Belong
Bringing closer to community :)
Problem Statement
Upon arrival in the United States, new international students often find it difficult to adjust to American culture and society. Many experience culture shock, feel homesick and sometimes have difficulty making friends and finding communities where they feel like they belong.
Vision Statement
We hope that our solution will help new international students cultivate a greater feeling of belonging in the United States. Our mobile application, Belong, provides a platform for them to connect to new people from different backgrounds and with common interests. Belong also enables users to reflect upon their experiences and track their growth in this new stage of their life. We believe that our solution can bring people together and facilitate thoughtful reflection, fostering a deeper sense of belonging in international students.
Context
This project spanned ten weeks as part of an undergraduate course on the User-Centered Design process at the University of Washington. Team of three. We selected international students as our user group, because all of us were familiar with struggles involving immigrating or moving countries. We learned that although each person’s journey as an international student is uniquely different, there were some common pain points for many people. Finding a comfortable community or making friends is difficult when someone is placed in a new country with different cultures and norms. In order to design a way to help mitigate this challenge, we went through the following research, design, and prototyping processes.