Immigrant Buddies connects new immigrants with Buddies (mentors and friends) who help them adjust to life in America

We conducted internet research for context and knowledge of immigrant types and motivations along with their integration needs and paths to citizenship.

I asked my team members to search the internet for information about the immigrant population that is already known and available. This would allow us to fill in knowledge gaps and develop beginning domain expertise in immigrant integration, which is needed for designing our product. We uncovered the types of immigrant categories based on their Visa types, which allowed us to segment them by needs and personas later. You can read a full summary of our research here: Immigrant Types, Needs, & Goals and Types of Visas and Paths to Citizenship. Our main takeaways are below.

We conducted market research and market sizing to uncover our user demographics and the size of our potential market.

One of my team members conducted market research on the immigrant population in Houston (where the majority of our initial users will be from), and the immigrant population in America. With her research, we could understand the size and demographics of our market, which was key background knowledge. Here are some key statistics that she found:

• As per the American Community Survey in 2021, nearly one in four Houstonians were foreign-born.

• 4,671,295 immigrants make up 17% of Texas's population, according to the American Immigration Council.

• Mexican immigrants were by far the largest group, making up 37 percent of all immigrants living in the Houston metropolitan area in 2017–21 (Migration Policy Institute).

Additionally, she found the Total Addressable Market, Serviceable Addressable Market, Segmented Addressable Market, and Serviceable Obtainable Market in the United States. This information helped us prove our business case and know that our solution will have enough users on both the Immigrant and Buddy sides. See our TAM/SAM/SOM diagram below.

We analyzed immigrant support organizations to understand the services they offer, which reflect immigrants’ needs and expectations.

First, I drafted a competitive analysis from internet research of immigration-related companies. Then, two of my team members expanded on this list with a complete analysis and summary.

My team and I wrote a list of prominent companies that solve immigrant integration. This includes immigrant and refugee services nonprofits (local and community-based, mostly in Houston) and tech-enabled solutions and mobile apps for immigrants and refugees. These organizations could be either our “competitors”, or “resources” that we could refer our immigrants to. We confirmed that Immigrant Buddies would be a First Mover: Currently, there are no known websites and mobile apps in America with our concept of tech-enabled peer-to-peer immigrant mentorship. See some sample companies from our analysis below.

After our user survey of immigrants’ needs and competitive analysis of how other organizations served them, I identified common Areas of Help that Buddies could provide immigrants below:

From user survey and user interview data, I asked my team member to synthesize the information with affinity maps & diagrams. Then, she created personas for each type of immigrant that we identified in our internet research.

Our personas include refugees, asylum seekers, student visa holders, work visa holders, family visa holders, elderly family visa holders, diversity visa holders, and undocumented immigrants. Each type of immigrant had some specific and overlapping needs. It was critical to uncover this so that we could make a comprehensive solution for all immigrant categories, or alternatively, decide to focus on only one or a few segments. View the 8 personas below (scrollable).

Additionally, I asked another team member to make a Buddy persona to represent the profile of people who sign up to volunteer to mentor and befriend immigrants. This helped us understand the motivations and characteristics of potential Buddies, so we can market and design the product and program for them.

We used real data on the motivations and goals of Buddies who registered for our manual program through Google Forms. There were initially more Buddies than immigrants who registered, and we were pleasantly surprised that many people were willing to volunteer. My teammate’s persona primarily represents the profile of a person who is an immigrant who has been here for a while and adjusted. However, Buddies also include native-born Americans who signed up, so in hindsight, we could have made a persona for this second category as well.

I wrote a problem statement to synthesize my research and define new immigrants’ core challenge: integration.

Next, I asked 2 of my team members to make a comparative analysis of other apps with UX filter/sorting capabilities to uncover users’ expectations for our UX/UI, as well as determine additional features.

Since we had already decided on the concept and solution, we now could determine the UX and other features of our web platform based on what is currently in the market. I decided to take a mobile-first approach as a best practice, designing the mobile version of our product first. Thus, we looked at websites on mobile browsers. We analyzed social websites and apps such as the mentoring site ADPList, AirBnb, friend-making app Bumble BFF, Etsy, Realtor, Upwork, Linkedin, dating app Hinge, Yelp, and Pinterest. What they had in common was the ability to filter and sort a list of items (whether it’s people, houses, or jobs). On top of filter/sort, we also analyzed their Messaging and Profiles, features that would be in our product as well. See screenshots gathered for inspiration here. Some sample screenshots from ADPList, AirBnb, and Bumble BFF are included below.

I asked a team member to create a user journey map (below) of an immigrant’s experience with our potential Immigrant Buddies product. This helped us uncover friction points, resulting in feature ideation and a list of assumptions to test, shown below.

To test our concept before we develop the technology product, I constructed a manual Buddy program (concierge MVP test) where I paired immigrants with Buddies personally through Google Form signups, Excel sheets, and video calls. I designed a preliminary website where immigrants and Buddies could register for the program.

