For my undergraduate capstone, I explored how mentorship could help new Vietnamese immigrants in the United States navigate integration tasks through researching, designing, and prototyping a mentorship app.
Problem + Outcomes
Helping new immigrants move through integration tasks.
Problem: Integration tasks such as learning English, finding employment, and finding community are often challenging for new immigrants to navigate. Mentorship and support are helpful, but can be difficult to find due to geographic location.
Outcomes: Designed an app idea that makes it easier for new immigrants to find mentorship from others who have immigrated from Vietnam. Gained experience with creating and distributing a survey to 10 folks, conducting in-depth interviews with 2 folks, and creating over 100+ prototype screens to fully imagine the app's functionality and iterate to find the most helpful solution.
UX Research
Finding common themes among people new the United States, especially those from Vietnam.
Secondary Research: I started the research process by conducting secondary research using relevant academic sources, with a goal of understanding particularly difficult areas of the integration process and systems that affect the immigration process.
Primary Research: I initially intended to primarily conduct research through a survey but results were mixed, making it difficult to draw helpful insights. I pivoted to conducting two in-depth interviews over Zoom with individuals who had immigrated to the U.S. from Vietnam.
Notable Research Insights • Fellow Vietnamese individuals are perceived as more willing to help, assuming a shared understanding of immigration experiences. • Being able to share the integration experience with others who are going through the same thing helps recent immigrants feel more supported. • Various aspects of individuals' lifestyles in Vietnam carry into their lives in the United States. • The integration process becomes less overwhelming when someone close has had similar experiences and can offer guidance.
Process Work
Using mentorship to help new immigrants receive advice and support from those who share common experiences.
From my research, I created the following problem statement to frame my focus:
How might we help people who recently immigrated from Vietnam to the United States share their integration experiences with people who have similar backgrounds to increase meaningful support, guidance, and understanding?
From my competitive analysis of resources available for new immigrants, I found the most common gaps in available resources were resources not being available in areas without a large Vietnamese population, and resources not being available in Vietnamese.
To better frame my goals, I used these considerations to imagine the impact on the current user journey I wanted MySpot to have.
After sketching, I decided to design a mentorship app that was gamified and centered around Vietnamese folks familiar with living in the U.S. providing guidance to Vietnamese folks new to the U.S.. The info architecture map below is modified from feedback I received on my initial proposal from my professor and classmates.
Design
Combining mentorship, gamification, and a community forum in one app.
My low-fidelity prototypes.
In my low-fidelities, I had an Instagram-like feature to incentivize community participation, as users could use in-app points to give posts more visibility. From usability testing, I learned that this social media feature distracts from the value of forums, which provides space to give support without focusing on popularity.
As I moved into my high-fidelity, I designed a "super mentors" feature for the forums page and removed the social media feed to better focus MySpot on mentorship. The "super mentor" badge is an incentive that gives particularly helpful mentors in the MySpot community a bigger voice to make a difference - indicated by a badge of trust.
Gamification and incentivizing in MySpot.
A variety of in-person and remote resources for those outside of Vietnamese hotspot locations.
Different views for mentors & mentees.
Becoming a mentor is easy, just fill out our mentor quiz!
A mini design system to keep my app visually consistent.
My final high-fidelity prototype (for-now).
Learnings + Next Steps
Presenting the idea to grow as a storyteller.
During this project, I gained more experience with gamification and was able to pivot my design direction based on feedback received in order to better align my design with my design requirements. For the final deliverable of this project, I created a 3x3' informative poster outlining my research, put together a few small booklets highlighting the style sheet, and created the video above for the BFA Exhibition at UIUC. In creating and presenting these deliverables, I was able to grow in my storytelling.
If this project continued (I am considering revisiting this for my Master's capstone), my next steps would be to conduct usability testing to continue iteration.
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