Intervention Study: Proto-Personas & Journey Maps

Name: No Direction Nick

Role: College student (freshman)

Goal: After 6+ years of learning Mandarin and no longer pursuing it for strictly academic purposes, Nick wants to keep up with the language and find ways to integrate it into his daily life because he aims to work in China in the future.

Conflicts:

Does not know how to gain access to native speakers
Is afraid of making mistakes in front of native speakers
Doesn’t have scheduled time to practice language throughout the day because he is no longer taking it for class, but he wants to pursue it for a career and keep up with it.
Duolingo is not fully customizable to his language learning, which leads to repeated content with the module system
Struggles to fit it into his daily life without class requirements
Language learning has become fundamentally isolating/individual in nature

Attempts to solve by:

Watching cartoons/reading the newspaper as a way to include language in transition/down time.
Tried to reach out to native speakers, but feels awkward asking for strangers’ time without anything to give in return

Setting and environment: At home and school

Tools and skills: Nick uses his phone to watch cartoons. For example, he has begun watching TV shows in Mandarin (with English subtitles) to try to more regularly hear the language and practice casually. He has found a handful of TV shows on Youtube that he enjoys and is now invested in the plot of each show. Similarly, he also has access to Chinese newspapers, which he occasionally reads to practice his reading skills and identify interesting discrepancies between how American and Chinese media portray world events.

Routine: