The international platform for simultaneous and consecutive interpreters.
Cosines P is an annual contest for professional interpreters which consists of two major rounds. The first one is an online qualification step, which is closely followed by the final offline round.
The initial brief included rebranding and work on the website layout and user experience specifics for the on-line part of the contest. The latter was a bit of a challenge, as our team was tasked with working out an ideal usability scenario, which would involve appropriate programming to enable users to transfer their interpreting skills into the digital format, namely record their against the background of the video they were interpreting.
After the detailed planning and strategy we came up with a list of goals and divided work packages into two iteration phases.
The first iteration was to include a minimum set of features that can be implemented over 3 months, and the second iteration consisted in a full-fledged set of new functions planned for the next year, with the earlier mistakes and glitches analysed, evaluated and corrected while working on a set of new, further extensions.
There were dozens of different user journeys in the project, and here is one of them that showcases the design of the platform.
In terms of work on new extensions, I will dwell on one of them to give you an account of how actual UI/UX decision-making takes place.
At the end of the contest we got a lot of data and feedback from users, including the number of users who got registered on the platform and the qualifying challenge. Initially it was an important figure and we planned to use it as an evaluation point for our user journey. But after a bit of design thinking we came to believe that the reason for this was a different initial motivation - to register with the project but not to take part in it. What currently seems most obvious to us, was not so from the very beginning.
We conducted a short email survey of participants who kindly shared their emails with us at the time of registration. And collected a perfect amount of data which showed that people would like to have a look at participants’ videos and share their reviews, but they could do it only when participating.
This understanding ultimately made us reconsider the whole approach and change the vision of the project. We stopped presenting the platform as a competition and began to look upon it as a professional network, although the contest has been there, up and running, ever since.
