Project Description

Release date: 2017
Role: UX Design Support/Tester

iTranslate is a translation app that could operate together with The Dash Pro where users could speak into their Dash, and the iTranslate app would translate it into the selected language.

Using two Dash Pro and the iTranslate app, two users could communicate in their own language, and the earphones and app would translate in realtime

The Challenge

This project had many challenges from both a technical and a user experience perspective. The technical difficulty lay in making the hardware (earphones) and our software communicate with the API from iTranslate. From the UX perspective, there was a lot of work to do regarding communicating to the users when the earphones were paired with the app and giving them enough feedback about when they would record a sentence that would then be translated. 

My work here was to support conceptualization, solutions, and feedback by testing the various software releases and finding bugs and improvements. 

Supporting

Together with the design lead, we developed a test protocol describing a list of actions that needed testing. Each test action was described in detail to provide consistency in the testing procedure and an expected result and a drop-down menu with whether this action did what it was supposed to do.

Together with the testing list, I was also responsible for preparing the test equipment with the test software and distributing it to our internal testing pool. 

Issues

The main problems we encountered with this feature can be divided into two functions areas. 

• Earphone to app-related issues
• Earphone to earphone issues

Earphone to app

Most of these issues resulted from a mix between connectivity between the earphones and the expected behavior of the users. Typically we ended up having situations where the earphones would take longer than expected time to deliver feedback, and the test users would take this as a failed input and repeat the action. This would start a flawed cycle of the device repeating the input action multiple times and inconsistently delivering feedback. To the frustrations of many of the test users. 

Earphone to earphone

The general issues between earphones and the app added to the earphone-to-earphone experience. We encountered more complicated problems as more interactions were involved with connecting two pairs of earphones and using the earphone app combination to make a conversation. 

While most of the issues were ironed out throughout development, there were always some potential issues that would reappear, some due to connectivity issues that were hard to make a permanent fix for concretely. 

A promotional video can be seen here of the project 

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