Application to Amplify Indonesian Sign Language Awareness

“Curiosity. It keeps us moving forward, exploring, experimenting, opening new doors”
— Walt Disney.

Hi! I’m a third year Cyber Security student that passionately curious on many things. Last year, I came across Apple Developer Academy, a program to nurture ingenuity developer with the innovative business mindset. The Academy supports us to develop our own apps and become a well-rounded professional. Through a series of open challenges, students will be able to demonstrate their skills at coding, design and business.

Thank God, I got accepted as the only one female Cyber Security student with 5.6% acceptance rate. In this article I’d love sharing my first individual project — called Nano Challenge, with “Personal Story” as a predetermined big idea.

Thanks to my curiosity, few months earlier, I participated at one of “Teman tuli” events. As a result, I could learn more about deaf culture and it transform my way of perceiving things that they are equally the same with us. In fact, most of us are too ignorant for understanding their conditions. The possible way to thinning the language barrier between “Teman tuli” and “Teman dengar” is acknowledging and understanding the deaf culture. Thus, I decided to bring up this issue as my Nano Challenge project, and I called it Isyarat.

Through Isyarat, I could amplify the awareness towards deaf culture, understand how to approach, and communicate with a deaf friend using BISINDO (Indonesian Sign Language) West Java.

In a nutshell, here’s how I conceptualize and backlog the end-to-end process.

1. Visual Research

First, perform visual research. It’s important to understand color theory and hierarchy in typography to help me determine my app’s visual style. After many scribble, seek reference from Pinterest, search different art style, finally, I found the most suitable main character style for my app. Initially, I draw a girl but since the hair need too much effort, I cut it short and change the gender😆.

Rough Sketching into Digital Art

Next, I choose the most suitable color palette and create a detailed hand gesture of every movements. For the character gesture reference, frequently I took a picture of myself doing the movement to visualize the color shadow and detail hand joints.

Process of making the assets

2. Prototype

First thing before all else, I draw a wireframe. Before using digital software, I use pen and paper to roughly sketch all of the ideas. From my standpoint, I recommend trying Crazy 8 method for fast wireframe creation.

Moving on to prototyping, it’s not solely about the visually appealing element but also able to provide the best User Experience. I use Human Interface Guideline (HIG for short) to assist on app’s design and engineering decision. Example, the appropriate color and placement for the destructive button.

This is my Lo-Fi and Hi-Fi prototype and you could spot a few changes between these two. I could improve the prototype through conducting simple usability testing to few friends and then got feedbacks. After gather those inputs, I tried to explore alternative possibilities. In conclusion, prototyping isn’t a one way trip, we could revise it many times to discover best UI/UX.

Low Fidelity prototype using no color and High Fidelity prototype is the visual representation of the final app

3. Development

I utilize storyboard for representing a visual user interface of the app. For the framework, I use UIKit and UI Animate View. There’re many rooms for improvement, in the future I’d like to implement MVC and Machine Learning to practice the sign language gesture.

Finally, this is the result.

In order to bring a great impact, I must be brave to take risk and stay curious. I’d love to hear your feedback!