Milestone 3: Storymapping
Brief - Create a story map and a lofi or midfi prototype for the digital artifact
User Research
Since we were working within a tight timeline, it was difficult to conduct a thorough primary research. We managed to interview two of our target users (a first-gen and a second-gen immigrant student) and then relied on our own experiences to validate or reject any of the proposed design features. With more time on our hands until the next milestone, we hope to interview a parent as well to cover all personas.
We also referenced some existing literature as part of our secondary research.
2.1 Primary Research
We used a version of the Critical Incident Technique as it gave us a good framework of questions to ask the interviewees. Following are some of the questions we asked -
Have there been any experiences where you faced any ethnic/cultural identity-oriented crisis?
Can you describe a time when you navigated a cross-cultural interaction effectively?
Can you describe a time when you felt like you were able to share or celebrate American culture with others in a meaningful way?
Have there been any experience in the past that has motivated you to learn more about your ethnic culture or community?
INSIGHTS
Adjusting to cultural differences - Interviewees admitted to not fully understanding aspects of American culture. Something as simple as communication style was at times difficult to grasp and created barriers.
Not knowing the context - One interviewee remarked that how despite following the rituals and customs, she was unaware of the context behind them. "I was mechanically following some rituals that were to do with the festival but did not have much context and felt very shy to ask thinking it would be assumed that I should know about this. And just as I was thinking this, someone asked me very publicly why I think one performs that ritual. I recollect being very embarrassed of the situation and wished I knew better."
Desire for deeper understanding - An interview mentioned that her motivation to learn more about the community comes from seeing her peers from different cultures. She finds her own engagement often superficial and wants to be a part of the community more authentically.
2.2 Secondary Research
We looked up existing literature around navigating cultural identities in the US. A study conducted by the Pew Research Center about the Asian-American experience was the starting point. It helped us validate many of our hypotheses and modify certain features of our app.
INSIGHTS
Specific Ethinicity vs a Broader Label - People often report dissatisfaction at being put into broad categories instead of being able to identify with their unique and diverse ethinicities. For example, the word Asian-American often conjures up images of people from East Asian countries alone, such as China, Japan and Korea; and ignores people with many different identities such as Burmese, Cambodian, Indian etc.
Interacting in one's own community helps - Immigrants often find it easier to socialize with others belonging to their ethnicity. Sharing personal stories and challenges allows them to feel a sense of security. This insight strengthened the reasoning behind allowing users to create and post their own content on the platform. Sharing experiences and stories via the activities would help people in feeling more seen and less alienated.
Language is a key element of one's identity - Speaking the same language greatly increases affinity amongst people. This led to including multi-lingual captions for the content users will be posting on the platform. Restricting to a single language means that a lot of context is lost and expressions, idioms etc. do not translate very well. Allowing people to post in their native language will help get around this.
Not doing enough - Research suggested that a lot of second-gen immigrants are confused and disappointed at not doing enough. Not conforming to the so-called stereotypes of their culture makes them feel disconnected and brings in a lot of guilt and frustrations.
Navigating Persona Ambiguity
The first step of the storymap was deciding our personas. In the first milestone, we had a vague idea of building the app for immigrants as the primary users. However, as we began working on the storymap, we realized everyone had a slightly different idea of who the target population would be and had been thinking of some combination of the following 4 personas -
First-gen immigrants
First-gen immigrant with children
Second-gen immigrants
Second-gen immigrants with children
This became really complicated. While we initially planned to design for some primary and a few secondary users, we were having trouble narrowing them down. It was here that someone pointed out that we had been confusing user personas and target user population all this time.
An important point of contention that created this confusion in the first place was our understanding of how the design of the app would change for first and second-gen immigrants. We drew insights from our own experiences and friends around us. The following persona map will help clarify these distinctions.
Final Personas
We clarified our user base which would be either parents, or parents with adolescent kids. "Adolescents", as this prevents further complications that come with designing content keeping children in mind. We would potentially like to expand the user base further, but from an MVP point-of-view, we chose to go ahead with this.
Deciding Flows
Following were the four features that we had decided on in our previous milestone -
“Activity for the Week” feature. This would have a simple activity that parents and children could do together
Create your own activities and post about them on your profiles.
See events and fundraisers happening around you relevant to your community.
Be able to access Regional Calendars
We deviated from the above in some ways -
While working on the storymaps, it became quite clear that the "Activity of the week" would be a pretty vast and the central feature of the app. The vision and the guiding principle of the product would be about "remembering and reconnecting with your roots", and incorporating events and fundraisers into the app did not align with this principle very well. A case could be made for the opposite indeed, but we collectively decided to scope it for later releases.
There was a lot of debate around the second feature about creating one's own content. But a detailed discussion convinced us that this would motivate people to try out activities by seeing what other people have done and put their own twist on it, and also create a more engaging experience. We played around with some smaller features to ensure that it does not devolve into a typical content-centric social media platform (as there is of course no shortage of those).
The Regional Calendar feature seemed to be a much more important feature. Since a lot of cultures do not stick to the Gregorian calendar, it can become difficult to calibrate festivals and important events. And so the Regional Calendar would save those frantic Google searches and calls back home and give a centralised place to track festivals and such.
We introduced a feature to browse activities from other cultures. Our user interviews highlighted that knowing about other cultures helps them to "fit in" with their surroundings and also acts like an interesting informative source.
3.1 Final Flows
The Onboarding Flow - User creates an account, specifies their background and chooses their interests.
Find an Activity - User browses the library of activities the app has, and selects one
Doing the activity - User does one of the activities, tracks its progress and posts about it
Trying out activities from other cultures - User explores activities from other cultures and tries them out
Regional Calendar - User can view the calendar and bookmark important dates, set reminders etc.
Favourites - User can save an activity they like and do it later
Storymaps
Modified lo-fi frames
Onboarding
Find an activity that is interested
Doing the activity and tracking the progress
Calendar Flow
Profile Flow
