Big Sister Facebook Extension

Project Detail

Project Length: 10 Weeks

Project Advisor: Manny Darden

Team Members: Karishma Deole, Viola Wang, Wasinee Winprawet (Myself)

My Role: User Research, storyboarding, prototyping, usability testing

Fact:

21 million female immigrants live in the United States. 85% of immigrant women gain permanent residence in the US through family-based visas.

*Data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)

Pain Points

Immigrant women experience difficulty after moving to the US, due to a lack of support with navigating the way of life and society. Difficulty acclimatizing to their new surroundings results in women feeling isolated, worthless, dependent on their partner, and feeling purposeless.

“I could not work and I realized I did not have a sense of purpose. I realized life is not all about walking, exploring, or painting.” – Damani  

 

User Research

To better understand immigrant women, we talked to them to collect these insights.

Common Themes

  • Feeling dependent
  • Having no support with everyday tasks
  • Trying to make friends via MeetUp, but can’t establish a meaningful relationship
  • Having anxiety and depression due to being isolated
  • Unable to find a local community to connect with other women

User Story

To understand more about our users, we created Yuki.

Yuki moved from Japan to the US to be with her partner. She started her new life without the help of friends or family. After failing at DMV several times due to the language barrier, she reached out to Facebook community. Feeling helpless and lonely, she stumbled upon Big Sister Mentorship. Yuki connected with a sister who speaks Japanese, joined a workshop, and made friends. Finally passed her driving test and are much happier.

Sketches/Low-Fi Prototype

Big Sister started out as a local friend finder app. But after user research and brainstorming, we decided that we wanted to be more intentional in supporting immigrant women. We didn’t want to be another MeetUp app.

To reach women faster, we decided to turn the app into a Facebook Extension.

Building into the Facebook ecosystem helped to expand our user base and helped to reduce the stress of a user learning a new app, since Facebook is already common in most countries.

Initial idea prototype: Social App

Usability Test Findings

Iterations

Information Architecture

We first designed an entering point under Facebook’s main menu. However, we received feedback that Facebook already has Facebook Mentorship and the label “Girlslikeyou” gives poor information scent. So, we reorganized and structured our extension under Facebook Mentorship.

Perceivability

At first, we had our Search page and User Profile page in one screen, using swiping gestures to navigate. We discovered from user testing that most users could not complete the task (finding a Big Sister mentor) because our interface was not perceivable. We redesigned our Search and User Profile screens separately and created clearer interfaces.

We also add a deeper search filter according to what our users consider when looking for a mentor.

Consistency

To coordinate with Facebook design and have more consistency, we needed to go back to Facebook’s style guide. This one is an example of our Big Sister bio page. However, we still wanted to keep the color unique and instead of using blue.

Findings

One of the most important things we learned from this project was how to build a non-native app that lives in the Facebook ecosystem.

What could be improved or added to Big Sister?

  1. Information Architecture – we wanted to keep it simple with a minimal number of pages, but having “event” and “discussion” on the same page might not be the best flow.
  2. ‘Become A Big Sister’ feature – Big Sister Mentorship doesn’t just end at a fun event. We want to make immigrant women feel so confident that they want to share with others. This feature is not only to grow the Mentor’s community, but also for immigrant women to give back and show gratitude to the community.
  3. Deeper filtering – we could use more research to develop more search and filter options. We would love to know what’s important for immigrant women while searching for their mentor.
  4. Explore different touch points – how do new users join from other apps besides Facebook?