HOM. home of migrants

a guide to complicated processes

Duration : 9 Days

Team : Arvi Mudaliyar, Alexandra Vavouraki, Danijel Kostadi, Dominika Luchenkowa

For the first project at Ironhack’s UX/Ux course, we were tasked with a wicked problem. Introduced in 1973 by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber, referring to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem.
We could choose from five topics Immigration, Public Hospitals, Urban Mobility,
Food Sustainability, and Culture & Heritage.
After brainstorming all the problems that are in the basket of immigration we decided to go with housing for migrants through a voting session.

Taking off to research about the housing scenario for immigrants in Europe, we found that the range of problems an immigrant faces to get a house in Europe is completely contextual.
And taking Europe as a whole was a difficult idea, we narrowed it down to the situation in Spain as it spoke more in terms of relativity for us and as the immigration is diverse and so are the problems.

Early assumptions
Immigration problems range from language barriers, bureaucracy, discrimination and financial status.
Not all immigrants are the same. From individual experiences and first hand knowledge about friends we derived that being a legal or illegal immigrant was one of the main criteria.
There were also refugees and other immigrants who faced much
more problems and then there were the homeless immigrants.
Looking at all these fronts and the most feasible option to do research and testing on the team decided to go with legal immigrants who come to Spain with a permit but still struggle to find a house.

Empathize

While more than 41,000 illegal immigrants reached the Iberian country in 2020, this figure represents merely eight percent of all immigrants that arrived in Spain that year.
Focusing on the larger population that migrated legaly in Spain and were mainly educational or economical migrants we saw these numbers

Grouping the larger age group of 16 to 44 years old to their context of migration was that they were here to find work, education or in search of a better standard of living or professional opportunities
interviewing 8 migrants from of which 5 were from Europe and 3 non European migrants in Barcelona 5 of them said “ Finding a house is the biggest problem in Barcelona”
2 of the interviewees also stated that they had to forge false papers to show that either they had a high salary or to show false finances because they kept demanding more papers that they could not show being in Spain.
The interviewees ranged from 21–40 years old and the common problem was the process of finding a house, shared or individual, the time it took,
lack of information, the real estate scams, documents that are required when making a housing contract the list of challenges in the process was extensive

Define
The documentation process and the list of requisites were so demanding that most students and workers had to spend a long time in Airbnbs paying high costs before they could actually move in. Finding a house beforehand was also a big fight.
Pulling together all the insights from the interviews we could state our problem as
“ young adults (21–40) immigrating for work or study for the first time need to find a way to have precise information about documents, requisites and procedures needed in order to rent a home because lack or misinformation leads to loss of finances or time or both and resort to last measures.”

User Persona
After getting our feet wet in others shoes , we created a persona who
finds herself in this exact predicament

After creating a user journey for the process of finding a home in Barcelona for Augustina, we saw several ups and downs
and a emotional rollercoaster on her way to her new home.

Ideate
Highly motivated with reason, to help Augustina, we started darting some strong ideas at the whiteboard with our post-its.
this was a wonderful moment as the user persona helped us all see the same picture and we were automatically solving the same problem, as if we had seen invisible footsteps.
We did a round of good ideas, bad ideas and a straight up idea dump.
surprisingly the ideas we came up for the bad ideas in the first round matched up with the ideas we dot voted on the idea dump.

They were :

The money transfer block solution
money transfer service that blocks the payment to the landlord
until the tenant has moved in and confirms everything is in order

A ratings and review system for all real estate agencies
A website with listings of info about all real estae agencies, average
agency commission rates and their manners of business.

AI powered Chatbot
That resolves and provides all queries regarding immigration such as documentation, bureaucracy to a certain country and sources information from verified portals.

Web Application
To create a verified source of information for documentation requirements for various processes in various countries, with a portal to housing that is aggregated on a portal for housing

Mix and Match
All four ideas seemingly worked to solve one particular problem and had
purpose in their own right.
How to find out which idea is the best ? the one that solves the most challenges in the easiest possible way. We could merge it all in one web applcation. And that could be a progression for the web applications development.
At the moment we would deal with helping Augustina get

• All the right info for her migration
• organise her documents needed for finding her home and
• at he same time help her look at some lisitings
• make appointments with agencies and landlords that are verified helping her keep it all organised while being in Argentina time-zone.

We called it HOM. Home of Migrants.

An app that will always help you find a home, anywhere.

After some crazy 8s and a Round Robin, we crated wireframes that different in UI but basically functioned the same way.

We create a MVP that would focus on getting help with

• Documents : get a informed start on the documents required with the list of docs from verified sources
• use upload docs and save feature to keep a track of your progress and organise docs for various processes such as work permit, travel, admission processes, bank account, health insurances, travel tickers, visa processes in a single place

House hunt : A portal that aggregates all the house listings from all verified web sites

User can book an appointment for viewing or contact for enquiry direvtyl from HOM and book a spot

the calendar is synced for appointments with consideration for the change in time zones

reviews and ratings to verify the agency/ landlord

A progress bar that shows the progeess of the process is on the header of the app. We wanted to create a responsive web app, so we began protoyping with a mobile app.

We also wanted to create a future feature that would be community of migrants who share their experiences, knowlege and wisdom on the platform.

Concept testing

Our teacher ahowed us a video of a little girl doing a usability testing with her father and he had made paper protoypes for usability testing. We were in love with his idea. We wanted to concept test our idea the same way.

The team got pretty creative at creating these screens with drop down menus and sliding main menus.

We concept tested with 3 testers.

After each test we received feedback and iterated on them.

We learnt that labelling even on simple sketcehs is important.

When concept testing, sketch only the most important elements that you want the user to see.

Iterate, test and repeat.

After three of these iterations we were pretty smilley about how far we had come in two weeks.

Learnings and Outcome :

We learnt that trusting the process is important.

Do not skip any steps in the process.

Empathising with the user helps the team align better

Next Steps:

Create hi fi wireframes.

Test the solituion in a realsitic situation and find strong concept validation points,