Immpowered
Role
UX Designer
Method
User Interview
Personas
Journey Map
Tool
Adobe Illustrator
Sketch
Invision
Date
Aug 2017 -
Dec 2017
Intro
Immpowered is a web application that teaches and guides immigrants in NYC to existing resources for job transition, capitalizing on skills and education they brought to the U.S. The project was done in a team of 5 and is a collaboration between Cornell Tech and Robin Hood Foundation - largest poverty fighting organization in NYC.
Challenge
How might we support immigrants trying to capitalize on the skills and education they brought with them to the U.S. to achieve greater financial stability for themselves and their families?
Demo
This demo video tells the story, please watch it before proceed
Process
Our research result in three wedges that could improve immigrants situation in job market.
Unwrap
Being realistic about our goals given the timeframe, we focused on immigrants with bachelor's degrees, and proper visa documentation. In 2014, 24% of the immigrants had a bachelor's or higher degree. However, nearly 40% of the immigrants have an annual income lower than $40,000. After our interview on 20+ immigrants(connected through friends and NPOs), we found there are several common problems that immigrants face when searching a job:
English Proficiency
Degree Translation
Resume Format
Culture Difference in Job Preparation
Interview I
Research
To brainstorm with potential solutions, we start looking for existing services that serve these purposes and found many of them from NGO's and public institutes such New York States Library. There are more than 93,000 non-profits organizations, governmental programs, and open source projects providing all kind of help to immigrants, but they are spread everywhere on the internet with pretty non-intuitive information navigations, which makes them confusing and difficult to find. What we could do is to build a website with a better experience that filters these existing programs and convey structured information to immigrants.
“Google is the easiest place to get lost”
This version enables immigrants to filter the programs on their own. However, this design assumes immigrants know what kind of help they need.
Design v1
Interview II
We tested the prototype with five participants. Beside ease of use, our participants reported the most helpful resource they had received was from the local connections for their constructive advice in using career resources. Hence, we pivoted the focus of our web app into a platform that guides immigrants through the necessary steps of landing a job, show tailored helping resources in each step, empower immigrants the ability to help themselves.
The most significant difference between V1 and V2 is that V2 elaborates the roadmap to landing a job in an interactive way. Also, by prompting questions according to each step on the roadmap to the users, we could consolidate the job landing process to users’ memory and make sure that in the future, they could follow the steps and help themselves systematically.
Design v2
Wireframe by hand
Wireframe in Sketch
System architecture visualize
mid-fi prototype with React
Hi fi prototype mainpage
Result
This project ended in December 2017 and was presented to Blue Ridge Labs@Robin Hood Foundation for their upcoming project. BRL was very satisfied with all the research, deliveries, and web application. By our prototype, we successfully helped one of our interviewees applied to Upwardly Global Inc, in which he is now under the training program.