Yijin Jiang

Information At Your Fingertips: OCADay - An Inclusive Mobile-based Information System for International Students

This Major Research Project is a response to my own lived experiences as an international student from China at OCAD University. In this report, I describe the language barriers, cultural barriers and socio-economic barriers I faced, and provide evidence to show that these barriers are common across most Chinese students. I identified the information gaps that create these barriers and visualized the structure of an inclusive information system to mitigate this situation. Wearing my inclusive designer hat, I designed a prototype mobile application OCADay (name signifies Okay day or a day at OCAD) based on that information system, which responds to the student needs identified through this research. Although OCADay is designed for Chinese students, it would be useful to most other international students, and even local students. Plans for future development therefore include addition of more personalization features to position OCADay as the signature student-centric App for OCAD University. http://openresearch.ocadu.ca/id/eprint/253/