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Profe - MIT IDM Project

How might we improve the economic opportunities of Latinx immigrants in the USA? “Not speaking the language is a real barrier to finding work”

Research shows that English-speaking workers earn substantially more than Non-English speaking workers, which is why we designed Profe - a language learning app designed for LatinX immigrants. It’s different from other language learning apps like Duolingo, as it offers multiple features to help people learn profession-specific skills so that they can start practicing and getting benefits from what they learn quickly.

Our Primary Research was done in Boston, through interviews with Immigrants from LATAM

We interviewed 29 immigrants in the Boston area, from 11 different LATAM Countries, with an average of 8.8 years in the USA. Our research findings supported other studies done on the financial stability of immigrants and the effect that language isolation can have on their livelihoods. We developed the persona of ‘Mateo’ to capture the type of person and condition we were looking to solve for with our product.

We stayed in touch with the people we interviewed, and developed App User Flows for testing

We did our first round of user testing with a paper prototype of our App, developed within a couple of weeks after our first interview with potential users. This round of testing gave us multiple insights on potential ease of the use of the App and changes we needed to consider for the next iteration of the design. We heard for example that ‘navigation is confusing’ or that the ‘course flow was not intuitive’. We digged a little deeper on these remarks and found that people needed less steps to get to their courses. they needed the back button to be more prominent, and the course content to be more explicitly organized by type.

The final prototype was developed based on 3 rounds of testing

The third round of testing highlighted the need for a mascot We had introduced a parrot as a mascot in the second round of testing and decided to take it out in the third round to see what the user reaction would be like. Many of the people interviewed asked where it was and asked for it to be brought back. The parrot mascot for ‘Profe’ gave them a sense of security and familiarity that was lost when we took it off, so we included it in the final prototype. WEalso heard for people that they needed a way to quickly find or translate certain phrases, in case they needed them on the spot at work. This led to us including a search bar as well.