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:
- Research barriers faced by monolingual immigrants and refugees
- Understanding in-app user journey
- Ideate and create digital mock-ups
- Present low fidelity Mockups and receive feedback
- Iterate Designs
- 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:
- 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)
- What is lost in translation?
- 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.
Key Finding 1
Translation apps fail to take into context what needs to be translated
“Machine Translation can’t understand the context. […] People can understand what you mean when you say things like “Yes, but no. I mean, yes and no…I don’t know it’s really complicated.” That’s a very complicated series of sentences that are all related to one another. A piece of technology is not likely to realize that these statements are all connected.”
Key Finding 2
Language barriers can cause mistrust
"We contribute to diversity research by distinguishing the exclusively negative language effects from the more ambivalent effects of other diversity dimensions. Our findings also illustrate how surface-level language diversity may create perceptions of deep-level diversity."
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.
Takeaway 1
Working in parallel with others created an environment based on trust
Working on a mobile app is challenging, especially when all the part were built in separate GitHub repositories. However, this experience has allowed me to challenge myself in building something without all parts ready at my disposal, and it pushed me to communicate effectively with my team.
Takeaway 2
I feel inspired when leveraging my creative background within technical problems
I feel confident when I can leverage my artistic background to problem solve through the coding problems I faced. This project allowed me to find endless solutions to one problem, and show me the possibilities how an app can create positive societal change.