SpeakEasy App

The idea for SpeakEasy was born in 2015 traveling through (and being lost in) Japan. We found that easy tasks like finding a bath room, or ordering food become extremely challenging when there's no shared language. Machine translation solutions like Google Translate sort of work, however, for a more complex topic it just doesn't work. Our solution was creating a smartphone app that provides travelers with remote, on-demand language support from human interpreters: SpeakEasy.

The user interface and experience design for the smartphone application was focused on a single objective: enabling the user to get a hold of an interpreter as fast as possible. The reason is, that once you're in a situation where you need help from someone, you need it right away and don't want to wait.

To keep things simple, a large round "call button" in the middle of the screen became the focal point of the UI/UX design. Using different colors, users were informed of the current state of the connection (yellow for connecting and green for connected). Once the user is calling, 2 additional features become available: a timer informs the user of called time, while an on/off button allows the user to toggle speaker mode.

At the bottom of the screen the user can switch between language pairs, while the app bar gives access to a profile page (with payment information), a call log and an about page. SpeakEasy is available in English, Mandarin Chinese, Standard Modern Arabic and Russian.

Project: https://www.behance.net/gallery/79789519/SpeakEasy-Startup