Create social connections to immigrants in their new home.
The United States is a melting pot, many immigrants are coming to the states every year to live the American dream. Relocating to a new country is not easy, and it comes with many challenges such as language barriers, and cultural differences. Since they are starting from square one in a different country, most of them lack social support and suffer loneliness from alienating from their community. How are we going to provide the social connections needed to integrate into society in their new home?
Role
Timeline
Tools
Team
Apoyo means “support” in Spanish. The project will focus on creating a MVP that will help new immigrants and refugees to get social support by connecting people from similar backgrounds.
View Final PrototypeResearch Plan
Research Goals
Assumptions
Methodologies
First, I conducted a market research to understand the immigrant community in general and what kind of services are helping them. Market Research provides critical information to determine who and where the customers are, and evaluate where do we stand. So, Here are some of the highlights from the research and view the full research here.
Immigrants account for one-third of all Ph.D. workers in the critical fields of science, technology, engineering and math.
67 percent of immigrants in the United States for 15 years or more can't speak much English.
Median household income varies from $100,000 among Indians to $36,000 among Burmese. Poverty rates among Asians are as high as 35 percent among Burmese and 33 percent among Bhutanese.
On an annual basis, 276,000 immigrants 50 and older now settle in the country, including 213,000 immigrants 55 and older, and 113,000 who are 65 and older.
Local libraries and community centers are also excellent places to find groups that meet regularly. They may meet to study English, talk about books, play chess, swim laps in the pool, play board games, whatever. See what offerings they have, and join something.
One study shows that Mexican immigrants in the US have a 40% higher rate of depression and anxiety than their relatives who stayed in Mexico. María Elena Rivera, a psychologist in Tepic, Mexico, believes that the increased ability to “phone home” can actually worsen homesickness, as the immigrants get constant reminders of what they are missing.
Following the market research, I researched my competitors (both direct and indirect) to learn their approaches to solving similar problems for their customers. View the full competitive analysis here.
Helps immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees to find Nearby Resources on a map.
• Can be used as a website or an app
• Can find resources for job, advice, legal, health, English classes, etc
• Easy to use like a Google Map
• No multiple languages options
• Similar informations that you can find on Google
Provides the aid and resources from trusted official organizations.
• Options for 5 different languages
• Provide resources from 5000 trusted services providers
• Shows what is available within 100 miles from the user
• Inconsistency in UI Design
• Buggy such as having error when signing up
Meet new people and access to thousands of events both online and in-person.
• Meet new people who have common interest
• Find numbers activities based on your interest
• Monitor the users such like report feature or message/email to the organizer for any concern
• Selection is limited compared to many other competitors
• Price compared to new competition
Provisional Personas - I created the personas based on the insights and demographics that I obtained from the market research. The interviewees will be chosen based on these personas.
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• To maximize their potential in their career
• To pursue advanced degrees
• Homesickness
• Competition with natives in the workforce
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• To seek greater economic opportunity
• To provide a better future for the family
• Language Barrier
• Less Educated
• Low Income
• To connect with other elders within the ethnic communities
• To get support from family
• Suffer loneliness
• Less capability to adapt
• Language Barrier
After having a better understanding of the market and competitors, I decided to move forward with the primary research (1:1 user interviews) to gain deeper insights from the users such as their wants, needs, and pain points. I have 5 participants, and their ages range between 18-57 years old. They are both female and male immigrants who came to the US to chase their dreams regardless of their race, ethnicity, education, etc. Here are some of the participants and myself in the pictures below. View the full interview script here.
Empathy Mapping: I reviewed my notes and recording during the interview and wrote the key statements on the sticky notes. To synthesize the research findings, I created empathy mapping to identify common patterns among participants during the interview. From empathy mapping, I uncovered four insights and generated four needs.
Based on the insights that I obtained from the research, I created two personas to represent our primary users. Meet our personas Suu and Phang, a fictional but realistic personas. Suu is a high-skilled professional immigrant that represents high-income group. Phang is an immigrant that believes American dream is for everyone regardless her status. I'm going to use this persona during the entire design process to ensure a user-centered design. View the second persona here.
After generating the insights and needs from the affinity map, it's time to define the problem. Based on the insights and need generated from the empathy map, I create POV statements and HMW questions.
• POV - Point of View statement is is a way of articulating the problem in an actionable and insightful way from the user’s perspective
• Based on the POV statement, HMW questions are created to launch the brainstorming sessions to explore ideas to solve the design challenges.
After generating HMW questions, I used the mind mapping method to generate as many ideas as possible to solve HMW questions. I set a specific time frame for each round. I can refresh my mind and start the next round without wasting much time while having a mental block.
After synthesizing the research, I moved forward with defining product goals. Before we ideate our products or features, it's crucial to know what businesses and users want, and if those goals can be feasible from the technical aspects. I made a Venn diagram to lay out user's goals, business goals, and technical considerations and defined the necessary features for our product. Here, we can see some goals are overlapped, and we can define them as common goals.
After brainstorming the possible features for Apoyo, I grouped them into 4 categories (Must Have, Nice to Have, Surprising, and Delightful, Can Have later). The Categories are based on the effort level and importance of the feature. This roadmap will be referred to in further product development.
Following the product goals and feature roadmap, I created an app map to organzine the contents on the app. This has helped me to visualize the structure of the app and ensure if it best suits the user's needs.
After creating the app map, which is the skeleton of our product, I moved forward with creating task flows that will help me visualize what step my personas "Suu" and "Phang" will take to complete certain tasks. Creating a task flow is crucial before sketching anything because it helps us visualize the motivations and primary steps that the users want to complete a task or accomplish a goal. The task below is defined on HMW questions and the steps that "Suu" will take during a specific task flow. View full task flows here.
