First-generation and immigrant student app
ONLY 28% OF FIRST-GENERATION STUDENTS ARE IMMIGRANTS, BUT ALMOST ALL IMMIGRANT STUDENTS ARE FIRST-GENERATION STUDENTS. The main challenge of this project was to create an environment for these two populations, which will help them overcome the majority of academic challenges that they have.
overview
Client
Fictitious university project for first-generation students and immigrant students population.
Task
In five months make a UX research and develop a high-fidelity prototype based on the findings.
Team
Three DePaul students majoring in UX
Role in Project
Interviewing
Ideation
Prototyping
User Testing
Process
- Discover – learn about user
- Define – determine user needs
- Ideate – find solutions
- Prototype – create user environment
- Test – validate with users
- Iterate – implement new findings
DIScover
The goal of this research is to better understand how first-generation students and immigrant student populations can be supported by educational institutions? What can they provide these populations with in order to help them achieve academic success? To answer these questions during our research we conducted eleven face-to-face interviews through Zoom. Here is the link to the script that was used for these interviews. On the right, you can see our discoveries from these interviews.
define
After collecting and organizing all information from the interviews, our group built three personas and highlighted the main challenges that these populations face:
Personas
Immigrant students highlighted that language is their main challenge
Educational systems are different around the world and immigrant students have to adapt to new system
Both populations are facing not understanding how the educational system works. Because of that, they need more advising than other students
Since parents of first-generation students are not familiar with how education in the US works, students have to explore everything by themselves.
Both populations found that communication with students with similar experiences is easier for them.
ideate
During the ideation process, our group built an affinity diagram on Miro to organize the data we collected from interviews and to find any patterns or data that stand out. Based on this diagram we started brainstorming potential solutions.
For our affinity diagram, we made four sections to highlight the similarities and differences between our populations:
- First-generation students
- Immigrant students
- Differences
- Similarities
After that, we came up with a few potential solutions.
Affinity diagram
Potential solutions
Prototype
For this project, our team went through the creation of Site Map, Mid Fidelity, and High Fidelity prototypes for the app using Figma. Here you can familiarize yourself with Site Map and Prototype . All rounds of prototyping took us three months. Based on our research our team focused on four main elements of the app:
- Assistant– helps students navigate through academic environment
- Resources – all university resources with hints collected in one place for easy access
- Translate – functionality that allow students to translate text, voice, and text from images
- Messages – academic-related chats from other messengers grouped in one place
test
For this project, we went through two rounds of usability testing, and in total, we got twelve tests.
During the first round of testing we found that:
- The top panel was conflicting with the IPhone layout
- The positioning of some elements was confusing
- For some users icons were hard to understand
- Some components did not work properly
For the second round our team prepared five scenarios:
- Sign up in the app
- Schedule an appointment with professor
- How would you translate text through camera?
- Using the Assistant mic, send Joshua Lawrence message
- Allow access for the first four messengers
After the second round testing, we found that:
- The settings section did not appear and fade properly
- The assistant screen did not have quick navigations for most used functions
- The translation section did not provide users with feedback after task completion
- On a few screens, users could not return to the previous screen
All bugs were registered and fixed
Reflection
The challenge of this project was to create an environment that will help first-generation students and immigrant students adapt to the role of students in the US. During our research process, we found that these two populations intersect in many ways and have similar challenges. Most immigrant students are first-generation students and at first look, these populations share the same challenges. But often Immigrant students have educational experience in their country. Accordingly, even if these populations are self-inclusive, they still have different needs and the creation of a universal app was challenging.
But with a proper UX Research process our team identified the main challenges of given populations and developed concepts to solve them.
Click on the phone to see the final result →
