Chinese Newcomers Service Center
FALL 2022
Product Designer, Strategy
ROLE
UI/UX, Product Strategy, Prototyping
DISCIPLINE
Developers: Mia Chou, Annie Huo, Charles Ming, Suraj Rao, Stephanie Wong
Project Lead: Albert Liu
TEAM
August 2022 — December 2022
TIMELINE
ABOUT CHINESE NEWCOMERS SERVICE CENTER
Chinese Newcomers Service Center, or CNSC, is a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco’s Chinatown that provides multilingual services to help Chinese immigrants adapt to life in the United States and empower them by providing them with a sense of community and mental and economic wellbeing. Their services include tax assistance, food pantries, technology literacy workshops, and job seeking services. Their job posting service highlights local job openings, ranging from tutoring to caretaking to food service positions, both from corporations and individuals that directly contact CNSC.
As the lead and sole designer on this team, I was involved in cultivating a relationship with Chinese Newcomers to scope out their core priorities and our MVP and establish communication and trust with our main CNSC contacts, George and Amanda. The mobile app will be used by them and other CNSC admin as well as by anyone in the surrounding Chinatown community who relies on CNSC’s services or is seeking employment.
CONTEXT
CNSC operates a service of posting job openings, painstakingly writing and posting each individual job opening in ~10 WeChat group chats up to 10 times/day. For CNSC admin, this eats up immense amounts of time and energy; for job seekers, looking for a job is difficult because there are countless posts to scroll through and you never know by looking at a message if a job has already been filled. All this poses the question:
How might we create an effective job posting platform for the Chinese immigrant community while reducing strain on CNSC admin?
FINAL SOLUTION
A job posting app for admin, job seekers, and employers, tailored to the experience of fervent WeChat-users and immigrants
My team and I scoped out, designed, and developed an app for CNSC admin to efficiently create job postings that can be accessed by job seekers to search for jobs, filter and like specific job postings, and apply to jobs without the hassle of scrolling through WeChat.
RESEARCH + INSIGHTS
RESEARCH GOALS
Our primary research aspirations were to understand as much as we could about how CNSC currently operated its job posting service and what both admin and its relevant community needed in terms of this service.
Understand how CNSC currently operates its job posting service.
Learn about the burdensome parts of the job posting experience for CNSC admin & the job seeking experience for job seekers.
RESEARCH INSIGHTS
After meeting with admin from CNSC, we learned how employers submit job postings, how admin draft job postings, what these job posting WeChat groups look like, and how individuals look for and apply to jobs. More specifically, we learned that:
Employers submit job postings either verbally or in writing on physical paper.
CNSC admin individually draft each job post and manually copy and paste each posting into every group chat.
Job seekers scroll through their group chat to find job postings relevant to what they’re looking for and directly contact employers to apply for jobs.
Many job seekers that CNSC serves don’t have access to a computer but do have a phone, making a phone number but not an email address feasible for authentication purposes.
We discovered that CNSC’s job posting service is highly manual for all parties — employers, job seekers, and CSNC admin.
SCOPING + TECH CONSIDERATIONS
Examining the three relevant user groups — CNSC admin, job seekers, and employers — we took on a technical lens, identifying core features each group would need from a job posting app:
Based on each group’s necessary functionality, our team talked to CNSC and determined that the most urgent user groups to design for were job seekers and CNSC admin.
From this, we determined that a minimum viable product (MVP) would possess the following features:
for job seekers, a job post feed, analogous to a social media news feed, the ability to like specific job postings
for CNSC admin, the ability to draft and publish job posts, the ability to remove job posts, and the ability to view the job posting feed
for all users, a user authentication & account creation process
USER FLOWS
To get a better sense of the sequential actions the admin and job seekers would undergo, I mapped high-level user flows for each group before I started sketching wireframes.
ITERATION: LOFIS & MIDFIS
After mapping out user flows for the two main user groups, I created low- and mid-fidelity versions of each flow, first on paper and then with several iterations digitally:
ADMIN
JOB SEEKERS
DESIGN SYSTEM
Along the way, as designs progressed in fidelity, I built a design system, consisting of a style guide and a component library, to generate thematic cohesion in my designs and for my team’s developers to implement. Based on CNSC’s logo and the auspicious nature that Chinese culture regards the color red with, I chose red and its variants as my primary colors, balancing it out with neutral shades. My component library included job cards, navigation bars for both job seekers and admin, buttons and input fields, and their variants where relevant.
USABILITY TESTING
With mid-to-high-fidelity prototypes, we conducted usability testing with CNSC and other individuals, testing prototypes of flows that included onboarding, interacting with the job posting feed, and error states that could come up in each. I incorporated some significant design changes based on the feedback, such as:
Changing the color, shape, and layout of job cards to increase readability, intuition to expand and collapse descriptions
HIGH-FIDELITY PROTOTYPES, FINAL DESIGN DECISIONS, & KEY FEATURES
My final designs for CNSC’s app implemented the following key features:
Job posts with expandable and collapsible descriptions
Search functionality
Job post creation feature with preset information fields pre-laid out, maintaining consistency with CNSC’s current guidelines for employer job submissions
User authentication processes involving email & phone number for admin and only phone number for job seekers in line with CNSC’s desire for greater accessibility for job seekers to use the app
REFLECTIONS
This was my first project done in collaboration with engineers, and it was such a rewarding challenge. I learned to navigate relationships with engineers, about how backend technologies influence user flows and frontend screens, and to synthesize my own designs with developers’ implementations — it was so cool to see my designs come to life in a product that performed actions and stored data in its backend. I also loved learning to design an app in its entirety, mapping out a comprehensive collection of flows and use cases, as well as prototyping interactions in my screens, all while following a design system that I built.
Thanks to George and Amanda for making CNSC such a warm and welcoming organization to collaborate with and my amazing team at Blueprint for supporting my visions, teaching me about Firebase, and demolishing dim sum in Chinatown with me.
