Raising the Voices of Japan in America

Bringing Nichi Bei to the forefront of Japanese cultural awareness

Duration: 2 week sprint
Team Members: Logan and Susie
Role: UX Research, Prototyping and Design
Methods Applied: User Interviews, Comparative & Competitive Analysis, Wireframing
Programs Used: Figma, Whimsical

BUSINESS ANALYSIS

I got to work with two other people to look at the Nichi Bei website, a Japanese-American newsletter dedicated to promoting Japanese culture and addressing issues affecting Japanese-Americans living in America. We did a business analysis of that site and found the following:

Due to the small size of the links and buttons, users can’t read the articles without having to spread the screen to zoom in.
The events displayed are outdated and no strong advertisements are evident throughout the site.
The subscription page and its process is unclear and lengthy. The hierarchy of its content and pricing is difficult to read and there were too many clicks just to find the price of a subscription. You also can’t save your information as you are going through the subscription process, which could result in lost information.

PERSONA DEFINED

COMPETITOR ANALYSIS

By looking at these problems, I did a competitor analysis to see what other news-related sites are better in terms of design, navigation and method of subscription, which is a factor in how users can sign up and attract our target user:

While the other team members looked at online news sources like New Yorker and San Francisco Chronicle, I looked at a Filipino-American news source called Positively Filipino and found that its articles are categorized on a navigation bar.
When you click on a category, it will drop-down showing sub-categories for better organization. It also works the same on its mobile version as you can see those menus and open articles without leaving the home page.
The images used in Positively Filipino dominate about ⅓ of the site once you open the page, which draws the reader to the articles.
My teammate, Logan, looked at AirBnB, Facebook Events, and Nextdoor Events and found that their events are displayed on the home page and a hierarchy is applied as to how the events are advertised (ex: image first, title of event, dates, and other information last).

SIMPLIFY TO SUBSCRIBE

My team and I compartmentalized the Nichi Bei site it to make it mobile friendly. I came up with the idea of making all the articles appear on the home page. The user can open a menu that pops out from the top corner and it shows categories with articles that can be opened and adjusted to read on a mobile phone. Only 1 or 2 advertisements are displayed on each article and dispersed so it won’t compete too much with the article and still patronize the advertiser.

The events are updated and current. Each event has its own related image along with a clear hierarchy of displaying the title of the event, date of the event, and other supporting information in that order.

My other teammate, Susie, lastly simplified Nichi Bei’s subscription page so users won’t need to go through too much information just to simply subscribe. To make it simple and easy for the user to complete the subscription process, we broke it down into 5 screens that walked the user through the following:

NICHI BEI HAS SMOOTHED THE WAY

After 2 weeks of research, revising, and interviewing users to try the old Nichi Bei site and our new prototype, we made a tremendous improvement.

When we tried our prototype for our users, they responded favorably with these comments:

TEAMWORK DOES MAKE THE DREAMWORK

Since this is my first group project, Logan, Susie, and I had to pour our strengths into creating a project that provides representation of an ethnic group into the American fabric. What I observed was that Logan and Susie had very analytical career backgrounds and could therefore simplify complex concepts to make whatever product work to the advantage of the target user. I came from a design background and had to redesign each screen in the mobile version of Nichi Bei to make it as compact and visually easy for the user to perform a range of tasks from looking up an article to subscribing to the newsletter.

We also had to delegate certain tasks to each of us so we can have equal leverage in redesigning the site. I was tasked to do user engagement to find ways how to make every feature of the site more engaging by doing a comparative analysis of other news sites. Logan researched other sites that advertised events in order to figure out how to spotlight the events feature. Susie lastly had to breakdown the form-filling feature into sections that would make the user feel at ease when subscribing and her re-design definitely did not feel like “a blob of text fields” as one of our users said when they tried to subscribe on the old Nichi Bei website.

Overall, I was fortunate to work with people with unique intellectual talents that are bound together to make a difference in helping minorities have recognition in whatever fields they succeed in.

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