The Roots
A mobile app helping first-generation U.S. immigrants navigate the financial, legal, and social systems that American life assumes you already know.
"I'm an immigrant. The American system assumes you already know how to open a bank account, build credit, file taxes as a visa holder, read a lease. I didn't. Most immigrants don't."
The U.S. system doesn't fail immigrants through malice — it fails them through assumption. Banking forms assume you know what a checking account is. Lease agreements are legal documents written in fast English. Tax rules for F-1 and H1B holders aren't covered in any orientation. Getting five of these things wrong in the first year doesn't cause inconvenience — it can take years to undo.
The Roots was built to close that gap. Not as a resource directory, but as a structured companion that walks immigrants through each challenge, in the right order, with the right depth.
Before any screen was designed, the research surfaced the project's core tension: the people who need this app are not one type of person — they're two, with fundamentally different problems.
Designing for both without compromising either became the central design challenge.
The research identified five life phases where the system fails both personas — in order of urgency: Financial Foundation, Housing, Healthcare, Transportation, and Social Capital. Each phase contains challenges that hit Persona 1 as immediate survival problems and Persona 2 as invisible landmines they don't know exist yet.
The obvious solution to serving two different user types would be to build two different apps, or a branching onboarding that routes each persona to a separate experience. That approach was rejected early.
The insight that changed the architecture: both personas face the exact same set of life challenges. The differences aren't what they need — they're when they encounter it, and how deep they need to go. Persona 1 needs to open a bank account in week one. Persona 2 already has one, but doesn't know they should have started building credit two years ago.
The solution: a single unified journey, structured as a progressive milestone system. Every challenge is on the path. Users mark what they've already completed and move on — no content is ever hidden, no fork ever creates a dead end. Persona 1 works through it sequentially. Persona 2 skips the basics, ticks them off, and discovers the gaps they didn't know they had.
The visual language was built around a single tension: authority and warmth. An app dealing with legal documents, tax deadlines, and immigration paperwork needs to feel trustworthy. But the users are often in vulnerable, high-stress situations — an interface that feels cold or institutional will be abandoned.
The three-colour system resolves this directly.
Typography uses Plus Jakarta Sans for display and headings — modern, confident, legible at small sizes — and Noto Sans for body text, chosen specifically for its wide language coverage. When multilingual support is added, Noto Sans handles non-Latin scripts without a typeface change.
Background tone is #F8F7FC — a faint lavender-white rather than pure white. Warm enough to feel approachable, neutral enough to keep medical and financial content legible at a glance.