As a new customer, As a new customer, Suu just wants to register an account and join a USMLE prep group in NYC.
Following the task flow, I created user scenarios that help me empathize with the context of our users and articulate their goals and motivations. Unlike task flows, user flows indicates the steps users might make based on the decisions they make. With this flow, we are making sure to put ourselves in user's shoes to give them best experiences that we possibility can. This user flow is to uncover the possible steps Suu and Phang would take to complete the task based on different scenarios.
Once I have outlined major requirements for the app, I created a UI requirement list which is a to-do list for the key elements identified in the flow chart. After mapping out the list of the key screens I'm going to create, I grabbed a pen and paper to visualize my idea in sketches because this is easiest and fastest way to interpret my ideas.
After deciding the visual layout to move forward, I digitized my sketch to mid-fi wireframes on Figma. I reviewed many competitor apps to familiarize myself with how the contents are structured, how screens are linked because I don't have to reinvent the wheel. I think I should come up with patterns that users are already familiar with. Therefore, users don't have to learn new things when they use the app. This allows me to visualize the priorities such as the hierarchy and usability without taking too much time to implement the details such as color and font.
I surveyed the interviewees and their families about what phone they use? The result shows 85% of the participants use iPhones. Plus, according to the data from statista.com, iPhone users in the US increased from 42.3% in 2014 to 46.9% in 2021. Although the data doesn’t represent the entire immigrant community in the US, these two data can support why we should design for the iPhone first. Then, Android comes later.
Following the Mid-Fi Screens, I added interactions based on the task flows mentioned above so that users can interact with the prototype during the usability testing. Click here to view the Mid-Fi prototype.
Since we have the working prototype, it's time to test how the users will interact with it. From this testing, We are going to find deeper insights to identify errors and improvements. We will also evaluate whether if it can validate the assumptions or not. Before conducting the research, I created a plan to outline the research goal, objectives, and tasks. View the full testing plan here.
I used the "Think Aloud" method to conduct the usability testing because it is inexpensive, and no special requirement is needed. I took notes as my participants talked. I recruited 5 participants through friends and family who are both immigrants and iPhone users. I conducted the testing via Zoom.
After conducting the usability testing, I summarized the test results with affinity mapping to find the patterns while the users were interacting with the prototype. Like the empathy mapping, I broke down the transcripts and wrote down the key elements on the sticky notes. I was able to obtain five insights from the mapping. I generated five suggestions for improvements based on the insights.
I used a priority matrix to evaluate the impact and effort level of suggestions. The matrix includes four quadrants that start with Low Impact, Low Effort on the bottom left, and end with High Impact, High Effort on the upper right. Since we have limited time and resources, we need to prioritize the lists before implementation.
After evaluating the suggestions on the priority matrix, I decided to update all the suggested features since both of them lie in the (High Impact - Low effect and High Impact - High Effort) quadrants.
1. Add skip button on the onboarding screens.
2. Add price tag in the corner of the image.
3. Add return button in search Result Page.
First, I started brainstorming on brand attributes representing Apoyo based on the project brief. Then, I developed a mood board on Pinterest that reflects the brand attributes "Friendly, Hopeful, Warm, Bold".
Afterwards, I started working on various options of logos and moved forward with the one that contemplates Apoyo's core values (friendly and Bold). It's essential to keep in mind that the logo must be scalable and readable.
Following the logo, I created a style title to build a visual reference for the brand. For Typography, I chose Rubik which is a san-service typeface. The round corner looks friendly, and adding stoke can be bold as well. I used blue as my brand color since it represents friendly. Yellow, the accent color represents warm. Then when we put them together, they can be bold. We also have high quality images and illustrations that can tell story of friendliness and hope.
Following the sketches and brand guide, I have a solid understanding of what we are going to build. So, I added the visual details to create high-fi screens. Following that, I will be adding interactions to high-fi screens to create an MVP, and ask the approval by stakeholders before development.
Following the high-fi wireframes, I created a working prototype for iOS application. We will use this MVP to present to the stakeholders and get approved to move forward with development. The prototype is created based on task flows above to complete two tasks here.
Task 1: As a new customer, Suu just wants to register an account and join a USMLE Prep group in NYC.
Task 2: As an exciting customer, Phang wants to search for an ESL class nearby.
I created a iOS UI kit to build a collection of components and resources that help the designers and engineers to build the UI faster in the further steps. This UI kit is a living document and will be updated as far as the product is built further.
Measuring the impact and utilizing data are vitally important to create a sustainable product. Based on the metrics below, I am conducting further testings in the future to collect more qualitative and quantitive to measure both the business and user experiences' success.
To measure how happy customers are with the feature through user interviews and surveys.
To collect the percentage of tasks that users complete correctly through the usability test.
To track app crashes per user to understand the technical barriers that are harming the user experience.
To measure the popularity of the app after launch.
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To measure the number of people who register and use the app after installation, which will be used to calculate the app's retention rate over time.
The average revenue per user from paid subscriptions (events/ classes/groups) to measure the financial success.
Since I designed a new app, I learned how to analyze, and apply the data from the primary and secondary research in creating an MVP product. The most exciting part of this project for me was having an opportunity to build the design system from the ground up.
If I had more time, I would be interviewing more participants from different immigrant communities to expand the sample size to increase the significance level of the findings of the users' group.
After having the design revised and approved by the stakeholders, the product is ready to hand off to the developer team.
• Export all the visual components
• Use the Figma Inspector to hand-off to the dev team
• Assist with any questions regarding design during the dev phase
Design System
A Responsive Layout grid
Etrade
Website Refresh
