January, 2017

Español – iOS app for learning Spanish

Español – is an iOS application for people who want to learn Spanish using a Storytelling method.

There is a series of Spanish courses made by Oscar Pellus – languages professor from Barcelona who advocates a storytelling approach. Courses are made perfectly, however there is one problem.

The author has distributed the content among various sources: podcasts, emails, and the author's web page. And it is hard for customers to use them all on a mobile phone.
I'm learning Spanish using Oscar's method. It works fine but I wish I could spend more time with the course materials and learn faster. That is why the idea of the app was born.
Thanks to the application a user can work with all the content in the same place, easily move from one course to another, listen audio, read texts and even get translation and grammar help.
With everything on your mobile phone, you can use any free minute to interact with the language in a comfortable way and fasten your progress.
In the app you've got all courses and see your progress in each of them. Courses distinguish by their difficulty. Each course consists of a number of lessons.
The inside pages of the courses
All you need to do as a user – listen, listen and listen. From any place, as much as you can. Your brain will automatically absorb words, phrases and patterns and you will learn the language without difficulties.

So you can open any available course, tap any lesson and it will start playing. After it finishes the next lesson will start playing automatically.
Lesson page
The main part of each lesson is an audio track. Also there is a text transcription and grammar comments that you can look up. If you don't understand a word or a phrase, you may open transcription and get the explanation.
The lesson page of the app – audio player, transcription and grammar help
Monetisation and billing
There are three types of courses: 1. Absolutely free courses, 2. Courses with several free lessons, 3. Courses without free lessons.

So there are two different ways to make a purchase – unblock a part of the lessons or buy the entire course.

To make a purchase you should enter a credit card details. To make a customer confident the payment is secure I put VISA and MasterCard verified logotypes, "Powered by Stripe" and "128 bit encryption" signs on the billing page.
Locked course and a billing page of the app
The app turned out to be simple and easy to use. No excess functionality. The customer can focus on education process, enjoy perfect content and monitor his progress.

I think it would be interesting to add comments and let users to communicate with each other and share their progress to motivate each other even more.
Olga Shavrina
Product manager. Human being