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©2025 Alex Woo

Enhancing STT Service Design through Hi-Fi Prototyping

Client : SK Inc. C&C, AUD Social Cooperative
Keyword : Inclusive Design, Micro-interaction, Prototyping
Timeline : Sep — Oct 2019 (2 months)
My Role : Product Designer

Overview

ShareTalk is a real-time text interpretation service for the hearing impaired, developed using STT technology by AUD, a social cooperative of SK. Originally ‘Share Typing,’ it evolved with STT technology into ‘ShareTalk 1.0,’ followed by the 2.0 project to improve the user experience.

Users

ShareTalk, designed for deaf students, ensures accurate text interpretation in classrooms. It adopts a universal design to support various hearing impairments.

Find problems and solutions

Difficulties Faced by Deaf Students in Education
Through in-depth interviews with hearing-impaired individuals and their support network, facilitated by AUD’s sign language interpreter, I identified key challenges in both educational and daily life environments.

Field research / In-depth interview If you want to know more about UX Research, check out the video here.

Initial Sketches
I made a rough sketch of the main screen and the chat room centering on the representative screen. However, it was difficult to understand the situation in which text was being translated from still images alone, so we were not sure if the user's needs were being met.

Discover Improvements with Hi-Fi Prototypes

While researching similar STT services, I reviewed Google's stable 'Live Transcribe' and discovered several improvement opportunities that had not been previously identified.

🚫 As-is

Static screen full of text

💡 1. Text

Text appears gradually from the top-left, with no text before ignition.
The screen should maintain a 1/5 blank space at the bottom for smooth scrolling.
The navigation area disappears during speech for better focus.

💡 2. Ignition State
Users may scroll to review past text, so the current utterance state should be visible.

💡 3. Text Recognition Status
Text is recognized word by word, with partial blur during input, becoming clear once fully spoken

Three Highlights

1️⃣ Don't miss the context

Dark mode is the default in the chat room for a comfortable visual experience.
The wave icon in the lower-left corner always indicates the current speaking state.
A fixed bottom area ensures users can always see what's being said, even when scrolling or switching screens.

2️⃣ Provide Input and Productivity Features for Diverse Communication

Communicate through text, frequently used phrases, drawings, and images.
Easily find unfamiliar words, with links to quickly use them in user questions.

3️⃣ Linking STT Technology with Service Identity

To add a personal touch, I integrated the concept of ‘belonging and communication’ from UX research through the AUD symbol.
The AUD symbol combines an ear shape (symbolizing hearing) and a yellow color (representing universal design).
The symbol’s 3D design and movement convey the idea of ‘artificial intelligence typing.’

A symbol character jumps and outputs characters for the keyboard.
By linking the images, we conveyed the idea of movement.

Let's make movement

While designing animations, I discovered Lottie, Previously, animations used large vector images with many frames, but Lottie made the process more efficient. It was my first time using this tool, so there was plenty of trial and error, but here’s a brief overview of the process.

Sum up

📍 Next Step
After advanced Hi-Fi prototyping, user tests will be conducted with the initial STT version.
The goal is to verify if users are effectively using the productivity features and if multitasking is needed.

📓 Retrospect
Although ShareTalk 2.0 was not launched due to a departmental decision, the project deepened my understanding of universal and inclusive design, broadening my perspective to consider diverse users. I felt great reward and value in helping users in various situations avoid being marginalized through the solution.