Work

Arrivalio is my capstone. It helps newcomers get through their first months in Canada with a step-by-step plan: SIN number, bank account, healthcare, housing.

The project started from research into what newcomers actually struggle with. The information is not missing. Government sites, settlement guides and community resources all have it, but it sits in different places and lands on you all at once. For someone who just arrived that is overwhelming.

So I did not add more information, I organised what already exists. Mobile first, because that is where people open these resources. Scattered tasks became one checklist with clear priorities and a sensible order, so it answers what to do first, not only what to do.

Usability testing kept changing the build. The biggest decision came out of it: I had planned a flexible system, and testing showed that too much freedom made things harder. People wanted to be told what came first. It became a guided checklist with task dependencies.

AI tools were part of this project. Figma Make for early layouts, Claude and ChatGPT for debugging and problem solving.

The original dashboard put everything on one page with no visual hierarchy, so pulling out a single number meant reading past dozens of charts that had nothing to do with you.

We catalogued every data point it showed, then wrote personas to work out who actually opens it. The primary one turned out to be a Vancouver resident checking a local transit, housing or environmental figure, not a data analyst.

That made the main decision obvious and uncomfortable: our persona did not need most of what was on the page. We cut roughly two thirds of the charts and rebuilt the rest around a cleaner sidebar, fewer and more readable graphs, and a path from summary to detail.

A school project built with a classmate, splitting the design and development work. No AI tools were used on this one.