Industry Social Impact
Role Design Researcher + UX Designer
Through the Human-Centered Design course offered by IDEO.org, my teammate and I wanted to find ways to improve the lives of the immigrant community. And a year later, I revisited the project again to develop a high fidelity mobile interface.
The Ask
Part of the course agenda is to master the different steps of the human-centered design process to create innovative solutions to real-world challenges.
According to americanimmigrationcouncil.org, one in seven Illinois residents is an immigrant, while one in eight is a native-born U.S. citizen with at least one immigrant parent.
Coming from immigrant families, we understood the importance of helping under-resourced immigrant families to assimilate to the American society. We wanted to create an innovative, effective, and sustainable solution for social change to improve immigrant parenting methods.
Process
Below are some of the techniques we used to approach the design challenge:
Built an effective interview guide to learn and document the primary research
- Gained insights from synthesizing the user research and identifying opportunities for design
Practiced creative techniques to build rapid prototypes and make the idea come to life
We started our research with six user interviews to frame our design challenges:
- How might we help immigrant parents to better bond with their children?
- How might we help immigrant parents to understand that academic achievement is not the only way to children’s future success?
After rounds of contextual inquiries and observations at library and playground aiming to understand the users and their culture more deeply, we realized that the parents’ expectations were built on the belief that college is the only way to have a successful career.
We then focused our effort educating immigrant parents on the alternative ideas that expand the same result and how they can improve their parenting methods by adjusting their parenting approaches.
Output
With the research insights and brainstorming, we built the first paper prototype of an app to further assist immigrant families to communicate more effectively inside and outside their homes. Later on, I challenged myself to improve the user interface and interaction by making the second and third interaction with Sketch and Principle(animation tool).
First Prototype
Second Prototype
Final Prototype
