Digital reading platform. Case study: classical chinese reading platform

Abstract

Classical Chinese (“ancient text”) is a written form of old Chinese, which has lasted for more than two thousand years in Chinese literary history. In today’s China, classical Chinese have lost its function as a usable language in people’s daily life due to the difficulties in realms of grammar and characters. But it still appears in the education from elementary school to high school as a compulsory course to cultivate young students’ national and cultural pride towards traditional Chinese culture.

“Ju Dou She” project is about creating a new online classical Chinese digital library supplemented by online writing and forum. This thesis expressly describes the entire user experience design process in “Ju Dou She” project, from the motivation all the way to the initial software wireframe prototypes and their evaluation. Reading behaviour and Self-directed learning serve as the most relevant theoretical frameworks for this project. I conducted benchmarking and interviews, and create the navigation map, three personas and the related scenarios to compile the design requirements. Based on the requirements and scenarios, I focused on four main pages including Welcome page, Reading list page, Reading page, and Writing page. After the evaluation, users’ feedbacks were adopted selectively in the final user interface visual design.

Based on results extracted from the empirical studying, I found that though the classical Chinese does not have the implemental scenarios, the willingness of reading classical Chinese remains. I summarized three concerns of the users. When they are reading the classical Chinese, they require assistance from the human or non-human instructor, communication, and the emotional response. I listed all of the functions that can meet these three requirements. In the end, I summarized the lessons I learned from the developing process and brought forth the proposition that continue study.