CLTURE CONNECT

Inspiration

Our product came out of a desire for knowledge and a yearning for identity. From speaking to peers, friends, and family, a common struggle has been the cultural and language barriers between older generations and immigrant generations. Our creation was built upon a passion for learning and an interest in understanding more about personal cultural identity. We also wanted to make culture more accessible to a larger audience, hence the creation of this platform.

What it does

CLTURE CONNECT provides users with a platform to connect to their East Asian culture without immense amounts of time, effort, and money to research and travel. Through this application, we hope that it provides newer generations with the ability to learn about a part of their identity and contribute to bettering the well-being of East Asian individuals from ages 15 to 25.

How we built it

We started this project in a FigJam file in Figma—brainstorming and ideating, creating personas and user flows, and planning the different screens. We took inspiration from some popular social sites such as Hinge and Discord, as well as some language-learning applications in the market, such as Chineasy. We also decided on the design system of our application, including primary and secondary colors and typographic hierarchy. After some brief planning, we went straight into designing. As a team of three, we distributed 6 sections equally, including onboarding, sign-up, Home, Talks, Events, and Profile. We built off of each other’s ideas which led to us establishing a cohesive visual system. We assigned a brief timeline to ourselves and actively communicated updates with each other.

Challenges we ran into

One of the challenges we faced was knowing what exactly our personas would want from a platform such as ours. Prior to our mentor workshop, we had many functions available but we were concerned that so many would create a sense of dread rather than excitement. After speaking with our lovely mentor, Dominique Huang, we learned that we should approach our product as if we were one of the personas. From there, we deduced that sharing language in our Talks section would be most beneficial to our audience, hence encouraging our users to participate in the Home screen and its place in the navigation bar.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of each other for staying on task and our abilities to work together as a team while not being together in person. Visually the app feels like one product and everything has been integrated fairly well across all pages. The app is fully prototyped and works which is something we are proud of. Everyone was able to stay together through the process and contribute their best ideas. We are proud of each other for learning how to use Figma on a tight timeline and being able to meet deadlines.

What we learned

Throughout this process, we learned the importance of communication and fair distribution. One of our teammates, unfortunately, caught the infamous coronavirus, preventing us from meeting in person despite living near each other. This led to us improvising online meetings every 2 hours, if not staying on a Discord call for a prolonged period of time. Our communication was impeccable, allowing us to create a sophisticated product. Furthermore, due to this structure caused by the coronavirus, we also distributed work amongst each other depending on how much our sickly members could handle (although, our team member did not stray away from any challenge despite coughing every 2 minutes). The final product is a product of commitment, dedication, and teamwork (as well as coronavirus).

What's next for CLTURE CONNECT

We hope to conduct more user testing to ensure the usability and practicality of this product. The community aspect of CULTURE CONNECT is truly inspiring and potentially collaborating with individuals from oversea countries would create a closer connection to cultures. As it is off to a good start, we hope to continue its bright future and possibility expand the region in which it focuses on.

Built With

• figma