Imfo (Image to Information) is our mobile application aiming at solving the issues of inputting local languages (i.e. Tourist, Travelling Businessman, Oversea Students), which includes the key feature of Text Extraction from photos as well as some other extended functions, i.e. Sharing to 3rd Party Products (3PP), Geographical Navigation, Web Search and Translation. We aimed to help the users solve the problem when facing unfamiliar languages.
Time and Place
Sep 2014 - May 2015
Paris, France
My Contribution
User research
UX design
My Role
Business Development
UX Researcher
This is a one-year business project with 6 team members in Université Paris-Sud. We built up a real business model by understanding the user's expectation and needs by doing user research, interview and questionnaire. After several rounds of design iteration, we launched our mobile application. In addition, we set the pricing policy based on the results and potential users' feedback from the questionnaire and even got in touch with the investors.
WORKFLOW
Our goal was to design an easy-to-use input method for users, hence only essential steps are included in our app
1. Language Selection
By default, 'Imfo' can recognize French. There are options to choose other languages
2. Text Selection
Users need to focus on target text with the resizable window and click the 'Camera' icon to extract the text from image
3. Operation
Select extended function: Translation, Search, Navigation, Share with icons at right side
CUSTOMER SEGMENT
International Student
Tourist
Business Traveller
Language difference is the main challenges when studentsfirst arrive in their destination countries. They might be the potential users for "Single Language Package".
Tourists are easy to meet lauguage problems when traveling. Both "Single Language Package" and "Regional Lauguage Combination" are handful to make their journeys more convinient.
Business travellers travel frequently to many countries rather than staying at one place. They will be the main group in purchasing the "Regional Language Combinations".
Most of the translation mobile apps provide users an easy way to type with built-in alphabet keyboard, which means these tourists may not be our target customers.
Majority of the tourists are easy to face language issues when travelling to Asia. From the user research, European and American are the main tourists who would be our target users.
PRICING STRATEGY
To ensure sustainable development, both market share and profitability are important. Freemium version will help us gain higher market share in the short-term, while the Premium version will accumulate and deliver more value.
ROADMAP
As this project was a real business project, in order to get some investments, the product roadmap was important for us. The development process took us a half year. During this time, we did lots of research and market analysis. We did some interviews to understand customer needs. We also made the questionnaires to collect the statistical data for our business plan and tried to get some feedback by showing people the prototype. The app development finished in March 2015 and was put on Google play around July 2015.
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