Project Summary

Recent research shows that undergraduate international students have significant stress levels linked to acculturation. Acculturative stress has a direct impact on students' health which includes both psychological and physical health. As the main designer, I created a mobile application called Wave, a digital solution to help international undergraduate students fight against the effects of acculturative stress when they transition to the US. Wave focuses on connecting international students with fellow American students to help them adjust to everyday life in the US.

High Impact of Acculturative Stress on Students

As of 2022, over 900,000 international students are currently studying at universities in the US. That makes a large makeup of the student population and contributes to the diversity at universities and in cities where those universities are located.

However, recent university studies show that international students in the US, especially international undergraduate students, are experiencing high levels of acculturative stress. At a US university that surveyed 67 international students, data shows that 97% of students indicated significant stress levels linked to acculturation (Oyeniyi, 2021). Acculturative stress negatively predicts students' physical and psychological health, such as more withdrawn, somatic, and anxiety/depression symptoms (Sirin, 2013), and has a direct impact on international students' adjustment to college (Yan & David, 2011).

Based on the above data, there seems to be little information on how to help international students make that big transition to the US at the university level.

Determine Common Predictors of Acculturative Stress

The research objective was to understand what might be some common predictors of acculturative stress in international students studying at the university level in the US. Some assumptions with this research objective were:
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1. These determined predictors will surface common underlying needs for the majority of international students.
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2. Determining common underlying needs will help us design a solution that will work for most international students in alleviating the effects of acculturative stress.

Breaking Down the Research

Before going into user interviews, I wanted to make sure I had in mind specific things that could be observed during the interviews that would contribute to meeting our research objective. Some questions to consider were:
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1. What are different things (people, tasks, etc.) students turn to when they are trying to adjust to the change?
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2. What are common frustrations students have when trying to adjust?
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3. Are there specific things that students look for help in? If so, what are they?

User Interviews

I conducted interviews with 4 undergraduate international students in the US via Zoom to gain insight based on the research objective. In each interview, the set of categories I focused on were pain points, motivations, and behaviors of an international student on the day-to-day to get specifics on their needs and how they currently try to meet those needs.

Lack of Direction and Connection

I compiled interview data through affinity mapping to synthesize the data to extract any common underlying needs among the interviewees. The synthesized data reveals that interviewees are in need of connection from American students and they have minimal to no guidance on learning how to navigate daily life in the US.

Challenge

As there are two major needs amongst interviewees, I felt the need to find a solution to address both needs. However, considering the time constraints and the possibility of creating a solution that doesn't meet either needs well, it only made sense to address one major pain point.

Problem Statement

The pain point I prioritized was the need for connection with American students because all interviewees heavily addressed that they struggled with feeling alone throughout their undergraduate years. Addressing this pain point also had the potential to indirectly help students get guidance on navigating daily life in the US through those they may connect with that are originally from the States.

Ideation

With the help of another designer, we explored different design solutions and came together to red-team our ideas to choose the best solution. We focused only on a mobile design as college students have it more readily available throughout the day.

Development Phase

Design Inspiration

I wanted to understand how other apps help form connections and meet the needs of their users for everyday life. I looked at popular apps that focus on making connections or are used on a regular basis like LinkedIn, Instagram, Mint, Chime, and Fitbit. I incorporate the following elements into the design.

Sketches

I explored different designs through sketches. I narrowed down the best options based on knowledge of the flow of other social mobile applications from previous research and picking which designs will create an intuitive flow that would reach to user's end goal faster-to make a connection to an American student.

Sketches to low-fidelity prototype

Testing

The low-fidelity prototype went through 2 rounds of usability testing with total of 10 participants, with design improvements implemented after each round.

Wave Experience

Results

I conducted testing with 2 separate international students with the high-fidelity prototype and received positive feedback on the experience. One said they definitely wished they had a tool like this earlier. This product still needs to undergo development and additional next steps are to build out the chat functionality and test potential designs with users.

Retrospective

What I learned from handling end-to-end of this design process is even though a solution like getting more counseling resources is important, there are different factors to consider i.e. how many features would need to be built out to create a counseling feature on top of creating a feature to help connect with peers, where would the counselors come from, would counselors need to be compensated, etc. It is important to weigh the pros and cons before going deep into the design process and finding out later that it is not currently feasible to build out.