A-Go
A mobile app that connects immigrants with their community.
Duration
Tools
Project
Team
3 days
Google (Doc, Drive, forms)
Figma, FigJam
Miro
Design Challenge
Kaitlyn Tran
Aileen Tran
Enna Phan
Angelina Ciuffo
Role
UX Research | UI Design
I acted as one of the four designers and researchers on the team. I focused heavily on:
- Delving deeper into concepts, questions, and tools
- Brainstorming using templates for further exploration
- Sketching to visually communicate ideas
- Ensuring everyone is heard and ideas considered
- Spokesperson for the group
Project Context
Design your own digital application that fosters community and celebrates inclusivity.
A-Go was created during Design a thon - You Belong Here. Teams partake in a 3-day long hybrid of design and workshop with the goal of creating a product focused on community and inclusivity.
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Our team focused heavily on the idea of neighbors when it came to the community. From neighbors we started to discuss our backgrounds as descendants of Asian American immigrants. We centered our focus on how to incorporate immigrants into the community and neighborhood.
Ideate
The Ws
Figuring out the potential who, what (positive), what (negative), where, why, and when of the prompt.
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We used the ideas to come up with themes and further questions.
Though the definition of neighbor is straightforward forward we created a mind map to explore all the ideas that are connected to a neighbor.
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What is a Neighbor?
From the design challenge and our brain storming, we created our own design question, tailored to our audience.
As designers who can create and inspire change, how can we amplify and empower cultures of community and inclusivity in our neighborhoods, schools, workplaces, and beyond?
How might we use digital tools to connect and build community between neighbors with diverse backgrounds and cultures?
Our Design Question
Research
Though the focus of the design challenge was more on the product than research our team looked at several resources to act as a framework or guiding ideas as we designed.
We also sent out a survey to our fellow participants. Though by the time we had responses
we had taken a slightly different direction. Lesson learned: narrow down the scope of design
in terms of specificity before collecting information.
Example of one of the questions we asked
"Focus on the Audience"
Pain Point
Neighbors
Immigrants
Once we had ideated and researched I thought it would be easy to come up with the design.
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I was wrong.
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When working on the components of the app our different understandings of what community and neighborhood were clearly evident. We also could not decide what direction we wanted to take with our components. We ended up spending a huge amount of time trying to explain to one another our ideas and reasoning.
I asked a mentor to help as I realized we weren't going anywhere fast. His advice was to narrow down our target audience.
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After narrowing down the target audience to immigrants joining a new community we were able to come up with components of our design that tailoring to the experiences of immigrants settling down in a new area.
Design
We began the design process by creating lower fidelity wireframes to get a sense
of how our final design would work and how components would lay on the page. Afterward, we turned the lower fidelity wireframes into higher fidelity wireframes to show what the app would potentially look like.
Reflect
1
Event
This was my first time experiencing a design challenge like this where it tests both your stamina and your ability to work as a team. Over the course of the event, I learned what I do well: Exploring and delving into ideas. Another thing I learned was time management. Knowing when to end the ideation phase and continue moving forwards.
3
Project
When we hit our pain point I feel like we did not delve deep enough into our target audience.
How are immigrants different than normal neighbors?
What functions can we incorporate to better serve immigrants coming into a new community?
If I were to do anything differently, I should have pushed more on what makes our idea unique and different. I would also focus more on stakeholders, as immigrants wouldn't be the only one using the app. Friends, families, and neighbors would also be using the app and in our final design we did not really take them into account
2
Group
Though I did not know much about my teammates before the challenge sharing ideas and stories brought us together as a group. The little things made us whole. Having everyone contribute and work together was a taxing but great experience. I learned a lot about being patient and open even if I didn't understand the direction someone was trying to go.
What's Next?
Though our group has disbanded and there are no current plans to continue the project, I want to continue to explore some of the other ideas I created and analyze the topics of community and neighborhood in the future.
Special thanks to the speakers, mentors, and other participants for sharing your thought processes and design with the world.