Case Study: Tu Salud Tucson

Our Beginnings

As students in the University of Arizona School of Journalism’s Product Development in Journalism class, we were tasked with developing a news product for a community in Tucson that the local newspaper, the Arizona Daily Star, was not currently serving well. Our goal was to find out what information needs a specified community had and design a potential product that could fulfill these needs. Our first step was to decide on a community to focus on.

We chose to focus on Latina women in Tucson, specifically women with children. We knew that the Latinx community makes up over a third of Tucson, and we wanted to find out how we could help such a large part of the city we live in. We began meeting people where they were. Ava first went to a Mexican Independence Day celebration in September and spoke to many moms there. From there, we kept going. We went to Spanish-speaking churches, Latinx grocery stores, parks, restaurants. We asked people what information they really cared about, and what they felt like they were missing. In interviews in both English and Spanish, on street corners and in supermarkets, a theme slowly began to emerge. Over and over, we heard these women talking about the importance of health, for them and for their families.

We found that many of the people we talked to have one or more struggles with health, whether that be with finding adequate and affordable care, understanding what nutrition does to our bodies, getting a ride to the clinic, or finding a doctor that speaks their language. Yet, these women actively seek out information to learn more and make healthier lifestyle choices for themselves. This is backed up by census data, too, with 39% of Hispanics saying that they are mindful of their healthy image in 2015.

We set out to create a product with one question in mind: How might we help the health problems in the Latinx community? Specifically, we wanted to create a news product to target the Hispanic users that the Star wasn’t serving well. In 2011–2012, 54% of Hispanics said they had read the Arizona Daily Star in the past seven days. In 2014–2015, that number dropped to 48%. Internet, however, jumped from 74% to 84% in the same time period.

To start, we began diving into this local community.

Discovering our audience

In general, there are 397,754 Hispanics in the Tucson area, which is 37% of the population, according to 2015 census data. They are more likely to be younger (76% are between 18–54), with the median age being 41. 56% are female, and many live with children (see chart below).

Eventually we decided to stick with only Latina moms who are 25–55 years old, because we found in our interviews that moms are generally the ones who plan events for their kids and the family, spread health news to their family and friends and help treat the kids when they are sick. However, we want to make our product accessible to everyone.

What we found

The major problems that came up in our interviews are as follows:

• There aren’t enough news resources for the Hispanic community that are culturally sensitive to their issues, or are trustworthy enough to be those sources
• There is no place for bilingual Spanish health news, much less a strong health news coverage in Tucson
• People without health insurance have trouble finding resources that they can afford, which usually means they go without care or go to the emergency room, which they cannot afford
• There is a lack of education on these issues, which leads to people relying only on home remedies instead of trusting medicine, or turning to unhealthy food without knowing better
• There is a cultural barrier and a stigma that going to doctor is “weak,” which leads to going without care or only going to the doctor if their sickness affects their lifestyle (i.e., can’t go to work).
• There is little to no preventative care that Hispanics, mainly those without insurance, are getting

There are even more problems in the healthcare sector not mentioned here, such as a lack of Latinx doctors, that make getting care a challenge. From these problems stemmed our solution.

What we made

Our findings led us to create Tu Salud Tucson, a bilingual health news app/website for the Latinx community. We knew we wanted to focus on health, but there were specific habits and traits we noticed in our users that informed the method of delivering this health information. Here are the behavior traits we observed in our audience that led us to this decision:

• Many of the people we spoke to were bilingual, and some only spoke Spanish. To accommodate those users, our product is bilingual, so users can get information in the language they are most comfortable in.
• The vast majority of the people we spoke to got their news from their smartphone. According to census data, 68% of Hispanics own a smartphone. We knew our product had to be geared to being used on a small screen, and because of that it had to have a simple design. It also had to be either an app or a mobile-friendly website, because that’s where our users are.
• The app/website had to have a friendly feel and look to it. Users spoke of how intimidating healthcare can be; we want users to feel comfortable and empowered when using our product.
• Many users also search for the answers to their health questions on Google, which is evidenced through census data too. To drive people to our product, we knew we needed a website.

After more interviews with potential users as well as local health care professionals, we decided to focus on our app’s content on three main areas, with the overarching goal of connecting people to local resources and information:

• Get Healthy news section: This section houses day-to-day news as well as educational stories about health topics like vaccines, preventative measures, nutrition and more.
• Find A Clinic: This search option provides users a way to narrow their search for a local clinic based on various aspects that were frequently concerns for our users, such as whether a clinic requires insurance or the providers there speak Spanish.
• Health Events: This section allows users to search and find events in the community centered on health. Informed by in-depth interviews with potential users, we added search filters such as if the event is free.

We were chosen to continue working on our product to actually launch a version of it this spring at the Arizona Daily Star. Since then, our work has evolved with the guidance of the Star’s product manager, Becky Pallack, and team of developers, including Rob Wisner.

We developed an initial prototype of our app using Marvel, and later an HTML version. With more feedback from users in on-the-street interviews as well as hour-long intensive sit-down interviews, we developed a third prototype on Adobe XD. We showed this prototype to potential users as well as health professionals in the community for feedback.

Since then, we’ve been preparing for the launch of our product. We’ve been talking to health professionals and organizations in the community to ask about potential partnerships, and have received good responses.

We are preparing to hand-off our project to someone else to keep it going.

Where we plan to go from here

As we wrap up this year, we are looking to the future of the app. As students, our schedules are changing. Ava is graduating, while Rocky has another year at the university. We believe this product should continue growing, either with our help or with other people taking the lead. The issues Latina moms face in Tucson are important, and the Star can help Hispanics/Latinx people in the Tucson area create healthier lifestyles and find the resources they need.

We have ideas about how the app could be improved and expanded upon, should it continue to grow in the future. Other issues we would like to tackle include transportation (perhaps partnering with Lyft or creating a ride-share forum), getting insurance (partnering with people who walk people through healthcare applications, or creating a test that lets people know if they qualify for low-cost insurance) and many more.

We know a product like this could be helpful for business, too. Arizona Hispanics control 17% of the state’s purchasing power, with $38 billion to spend in 2015. The projected number for 2019 was 49.2 billion. In Tucson for 2019, that was $10.4 billion.

Partnering with local healthcare providers, selling ads to be the top clinic or event to show up in searches, paid content and ads are just the tip of the iceberg for ways we could make money, and simple number crunching of ad sales showed that $104,000 could be made by just the above mentioned ways.

What we hope you take away

The Tucson Hispanic/Latinx community is a vast and vibrant group of people that we have been honored to dive into. The problems with healthcare in their community are large, but multiple health organizations are doing small parts to try and help. With a product like Tu Salud Tucson, their work could be amplified and reach thousands more people who don’t know where to find them. Tu Salud Tucson could also be a bridge that fills the educational gap in this community, connecting them to stories about health to help them live longer, happier lives.

We’re excited to see where this product goes next!

— Rocky and Ava

For more information about the Hispanic community in Tucson, please reference the census data we pulled our stats from for this case study here.