Final Solution

Leveraging existing skills to empowering non-english speakers

With more than half of millennials in Los Angeles bilingual, this application empowers non-English speakers by connecting them to bilingual speakers in hopes of creating a more understanding community.

Process

Understanding angelinos to assist non-native english speakers

The City of Los Angeles is home to a large number of immigrants,  refugees, and non-English speaking residents.  Within a dominantly English speaking city, non-English monolingual residents may feel anxiety or fear when needing to speak to another English speaking Angelinos who don’t speak their language or when needing to understand documents that are not written in their native language. Our team wanted to help our community by creating a solution that would empower non-English speaking residents and enable empathetic understanding and community building.

OYA is a free peer to peer translation service that connects you with bilingual speakers able to provide you with translation and context either for simple phrases or to help you facilitate a conversation. Whether it’s to better communicate with a community member, coworker, or make a request of your landlord. OYA volunteers will help you with what to say and how to say it.

In creating the application, our team followed the double-diamond design process to quickly develop a minimal viable product:

1. Research barriers faced by monolingual immigrants and refugees
   
2. Understanding in-app user journey
3. Ideate and create digital mock-ups
4. Present low fidelity Mockups and receive feedback
5. Iterate Designs
6. Develop front and back-end

Research

Understanding How to establish trust between languages

Many apps provide translation, but knowing what to say is only half the battle, the other half is knowing how to say it. Our research focused on wanting to understand how monolingual speakers, particularly non-English monolingual speakers, connect with English dominant speakers. We wanted to think about these major questions:

1. How do you non-English monolingual speakers communicate a need for help? (I.e ask your landlord for a repair or communicate a need to an employer)
   
2. What is lost in translation?
3. How are translation apps being used today?

Through our research, we found

Translators have the potential to create an environment that promotes trust as power dynamics between actors become balanced.

Wireframes & Prototypes

Creating The face that drives connection

Wireframes

Once looking over the different ideas, we narrowed our focus to fulfill our Minimum Viable Product (MVP). We based our mockups and development on the features we knew we could complete within the time frame provided.

Prototype

Retrospective

empowering The community around me

Designing a solution that leverages existing cultural behavior and empowering communities was rewarding and a perfect setting for me to challenge my skills as a designer and developer.