicked the web browser would serve up a big blank page and a wait, sometimes long enough to forget what the previous page looked like.

For a while nifty transitions got a bad name because people mostly only saw them in Flash apps that boasted little else.

Modern web and mobile apps, along with speedy processors, have put transitions back into designer hands. It's great to see designers thinking about them in detail. 

We do keep in mind that transitions that are nice on a small screen can be unsettling on a large screen. It took me a while to get used to some of the full screen transitions in OS X Lion. As it turns out I was not the only one to experience motion sickness with the new UI.

Productivity and the 40-hour work week

Great article in Salon (via boingboing) about the damage done to productivity when teams are over-worked and over-tired. Many of the studies cited apply specifically to knowledge workers.

The Business Roundtable study found that after just eight 60-hour weeks, the fall-off in productivity is so marked that the average team would have actually gotten just as much done and been better off if they’d just stuck to a 40-hour week all along. And at 70- or 80-hour weeks, the fall-off happens even faster: at 80 hours, the break-even point is reached in just three weeks.

... The other thing about knowledge workers is that they’re exquisitely sensitive to even minor sleep loss. Research by the US military has shown that losing just one hour of sleep per night for a week will cause a level of cognitive degradation equivalent to a .10 blood alcohol level. Worse: most people who’ve fallen into this state typically have no idea of just how impaired they are. It’s only when you look at the dramatically lower quality of their output that it shows up.

Bring back the 40-hour work week

Smackerel's second meet-up

Smackerel had its second meet-up last night. Friends, collaborators, and clients dropped by for some beer, wine, cheese and conversation. We're going to make this a regular thing, so don't feel bad if you couldn't make it last night. Going forward, we'll be having people over on the last Thursday of every month. Hope to see you February 23!