Gravitate
UX Research • Strategy
The Challenge
How might we design a mobile product to facilitate the social integration for migrants to the USA?
Overview
Migrants face a variety of challenges (e.g. social, cultural, logistical) when adjusting to a host country. This may result in feelings of isolation and depression in migrants. However, there is no current single unified solution to help migrants address these challenges.
As such, we developed Gravitate, a one-stop solution to provide migrants with emotional and practical support. By doing so, Gravitate aims to facilitate the social integration of migrants to the USA, thus improving a migrants’ overall well-being.
During this project, I led the user research, strategy and usability testing of the product.
My Role
Lead UX Researcher
The Team
2 UX researchers
2 UX designers
Duration
August - December 2023
Skills
Interviews
Surveys
Field Studies
Affinity Mapping
Task Analysis
Usability Testing
Tools
Qualtrics
Notion
Miro
FigJam
Figma
How we approached the problem space
We began by conducting secondary research using Google Scholar and the ACM Digital Library. From this, we gained insight into the characteristics of migrants, the type of problems they faced, and the existing solutions.
To supplement our research, we conducted observational field studies of two locations in Atlanta that draw a large international community. Through this, we drew these key takeaways:
(1) international migrants value their culture (as seen in the many posters advertising cultural events, stores selling ethnic food and clothing)
(2) international migrants gather to form their own cultural communities and develop social support
This prompted us to consider how these cultural communities form, the support that cultural communities offered and lacked, and the role that preservation of culture had in helping migrants to adjust.
To address these questions, we deployed a Qualtrics survey to understand characteristics of migrants, their perception and experience of social integration, their existing support network and the role of culture in their lives. We received 165 survey responses and determined that most migrants to the USA had come alone for education and wanted close friends, a mentor, and cultural community for practical and emotional support when moving to a new country.
We then carried out 6 semi-structured interviews with migrants to the USA. Through this, we gained a firsthand perspective of migrants’ experiences with social integration and analyzed the results with an affinity map.
From the affinity map, we identified major themes which were used to develop 2 personas. This helped to humanize and better empathize with our target users.
We also conducted hierarchical task analyses of two major tasks that migrants engage in when adjusting to a new country: (1) obtaining practical support from others regarding essential needs (e.g housing, visas, food, etc.) and (2) how migrants connect with their own culture.
Through this, we were able to identify gaps in support and draw design implications. We identified community building, improving access to resources and facilitating cultural exchange as our top three design implications.
Summarizing the Problem
Migrants face a variety of challenges (e.g. social, cultural, logistical) when adjusting to a new country. However, there is no single unified solution to help migrants solve these problems.
Ideation & Next Steps…
We utilized How Might We statements, the SCAMPER technique and storyboarding for our ideation process.
We came up with 10 different ideas and narrowed it to our top 2, based on feasibility and how well they fulfilled our design requirements. We are currently working on low-fidelity wireframes, user testing, and will eventually develop a design system and high-fidelity prototype.
