Project timeline
Winter Quarter 2022 / 10 Weeks
Problem definition and planning
(3 weeks)
Design, develop & validate Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
(7 weeks)
Spring Quarter 2023 / 8 Weeks
Iteration cycle #1
(3 weeks)
Iteration cycle #2
(2 weeks)
Finalization + iSchool submission
(3 weeks)
Problem statement
Currently conlangers need to use a number of other pieces of software to help build, store, and maintain their languages. The goal is to have one piece of software that does everything.
Sponsor: LangTime Studio is a live conlang creation demonstration, hosted by David Peterson (Game of Thrones, The 100, The Witcher) and Dr. Jessie Sams (Motherland: Fort Salem). David and Jessie will be creating a number of long term conlang projects
Conlagers: A 80,000+ community connected through conlanging as an art and a passion.
“Currently, there's no good products that work well for the purpose of creating languages. Language creators have to do all the work manually. Our product's goal is to save language creators' time and provide a powerful tool for them.”
LangTime Studio is a live conlang creation demonstration, hosted by David Peterson (Game of Thrones, The 100, The Witcher) and Dr. Jessie Sams (Motherland: Fort Salem).
Our primary stakeholders are our sponsors and constructed language creators.
Our target users are constructed language creators who have a hard time managing their lexicons. The aim of the product is to be flexible and dynamic enough so that it can fit a wide range of language creating skill sets.
Surveys and interview invitations were sent out with LangTime studios as a mediary to reach out to the community. Our primary focus was learning about the Conlang community's experiences with language development and what software / pain points that had.
The team explored over twenty current software solutions used by the conlanging community.
Community experience:
All languages and language creation processes are different
Creating the dictionary takes the most time in the overall process
The community is made up of professionals but more so hobbyist
Want to lessen tedious work to enhance creativity
Want to encourage / flourish the conlanging community
Process pain points:
Lots of time spent doing tedious work (importing, linking words, etc.)
Difficult to remember / reference language rules when creating lexicions (written dictionaries)
Software have certain assumptions of how a language should be structured, not suitable for variability conlang
Software:
Current softwares have too steep of a learning curve and a lack of customization
There is often a need for multiple platforms in the process for one language
Text editing softwares (word, excel) are used by the majority of the community, a small percent uses targeted platforms
"Language generators" are misleading and do not function as such
Tools are spread amongst many programs and have outdated UIs
No functionality for custom language fields
After discussing user and market research, the team began developing prototypes for stakeholder review and concept validation.
Overall, conglangers like the design and features
Conlangs are unique and very dynamic our program allow for lots of irregularity
Continue to force simplicity with our design for both workflows and aesthetics
Functions similarly to advanced scripts seasoned conlangers use
Most users appreciate starting with a blank slate
Create find + replace functionality so that conglangers can apply mass-changes
Create error checking feature / signifier for language rules during lexicon creation
Include an expanded view / description for tags
Elevated word information would be very helpful
Additional usability testing was done with our MVP to see if users understood the coded designs. This brought up small experience issues that we would then resolve in the final design
More reassuring patterns should be implemented (eg, a row has been deleted)
Delete flow isn’t intuitive, our solution was to make more immediately visible
Addition of IPA charts
Add multiple ways to do tasks (eg, right-clicking to bring up row options and ability to use edit mode)