Ding UX design case study
A Platform allows Chinese Labor workers living better by build confidence and earn more money. This APP lets Chinese labor workers in San Francisco Bay area find a way to learn English then they can apply jobs to let them live better.
Objective
Learning & speaking English is one of the most effective ways for Chinese immigrants to earn better incomes in English speaking countries. As a group, we were interested in investigating how might immigrants thrive in a country without speaking their language.
For this market research project, we visited Chinatown in San Francisco and observed Chinese immigrants who worked 24/7 with little time to relax. One of the challenges in this research was to find and connect with workers who were willing to talk to us about their day to day life. This case study demonstrates some of our market research findings and takeaways on language and labor.
The Design Approach
Ding helps Chinese labor workers by:
- Giving them opportunities to make new friends
- Finding job easily
- Enhancing English speaking skills, better for educate their children
- giving users a greater sense of self-care
We conducted research (primary research, quantitative research, user interviews, and contextual inquiries) on the Chinese labor workers at San Francisco Chinatown to find out about their hardships and needs when they try to find a way to improve their salaries. Based on the data gathered, we analyzed the report by doing an affinity diagramming activity and created personas as well as journey maps. This helped us to understand the users better so that we could design a better solution for them. Ultimately, with multiple iterations, we came up with a mobile application called Ding.
Problems
Goals
This Project aims to understand Chinese Labor Workers’ circumstance and find a way to improve their lives, making them living better. Concerned Chinese labor workers want to have greater access to living better; aging parents have a strong desire to give their children a better education, but they need to educate themselves first.
Challenges
How might we help Chinese Labor workers in San Francisco Living better?
All of the labor workers move to San Francisco couple years. some of them are immigrants who already working here more than 20years and they do not use the smartphone and the internet, some of them are trying to become immigrants. As international students, it’s hard to us connect with them, we can not say that we understood all the worries and pains of them. However, our target market was just the age of 18 and 35, both men and women, so we can find some access by finding their information on social media and blog. From there, we listened, thought, felt and empathized.
How might we help Chinese Labor workers in San Francisco balance their time, money and English learning?
After we had completed plenty of primary and secondary research, the market opportunity became clear. A simplified version of our process went as follows:
- We built up a platform to give them opportunities to find a job and make new friends as well.
- We came up with a new system to let them learning English in their limited free time.
Research
In our market, we found out that their English was not good although they were aware that their lack of English ability would bring down their income. However, they still chose not to learn English. Therefore, we decided to do research towards this phenomenon.
Interviews
A Cashier at MICI/10h/day
“If I spend 2 hours learning English every day, I will lose about 24 dollars or more. So I will lose lots of money per month, this money equals to transportation fee.”
A Cashier at 99Ranch Market/12h/day
“I would have to work more than 10 hours at 99 Ranch Market and I had to drive to more locations while taking Uber jobs due to my lack of English ability because I could not communicate with customers very well in terms of pick up locations.”
An Uber Driver/10h/day
“I know English is really important. But I just do not have time. Due to working takes me all my time. I have been in San Francisco for two years, and my family is there. I have to pay my rent as well as my children’s tuition.”
Empathy Map
The Insights
- Have no rest time
- Have trouble with trust issues
- Lack of social abilities
- Do not have enough money
- Do not have large community
According to our research, they don’t believe others, and lack of socialize and social ability, most of them work about more than 10 hours per day, so they not have time to learn English and they limited themselves just live around like Chinese area or Chinese community, due to lack of time, they can’t get enough time to rest and any entertainments. and we also found that the reason they came to SF is for making money.
Personas
Ping — A cashier works at San Francisco Chinatown, want to apply for some well-paid job.
Lily — A house cleaner works at San Francisco Chinatown, want to learn English for her child.
Kate — A retired account manager lives in San Francisco, want to improve her social impact.
Our Assumptions
The main purpose of the first version of our app is to make them learn English and save money at the same time. Our first step is to make them save money on English learning with our service by offering discounted, free and sample classes. That it is a map-based system and labors can see tutors around themselves as well as their distance. They can also see their profiles and their tutor levels when they click request tutor. They can also see that on the user profile page, there is a coupon option which offers discounted class price.
“I think $30/hr is too expensive for me. I have to work more shifts in order to have time learning English, so after maybe two classes I won’t want to take classes anymore”
“This is interesting but I might have time to participate. I might not even have the time to finish taking free classes, how can I continue learning?”
“The cost is too much and I do not have enough time. I mean I have to take care of my kids. Also, I do not have friends to take classes with.”
In conclusion, our platform has only solved their English learning problem and provide a motivation for them to learn English, which is to let them make money at the same time.
Moreover, they can develop their own community in order to make friends as well as building up their confidence.But they cannot sacrifice their time to learning English when they could have used this time to make more money.
Ideation
With the help of TH, there able to build a reliance on native speaker, and they’re not limited within Chinatown, they can expand their social community and go to different places and meet various people, which gives them the opportunity to build their confidence. At the same time, they could balance their personal time and money.
We sent out the link to Labors and Hosts, Some questions and challenge we found:
Some of them did not accept any interview.
Time is the biggest limitation for hosts. They hire people to clean their house because they do not have time.
We should narrow down our target of the host. We should find people, who have time and willing to help others also they can speak English.
Trust issues. “I think I am having trust issues. I do not believe hosts can teach me.”
We have our own rules. “I do not want to or need to learn English because we have our own rules in the Chinese community”.
Don’t know how to start. “I am willing to learn English for my child. But I do not know How to start”.
User Flow
Visual Design
Things I Learned…
Design empathy
If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far. — Daniel Goleman
when we made the first version for this product, we do not use a right way to think it. After I creating the empathy map, deep understanding the needs and pain points, we find a better solutions for solving that problem.
How to do the better user interviews
when we do the user interviews, part of our target audience they do not accept any user interviews due to some sensitive topics. we set up few questions and scenarios but can not get the access to asking them questions, after this practice, I observed we should build a story as a start point and then lead to a positive conversation.From there, we listened, thought, felt and empathized.
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