BigSister

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.

Overview

There are at least 21 million immigrant women in the United States, which is over 13 percent of the nation’s female population. Immigrant women come from all over the world, primarily through a family-based process, rather than through employment like their male counterparts. The majority are likely to be in their working age which means that the majority of immigrant women arrive with no job.

Team

Wasinee Win – UX/UI Designer 

Viola Wang – UX/UI Designer

Advisor

Manny Darden – Senior UX Designer, Apple

Timeline

10 Weeks

Tools

Figma, Miro, Lucid Charts

Problem

Immigrant women experience extreme difficulty in acclimatizing to their new surroundings and community, resulting in feeling isolated and dependent on their partner. To provide community-based mentorship by immigrant women for immigrant women that supports their unique needs as they start a new life.

Goal

To provide community-based mentorship by immigrant women for immigrant women that supports their unique needs as they start a new life.

The Solution

Integrating a mentorship platform into the Facebook ecosystem. This will allow users to organically find new connections and the required support.

Research Takeaways

1 m

Female immigrants live in the USA

1 %
Immigrant women gain residency in the US through family based visas as opposed to an employment based visa.

Interview

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?

Based on the affinity map, we identified some key priorities to address

Persona

It was important for us to define a persona that could accurately represent our target users. This persona ensured that we incorporated the key needs and expectations of our future users which helped us 
User story sketch
User Story

Design

Initial User FLow

Low Fidelity Sketch

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

Wireframes

Initial idea of social app

Refining the product

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.

Updated User Journey

1. Onboarding

2. Pick your mentor from the recommendations 

3. Connect with your mentor

Style Guide

The UI elements had to be in correspondence with Facebook.

Mid Fidelity

uxfolio mid fed old idea

Usability Testing Insights and Iterations

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)

Information Architecture for Homescreen

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.

Onboarding

The initial homepage displayed recommendation of BigSister (mentor) based on location. During user testing I observed that participants were confused on how they landed on this page. So I added filters on the landing page to let users know how recommendation works.

Consistent Design

Our interface design had to be consistent to Facebook’s style guide. The profile page is one such example.

Prototype

Learnings

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.