The Solution
Integrating a mentorship platform into the Facebook ecosystem. This will allow users to organically find new connections and the required support.
Facebook extension for immigrant women to find help and support in the community
GirlsLikeYou is a Facebook extension providing a platform for immigrant women to support each other through a mentorship program that addresses their unique needs.
To provide community-based mentorship by immigrant women for immigrant women that supports their unique needs as they start a new life.
Female immigrants live in the USA
For this project, I decided to conduct User Interviews because it was important for me to understand the story behind a participant’s experience. This qualitative research approach helped me gain an in-depth understanding of their pain points so I could empathize and address them.
I conducted in-person and remote interviews with 8 women who fit the target audience.
Research Questions
1. What are the needs of an immigrant woman?
2. What are the everyday struggles of an immigrant woman?
3. How does an immigrant woman find support in her local community?
I started sketching some ideas for a native app. Some features of this app were:
1. Finding a mentor near you
2. Connecting with the mentor
3. Attending events hosted by your mentor
4. Chat box
BigSister was initially a stand-alone local friend finder app. However, after conducting and synthesizing user research and iterating, we concluded that Facebook extension was a more effective solution.
Why Facebook ?
The main intention behind this concept was to provide mentorship, and we need more features to create a native app.Facebook is global and already has features like Events, Messenger and Groups, which are already set up to serve our target market.By building out an extension within Facebook, we could instantly resolve any learnability issues, since it is widely used globally. Facebook has key demographic information about each user that would be extremely relevant in the process of recommendation.
1. Onboarding
2. Pick your mentor from the recommendations
3. Connect with your mentor
I conducted usability testing with 3 participants to get meaningful insight on the mid fidelity prototype.
The purpose of this testing was:
To verify if the extension is better than a native app
To verify if users can find a mentor they want
To verify if users can find events, they want to participate in
To verify that if users encounter problems, they can they seek help from big sister(mentor)
The initial design was to have GirlsLikeYou right under Facebook’s main menu. However, we received feedback that label “Girlslikeyou” gives poor information scent. So, we reorganised to structure our extension under Facebook Mentorship.
Our interface design had to be consistent to Facebook’s style guide. The profile page is one such example.
My key learnings from this project are:
1. As a designer it is important to be flexible. Your final product will almost never be what your initial idea was.
2. When conducting user research, if you are able to empathize with the users your solution will be more effective.
3. How to design for an extension in a pre-existing app, using the same UI elements.
info@karishmadeole.com
© 2024 Karishma Deole Design