Coulter Welcome Center Multilingual Tour Guide

PROJECT OVERVIEW

Create a campus tour guide that is both multilingual & multimodal to transform the linguistic landscape of our institution and cultivate senses of belonging.

TIMELINE

20 weeks, 2024 (Ongoing...)

ROLE

Design Lead & Researcher

CREDITS

Team—Huarui Lai, Michelle Jia, Sijia Fan, Scarlette Mo

The Coulter Welcome Center is where all visitors can learn more about Carnegie Mellon University through tours, interactive maps, and other marketing material.

PROBLEM SPACE

After talking with the Modern Languages Department, student tour guides and admissions directors, we learned that...
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INSIGHT 1:

Multilingual resources barely exist at CMU:

Most posters, signs, and print media around campus are exclusively in English, but look at the statistics of our student body...
(see CMU's data report below)

INSIGHT 2:

Students receive a hindered experience when expected to be a translator by default:

Translating requires a lot of focus and effort to code-switch and properly convey intended meaning. Without full engagement during the tour, information gets lost in translation for both the student and the parent.

RESEARCH

Survey:
Through a wide distribution among international student associations, 72 students respondents were asked about their demographic, personal experiences, and preferences regarding multilingual tools.

Direct Interviews:
We conducted interviews with...

8 students whose survey responses stood out, to gain a deeper understanding of their experiences.

3 CMU faculty members and parents to gain insight into their perceptions of CMU's cultural landscape.

4 Tartan Ambassadors and college-specific tour guides to understand the potential challenges when giving a campus tour.

Associate Director of Visitor Experience and Campus Tours to better define our problem scope and align our project with CMU standards.

Observational Study:
To better understand how the current CMU campus tour works, as well as the visitors’ main focuses, we broken into teams and attended 2 campus tours.

Competitive Analysis:
We compared 11 existing multilingual tours utilized by various universities and museums. Our objective was to evaluate the range of languages offered in the tour guides, the modes of presentation utilized, and the interaction type.

Affinity Diagramming:
To synthesize our findings, find common patterns and pain points to help us generate potential ideas for our solution.

INSIGHTS

Through above, we concluded...

INSIGHT 1:

The lack of multilingual resources on campus has caused some students and faculty to feel a sense of “othering.”

INSIGHT 2:

Both students and parents feel frustration when the student can not encapsulate the intended meaning.

INSIGHT 3:

Parents were interested when student tour guides brought in their personal experiences and stories about student life.

INSIGHT 4:

Auditory communication is just as important because visitors want to be able to look around while walking along.

“There’s still a lot of ignorance about what it means to be here, speaking several languages.”

“I feel embarrassed and frustrated when I can’t properly convey the meaning of a translation for my parents.”

“The Tartan Ambassadors are encouraged to talk about their own stories, but the amount of such is limited due to the fixed schedule and script.”

IDEATION

Weighing our abilities with our stakeholder's needs and wants...

We created 3 different prototypes to test out our intended user flow.

REFLECTIONS

On going...

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