Unexpected decision points: Langauge direction

One decision that I hadn't really given much thought to in the early stages was the target learning language of the application. Early prototyping was done using English as this was the language of the prompts and because that was the target learning language of the original product, myRead, I had in mind when thinking about this new app.

However, as I was testing out the prompts and generating the articles I began using Japanese as the target learning language as it was of more interest to me as a learner and easier to sample myself. When researching for this post I came across a new piece of tech jargon for me, dog-fooding, which is the testing of your own product on yourself as if someone making dog food should be comfortable trying out themselves or something to that effect. So I was dog-fooding the product using Japanese generated content.

The I reached the crossroads of having a product that I was happy with from a release perspective, but I had to decide which language to include in the first release.

Focus on Japanese

Initially I considered English and Japanese with a switch so users could alternate based on whichever language they were learning, and I think that would be ideal further down the road. For now though focusing on one language has its merits.

Firstly, from a testing perspective, as a solo designer being able to dog-food the product certainly enables me to take the role of customer/learner and give myself feedback on the product - something I wouldn't be able to do so well with English. This also works from a motivation perspective as I can see how well the product works if I can also feel myself learning from it.

Possibly more importantly, focussing on one language enables me to go deeper on the product. It enables me to experiment with language learning features, such as built in dictionaries, with a lower threshold of time investment as implementation for two languages would likely double the time needed to install one additional feature in the early stages if it needed to be released.

Way forward

So combining these two reasons I have made the decision to focus on Japanese for now. I would like to make this a multi-language product further down the line, and will keep this in mind when developing features to try to keep things slim and scalable. As a beginner level learner, Chinese is one language I want to explore - it would certainly help me to dog-food the beginner level content more easily. But that's for another day. Version 1 release approaches.