Summary
Problem:
Immigrant women often feel overwhelmed navigating life in a new country, facing cultural, emotional, and systemic barriers without centralized support.
Goal:
Create a mobile tool that empowers immigrant women with personalized resources, emotional guidance, and peer-shared insights.
Result:
Created a prototype supporting childcare, healthcare, and community. Testing showed increased confidence across core tasks.
Role: UX Researcher & Designer
Tools: Figma, Miro, Illustrator
Skills: User research, Storyboarding, Prototyping
Home screen showing all the available resources, and community screen
Background
The Problem
Immigrant women often face an overwhelming mix of cultural confusion, emotional isolation, and logistical challenges when settling in a new country. Existing services are fragmented and impersonal, offering little support for the lived experience of starting over.
As one participant put it:
This gap leaves women vulnerable, not just to inefficiency, but to deeper feelings of disorientation and fear. Her Journey was created to center their voices and restore a sense of clarity, safety, and support.
"I felt very lost when I arrived. I didn’t know where to start or who to ask for help."
The Challenge
How might we support immigrant women in navigating essential services and unfamiliar systems so they feel confident, informed, and emotionally supported from the start?
"Finding basic information like health or job services in my language would’ve made a big difference."
Research
Framing
Before conducting interviews, I grounded my approach in secondary research and informal observation to understand the broader challenges immigrant women face when relocating. This helped shape my questions and ensured my approach remained culturally sensitive and user-centric.
Key Insights
Many resources exist, but they’re fragmented and often too generic to be actionable.
Interviews
Conducted 3 semi-structured interviews with 3 immigrant women from Ecuador and Colombia, now living in New York and New Jersey. These women were juggling new jobs, studying English, caring for families, and navigating unfamiliar systems in a new country, all with limited guidance and time.
“I felt lost. I didn’t know how anything worked here.”
They often turned to informal platforms like WhatsApp and Facebook Groups for help rather than formal resources.
Emotional stressors like fear of judgment and social isolation frequently delayed action.
Key Takeaways of Interviews:
All 3 participants reported struggling to understand how the healthcare system worked.
Recommendations from friends or online groups (e.g., Facebook) were preferred over official websites.
Common workarounds included using AI tools (like ChatGPT) and social platforms for translations and real-time help.
Language barriers were a major source of and stress when accessing essential services.
Surveys
Distributed an anonymous survey to 14 respondents to validate findings from interviews and identify broader patterns across the immigrant experience. As part of the filters to complete the survey, responders we asked if they lived in New York or New Jersey and if they identified as women.
50%
reported difficulty accessing healthcare or forming a social support network.
78.5%
valued learning from other immigrants (word-of-mouth ranked highest).
50%
had never engaged with a formal immigrant support group despite expressing the need for one.
Affinity Diagram
After collecting raw data from interviews and surveys, I conducted an affinity mapping session to identify recurring patterns, emotions, and unmet needs. Sticky notes were categorized by themes like logistics, emotional barriers, and support systems. This process allowed me to translate complex narratives into actionable insights.
Key Themes:
Emotional fog: stress, anxiety, uncertainty
Logistical barriers: housing, transport, job search
Cultural gaps: unfamiliar norms, systems
Information overload: too much content, poorly organized
Ideation
The ideation process began by identifying critical requirements grounded in real user experiences: the need for offline accessibility, translation tools, onboarding support, and localized services. With these insights, I developed two user personas and crafted storyboards to reflect real-life challenges immigrant women face when accessing childcare and healthcare.
Design opportunities
Centralize key services (legal, housing, health, language).
Offer emotional support during the transition.
Personalize the experience to feel safe, relevant, and supportive.
Explorations
To visualize possible solutions, I sketched some ideas based on our personas' journeys. I explored how information could be made accessible despite language and tech barriers. These sketches tested how to present step-by-step guides, organize resources by location, and integrate peer recommendations.
1. Storyboard based on Personas
A visual scenario of Ana, an immigrant mother navigating language barriers and limited support to find urgent childcare, highlighting the systemic challenges that inspired our solution.
2. Community & Resources Map
Early UI sketches exploring a multilingual forum and interactive map to help immigrant users crowdsource advice and locate trusted services in their area.
3. Childcare & Healthcare Pages
Low-fidelity wireframes designed to centralize critical service info (e.g., childcare and healthcare) with clear language, visual aids, and FAQ support to increase accessibility.
Final Design
Informed by real user needs, the final design streamlines access to essential services, prioritizes language accessibility, and fosters community connection. The interface balances visual simplicity with cultural sensitivity, ensuring the app feels intuitive and supportive for newly arrived immigrant women navigating unfamiliar systems.
2. Language Accessibility Toggle
A clear “English” toggle button was added to the top right of the screen, replacing a confusing globe icon. This simple change significantly improves accessibility for non-native speakers by making language switching intuitive and immediate.
1. Smart Resource Navigation
The app’s updated Resources section offers both list and map views, allowing users to quickly find nearby services like childcare, healthcare, and legal aid. This redesign was driven by feedback showing users struggled with cluttered information and wanted visual clarity and geographic context.
3. Personalized Community Support
The redesigned Community section lets users join filtered peer groups (e.g., “Mothers from Ecuador” or “Childcare Tips”). This change empowers women to connect with others who share their background or challenges, fostering both emotional support and practical advice.
Insights
Outcomes
Her Journey offered a compassionate digital solution to empower newly arrived immigrant women with culturally relevant guidance, emotional reassurance, and community-driven support. Through testing and feedback, all three interviewees reported that the prototype “felt made for someone like me”, a powerful validation of need and resonance. While the product has not launched, the final design presents a clear opportunity to reduce early relocation stress, streamline resource discovery, and build a sense of belonging from day one.
What I learned
This project taught me the value of leading with empathy in every phase, from recruitment to design. I learned how culturally informed research creates more meaningful solutions and how emotional pain points often outweigh usability issues. I also deepened my skills in synthesizing qualitative data into actionable insights, and prioritizing features that deliver clarity and emotional safety, not just functionality.
What's next?
I plan to refine the prototype through additional user testing with a broader, more diverse group of immigrant women. Next, I aim to collaborate with local non-profits and immigrant resource centers to validate the real-world impact of Her Journey. The goal is to pilot the tool as part of an onboarding kit for newcomers, bridging the gap between information access and emotional support in the first 30 days of arrival.
Prototype