Client Overview
NichiBei is an educational and charitable nonprofit organization, located in San Francisco, California. Dedicated to keeping the Japanese American community connected, informed, and empowered - Nichi Bei has a community newspaper (Nichi Bei Weekly) and Website (www.nichibei.org), as well as educational programming for their users. They stated, “Nichibei.org is a one-stop site for Asian American content.”
My Role
Ideation and Research
Duration
2-week sprint
Team Members
Mike Han
Makylie Dart
Urvashi Chopra
Tools
Sketch, InVision, Google Analytics, Trello, Slack
BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
After developing a strong understanding of what Nichi Bei wants, we focused on three objectives to satisfy their goals.
Enhance nichibei.org to improve the experience for new and existing readers.
Distinguish Nichi Bei Weekly from nichibei.org, and give a clear reason why someone should become a member.
Increase attendance of events by making them more attractive, and easier to understand and act on. We believe this will help Nichi Bei build a stronger community.
The Process
Research & Discover
C&C Analysis
User Interviews
Affinity Map
Contextual Inquiry
User Personas
Ideate & Design
Feature Prioritization
User Flow
Wireframes
Wireflows
Test & Iterate
Clickable Prototype
Usability Tests
Iterations
Goal
We Designed a clean interface that promote inclusivity of Asian-American communities while not alienating their current Japanese readers.
RESEARCH
We produced a competitive & comparative analysis of our competitors. We did this to better understand what our main competitors and indirect competitors are doing that is beneficial in order to understand the user’s needs and wants. Because of this, we found the features that were necessary for Nichi Bei to compete with its competitors and to generate more flow to the website and give the users a better experience.
We conducted in-depth user interviews and interviewed six users, varying in age and ethnicity to understand the user’s expectations and behaviors when using the website. Based on our key takeaways from these interviews, we created the following affinity map for our users.
Next we gave each user some tasks to get a better understanding of the users needs and their pain points while using the website and came up with the following.
Our users felt the site was unappealing, confusing, and difficult to read. From the logo to the size of the article text, legibility was a challenge for our interviewees.
They said the site wasn’t relevant to them, because it was only for Japanese people.
We learned that many of our interviewees learn about events through social media and their networks.
We also learned that our users want a friendlier website that has more visual content instead of text.
After observing our users complete the tasks they had using the website, we designed our user personas, inspired by our interviewees.
Problem Statement
Rachel needs an efficient resource that will engage her with her Korean-American roots because as she is getting older, she is realizing the importance of developing connections and ties with Asian happenings and Seattle’s Asian-American community.
How Might We
How might we help Rachel get the news and current events she needs with the Asian- American community around her at her fingertips?
We recognized that they had similar pain points. Therefore we came up with a problem statement and how might we for each persona to show the frustrations they had when completing the tasks and a solution for it.
Problem Statement
Len needs Nichi Bei to provide him with reliable Japanese news and community events because after he immigrated to California, he has always felt comfort in staying connected to Japan’s happenings and the local Japanese community.
How Might Me
How might we help Len make Nichi Bei a regular and enjoyable part of his daily routine as well as helping him get more engaged with Neighboring Asian- Americans through events?
Ideate & Design
We conducted a feature prioritization analysis using the Moscow method to determine which features were needed for our minimum viable product (MVP). Because of the we were able to understand what the main features were and what to prioritize and what not to.
We then conducted a Design studio session in which we brainstormed our site map and our user flow for the website before designing the lo-fi wireframes. Doing this made the process of design more organized and helped us understand the flow the user goes through to accomplish their task while being satisfied .
Test & Iterate
When testing out our mid-fidelity, we gave our usability test participants a scenario and tasks to help them understand the flow of the website.
Scenarios
Based on the results of the usability tests, we continued to iterate on our design and made the following changes before designing our high-fidelity wire flows:
Search bar-simple and easy way to find any topic the user wants to look up.
We wanted to allow users to filter events based on their location and add a Call To Action to increase attendance
Three cards and a progress bar during the process of subscribing to the Nichi Bei Japanese weekly.
Because of this, our design lead was able to design the final prototype we believe that would benefit and meet the goals of Nichi Beis’ core objectives.
To further Nichi Bei’s success, we encourage the following next steps:
Invest in a team of Journalist and editors to keep the site up to date with news and events
Implement social media more throughout the website
Create a weekly for the cultures that would be interested
Reflection
My key takeaways from this project were:
Be open-minded when working with a group. Being able to understand each others’ opinions and work together on solving the problem is very important. Close mindedness will only create frustrations and lead you in a direction to where you lose focus on the objective.
Interviewing the right users is key, such as the Pan-Asian users we were able to have interviews with. We uncovered insights that we would not have gathered if we interviewed just anyone. Being able to put ourselves in the users’ position really helped us ideate key features such as adding a community event search to get the community enjoying life together.