Nihongo Nepal: Designing a Learning Experience Beyond the Classroom

Overview

Nihongo Nepal is a Japanese-learning platform for students enrolled at partner language institutes in Nepal. The student app brings together lessons, flashcards, learning resources, quizzes, and mock exams.

I was one of two designers on a team of two designers, a Product Manager, and Product Owners. I contributed to the product from early research and structure through interaction design and implementation QA, while also contributing to product decisions.

The Problem

Students were already learning Japanese through classroom teaching, textbooks, teacher explanations, videos, and supplementary materials. The harder problem was continuing that learning outside the classroom.

The product needed to support several things at once: learning new material, practicing specific concepts, revising forgotten material, and preparing for Japanese proficiency exams. At the same time, students could have different proficiency levels and learning needs, while institutes could differ in how they taught and organized material.

We therefore weren't designing a single linear course. We were designing a system that could give students structure without making every learning activity dependent on the same path.

Research

Our research covered student context, existing learning materials, classroom practices, competitor products, and Japanese exam formats. One of the most useful distinctions was between the different jobs the product needed to support.

• A lesson introduces something new.
• Practice reinforces it.
• Revision brings forgotten material back.
• Assessment measures whether it has been learned.

This led us to use Learn → Drill → Test as a conceptual model for organizing the product.

Rather than making the entire app follow that sequence rigidly, we used it to connect related experiences while allowing students to enter at different points.

That distinction influenced several of the core flows.

Key Design Decisions

01. Turning flashcards into active practice

Flashcards were initially easy to think of as a simple vocabulary feature: show a word, reveal its meaning, move on.

Our research and design exploration pointed toward a more active interaction. If a student got an item wrong, simply moving past it would not help much with retention.

For flashcards, we therefore designed a remediation loop:

Question → Mistake → Explanation → Practice → Retry

Incorrect items could return to practice and remain there until they were answered correctly multiple times.

This made flashcards part of the learning process rather than just a reference library.

02. Designing assessments around the real exam

Exam preparation required a different approach from everyday practice.

We researched JLPT and JFT structures and translated their question types and constraints into digital interactions, including vocabulary, kanji, grammar, reading, listening, timers, navigation, answer states, and submission behavior.

The challenge wasn't simply supporting many question types. It was making each one behave appropriately.

For example, listening questions had different playback and navigation constraints from written questions. JLPT and JFT also required different interaction treatments rather than being presented as two versions of the same generic test.

The result was an assessment experience designed around the structure of the exams students were preparing for, rather than around a generic quiz component.

03. Making course structure useful without making it restrictive

The learning content was organized around chapters, lessons, topics, practice, and supporting resources.

We introduced connections between these layers so students could move from learning into relevant practice instead of having to navigate the entire course manually. A lesson could lead into practice for a particular rule, while resources remained available for revision.

This was especially important because the app needed to serve students at different stages of learning. The structure provided a clear path without assuming that everyone would always move through the material in exactly the same way.

04. Designing for the actual learning environment

The product also had to work beyond an ideal classroom scenario.

Japanese and localized content needed to coexist clearly. Audio was important across multiple learning activities. We considered device and connectivity limitations, including offline access to learning resources.

These constraints influenced interaction patterns, typography, content presentation, and states throughout the app.

The goal was not simply to digitize classroom content, but to make that content usable when students were studying on their own.

Landing Page

Alongside the student product, I contributed to the Nihongo Nepal landing page, designed for both app-store review and potential institute partners.

The page intentionally kept the structure focused:

Hero → Team → Features → CTA

Rather than building a long SaaS-style marketing page, we prioritized quickly establishing what Nihongo Nepal is, who is behind it, and what the product actually provides.

The visual direction used the product itself as evidence, with real interface screens and a Japanese-influenced visual language while maintaining a professional educational tone.

Outcome

The MVP launched with the core student learning experience covering lessons, practice, flashcards, resources, quizzes, and exam preparation. It is now being introduced through partner institutes.

Because the product is still early in adoption, the most meaningful outcome at this stage is the product itself: a single learning environment connecting classroom-aligned content with independent practice and assessment.

For me, the project reinforced a principle that shaped many of the design decisions:

The goal wasn't to give students more learning features. It was to make the next useful learning action easier to find and use.