User Report

The main goal and direction of our project is to improve the communication between individuals of different linguistic backgrounds and reduce the language barrier they face in the online space. Therefore, for our project, our target audience were people of different language backgrounds that want to communicate with people of other languages without having to encounter a significant language barrier.

Going into the user research phase, our group decided to conduct a brief questionnaire that was anonymously filled out by close friends of the group members, classmates, and people from the UW discord server. One thing to note is that the respondents mainly, if not entirely, consisted of students and young adults. We decided to use this method of user research because it was an accessible approach for both ourselves and the people illing out the form, and allowed us to get input from people in our target audience. For the questionnaire itself, we asked questions related to the respondents’ use of Discord and its features, such as voice channels and chat messaging, respondents’ language background and personal experience with language barriers, and respondents’ thoughts on a Discord bot that bridges the gap between people of different languages. Through this questionnaire, our group was able to get a better understanding on whether the problem that the project tries to solve actually exists and whether the discord bot could be adopted by discord users.

From our finding and using the AEIOU framework, when looking at findings related to the “activity” and “environment” part of the framework, we found that a majority of respondents used and interacted with features that our planned Discord bot would interact with, such as voice channels and chat messaging. For questions related to “interaction”, we asked respondents about “how often they communicated with others using voice channels”. The findings show that 47.1% of respondents used voice channels very often, 23.5% sometimes used voice channels, 23.5% rarely used voice channels, and 5.9% never used voice channels. Another question related to “interaction”, we asked respondents about “how often they communicated with others using text chat”. These results showed that 47.1% of the respondents used text chat very often, 35.3% of respondents sometimes used it, 11.8% rarely used it, and 5.9% never used it. A major component of our bot is that it will translate and transcribe voice channel audio to text messages. So seeing that a large amount of the respondents already use the interaction building blocks required for this project shows the adoptability of this discord bot. For the “object” part of the framework, the main object is that respondents use Discord already or are willing to start using it. A question we asked respondents was how often they used Discord. The results showed that 64.7% use it very often, 23.5% sometimes use it, 11.8% rarely use it, and 0% never use it. This shows that people have already adopted the platform that the project will be used on which shows the potential for it being used by discord users. For the “user” part of the framework, we asked questions related to language barriers that had faced online to see whether the problem the discord bot tries to solve exists or not. Looking at one of the questions we asked, “How often do you (or someone you know) encounter language barriers when interacting with someone online?”. The results show that 5.9% of respondents encounter situations like this very often, 17.6% of respondents sometimes did, 47.1% of respondents rarely did, and 29.4% of respondents never did. This shows that this problem is only sometimes faced by users so while the project is solving a problem that isn’t faced by the majority of people, it is still faced by a niche group of people. This result also brings up the challenge of how we will reach this niche group of people. As we have our final product ready, we will have to find a way to reach our small target audience that faces these language barriers.