VocabTab
4.5 Stars on the Chrome Web Store | Used over 5 million times annually
As a self-taught coder, I feel a remarkable amount of freedom in the projects that I undertake. Without the confines or limitations of an assignment, I am able to produce projects that I genuinely care about creating. One of these projects is VocabTab, a Chrome Extension designed to help English speakers worldwide maintain an impressive vocabulary.
Upon every opening of a new tab or window, users are shown a New York Times word-to-know, along with the user's 12 most-visted websites. I created this extension to be a highly educational but simple tool while making the web browsing experience as easy as before.
I originally designed VocabTab for people like me: a college student hoping to improve his vocabulary in a painless way. After initial deployment and observation of my analytics, I found that VocabTab was most popular in non-English speaking countries. My main users, to my suprise, are foreigners using VocabTab to improve their English skills. This insight helped me shift the focus of my product to better serve my user. I optimized VocabTab for lower resolutions and lower computational stress to ensure that all of my users would have a great experience.
I have loved hearing very positive feedback from users all over the world who use VocabTab everyday. Today, VocabTab is used by thousands of DAUs who use VocabTab millions of times a year.
To aggregate these learnings, I wrote a case study documenting my development and iterative refinement of VocabTab. I describe the insights I observed, the user research I conducted, and the ways I changed VocabTab to best serve users. Feel free to reach out with any questions about VocabTab or the case!