The manual Buddy program (concierge MVP test) operates like this: immigrants and Buddies sign up on our website through our embedded forms. I meet with the immigrants to learn more about them and give them the full list of Buddies, and they choose the Buddies with whom they want to connect. I reach out to the Buddies to see if they're available; if so, then I introduce the immigrant and Buddy to each other in a kickoff call where they learn about each other, set goals for the partnership, and establish communication methods. Then the immigrant and Buddy take it from there, and I follow up periodically for feedback and support to evolve our program and product.

This manual connection method was meant to mirror the functionality of our future product. My goal was to see whether this type of mentorship and connection would result in value for both sides and how these connections would play out in real life.

After a few months of the manual Buddy program, I surveyed immigrants and received responses from 4 participants. Positive survey results (shown below) validated our hypothesis and proved that our concept provides value for immigrants by helping them integrate.

I also surveyed Buddies and received responses from 4 participants. Positive survey results (shown below) validated our hypothesis and proved that our concept provides value for Buddies by giving them a rewarding experience of helping others and of cultural exchange.

Since our concierge MVP validated the concept, I felt confident about moving forward with the design and development of the tech product.

I continued the design process by asking 2 team members to create user flows of both the immigrant and Buddy sides (see screenshots below) to illustrate a user’s journey while using our product based on different scenarios and decisions.

Next, I asked 2 team members to create site maps of both the immigrant and Buddy side (see screenshot of immigrant side MVP below) to illustrate the navigation and information architecture of our future platform.

I made a series of sketches below to illustrate the flow, features, and layout of the Immigrant Buddies web platform. Here are the sketches of the desktop and mobile screens from the immigrant side.

We used the sketches to design the first low-fidelity Figma wireframes for mobile and desktop. Then I constructed a V1 mobile web prototype to test with users.

From the test results, I analyzed the most commonly mentioned issues and points of confusion with this spreadsheet to determine what to change for our V2 prototype.

As a team, we met to discuss the results of our respective tests. I noted all the issues and counted the ones most often noted by users. We implemented changes to the ones mentioned more than once, as well as a few tweaks and others based on our judgment as a group. See the list of changes below (the issues mentioned more than once are in yellow. The green comments represent several points of confusion that resulted in a major navigational change in our product.

For our next version, our group decided to make high-fidelity mobile wireframes. I asked 3 team members who had a graphic design background to first make a design system to determine our branding, layout, typography, color scheme, and common mobile components.

My team members created a comprehensive design system that made our construction of high-fi wireframes more efficient and consistent. See sample guidelines for mobile web below.

We implemented our changes from the usability tests in our next high-fidelity mobile prototype, which utilized the elements of our mobile design system.

The team created high-fidelity wireframes using the components in the design system in Figma. I then added interactions to the wireframes to turn them into the clickable prototype below.

I asked my team to conduct a second round of usability tests (2 tests assigned per team member) on our V2 high-fidelity mobile prototype for immigrants and Buddies to identify additional gaps in usability.

For this round of tests, we had different participants than the first round go through the same Usability Test Plan for immigrants and Buddies and test scenarios via Google Forms for immigrants and Buddies.

We compiled the results of our usability tests through a Google Forms summary for immigrants and Buddies. Using a spreadsheet, I analyzed the test results, identified the most commonly mentioned issues and points of confusion, and determined what to change for our V3 high-fidelity mobile prototype.

As a team, we met to discuss the results of our respective tests. I noted all the issues and counted the ones that were noted most often by users. We implemented changes to the ones mentioned more than once, as well as a few other tweaks based on our judgment as a group. See the list of changes below (the issues mentioned more than once are in yellow).

We then implemented the changes in our final wireframes for a V3 high-fi mobile prototype. Then, we made design system components for the desktop view below. Afterwards, we made high-fidelity desktop wireframes and a high-fidelity desktop prototype. We then conducted usability tests on the desktop prototypes for 6 participants on the immigrant side.

For this round of tests, we had different participants than the first round go through the same test scenarios for immigrants with these summary results.

Overall, since we had tweaked a lot from the mobile tests, the desktop view had minimal changes needed. Some minor changes we made to the final version are: Adding "Find Activities" and "Find Communities" and "Find Food & Water" to the “Areas of Help”, Deleting "search by name" because we don't know the name of the Buddies, Changing the “Requests” tab to "Incoming Requests" on desktop and keeping "Requests" on Mobile, and making reviews on the Home Page more concise. We also noted suggestions for future features such as verified profiles/ background checks and Buddy recommendations.

The prototypes above are what we gave development for illustrative purposes. The development and design teams then determined additional changes. Below are our final updated wireframes with design adjustments after hand-off to development.

The team adjusted our screens to be complete with auto-layout, revised dimensions, and additional needed features such as Email Verification and Forgot Password. Sample final screens for development are below.

View our current deployed website in progress at www.immigrantbuddies.org. We aim to complete our product by Summer 2025.