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International students at Wellesley College have little opportunity to connect meaningfully with their family/friends who are back at home. Many cite challenges such as little opportunities for real-time communication methods (eg. video call) with their family/friends and difficulties scheduling calling times due to time zones. For these students, they have little opportunities to show off what their daily life at Wellesley College looks like to friends and family far away. This contributes to increasing feelings of isolation and loneliness that international students feel.
Based on semi-structured interviews and content analysis, it was found that international students at Wellesley faced challenges due to cultural differences and being far from their home countries, resulting in social isolation. Many of these students expressed gratitude by connecting with friends from their home country. Additionally, almost all interviewees expressed a desire to express more gratitude to those who supported them during their college experience, including friends, family, and mentors, as well as acknowledging their own efforts.
Based on our interview data, we created two user personas, Mina Kim and Wendy Cai. The key difference between our two personas is one is extroverted and has a straightforward way of expressing gratitude while the other one is introverted and uses more subtle ways to express gratitude.
Based on our interview data, we identified three key tasks as core actions to our solution:
I worked collaboratively with a teammate to design the structure of the memory feature.
Create an app that allows for both family/friends back at home to co-create memories with the user (an international Wellesley College student) without relying on real-time communication.
Designing for a better world
