UX Case Study | Migration Process in Portugal
How Might We solve how migrant people find the information, complete the tasks and successfully get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city?
At Ironhack School, our first teamwork challenge was to find a possible solution (non-digital) to the immigration process in Portugal. As human-centered designers, we had to use a user research approach and what could be better than applying the Design Thinking process?
The Process
Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.
— Tim Brown, Executive Chair of Ideo
Each phase of this process was fundamental to find a solution that was based on our user needs and not on own assumptions. We only had to trust the process and everything came along.
EMPATHIZE
“You are not your user”
Everything became easier when we found out that we had at our group 2 colleagues that did the immigrant process in Portugal, it was helpful to define some assumptions to start and to get to know the possible immigrant’s profile.
Then we started our research doing an interview guide, defining the main objective and what topics were more important to explore.
Interview Guide
Objective: Decrease pain points of immigration processes for immigrants in Portugal
Target: Immigrants in the process to get a residence card
Where: SEF (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras) delegation
Topics:
1. Accessibilities
• How did you get the information?
• What type of information did you have?
• What type of outside information did you search for?
2. Clarity
• Who clear was the information you find on the site?
• Do you think the information provided could be improved? Why? (5)
• What did you think about the language used in this kind of documents?
• How do you feel about the provided information service?
3. Process
• What was your general feeling through all this process?
• Do you remember your experience?
• What’s was more difficult?
- What was the moment you felt more proud in the process?
Major Pain Points Found
“It was complicated to get the documentation, the ladies on the service couldn’t tell which process was.”
“Difficult to find reliable information, some of the information appears on the Internet are broken links or just promotion.”
“Agony, for the time of the process. don’t be clear how much time is gonna last.”
“The most difficult part was to find the right documentation.”
Survey
Surveys are useless until you know who it’s for and what you want to learn from it. — CHRIS THELWELL
Lean Survey Canvas is an amazing tool to construct our survey, to have present what are we really looking for and main objectives. When using it you can ask yourself if you are sure about that question is aligned with what your main goal is, what you already know and what you have to go deeper.
During the process we came up with the following questions:
- Did you already use SEF (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras) services
- What kind of visa are you applying for?
- How would you rate the process to get information?
- How clear was the information that SEF website provided?
- How clear was the information given by the SEF Workers?
- How often did you talk with the SEF during the process?
- How did you feel during the process?
- What did you need the most from SEF during the process?
- Which situation was more complicated for you?
- What part of the process was the easiest for you?
- Did you have any problems during the immigration process
- If yes, please describe them.
The survey was shared at immigrations at Portugal facebook groups, our ux_survey channel at Ironhack School and within just one night we had 77 answers! It was very helpful to get some new insights and confirm others.
Survey Results
Open questions:
“A russian employee “forgot” to ask me a document… So, I lost 5 months”
“Secondly, making an appointment with SEF is a nightmare. Not only does it cost you money every time you dial, even if you don’t reach them, but it takes hours to talk to a human. Once you finally speak with a human, your appointment is most likely scheduled months out in another city far from Lisbon. You wait for months in anticipation of your legal status — scared that you’re forgetting a piece of paper that is listed… nowhere. You end up bringing a suitcase full of every document you can imagine in case they will ask.”
“They were not clear about the documents I was supposed to present and whenever I went to SEF there was a missing document.”
“The staff from SEF don’t know the law”
About feedback:
Ashley Carr is one of our TA’s and after sending our survey to her, she gave us some tips:
- « “How often did you talk with SEF during the process?” — try to be more specific — you don’t yet know where the informant is at in their immigration process — maybe they are just starting (like me) or maybe they are finished. Answers will vary. Do you mean on the phone or in-person?” »
- « “How did you feel during the process?” — perhaps leave this open-ended. They’ll explain into detail about how they really feel/felt during the process. If they’re done with the process, though, it might have been extremely frustrated, they might mark “really satisfied” because they now are legal & done!»
This kind of recommendation reminds me how important is to have feedback, they were so accurate and it would be so important to implement it… unfortunately, we didn’t see it before sharing the survey. So… don’t forget to ask for feedback, it’s always a good idea!
DEFINE
Define the Problem and Interpret the Results
We reached a point that is needed to converge all the insights, information to a problem statement, to go through this process we used affinity diagram and persona as tools.
Affinity Diagram was useful to get all the information organized by topics and be visual to all analyze them. Using this tool made persona very easy to do, define what would be the more relevant information to include.
Main insights:
- The process isn’t clear;
- It’s common documents to be missing and people have to wait months to another appointment to show them;
- Talking to SEF workers doesn’t make it easier because sometimes either they aren’t right about the process;
- It’s very painful to go through a process you’re not sure about what you are doing and little mistakes can make you illegal in a country.
Meet Helena, Our Persona!
How Might We
After discussing all the findings we did a brainwriting to find which How Might We will we respond and after using our vote we decided:
How might we make the immigration process understandable?
IDEATE
Once again we had a moment to brainwriting, and Round-Robin was the tool that helped us ensure that people contributed great ideas without being influenced by others. It was amazing to see how ideas can be improved when worked together! See some ideas that came up:
- SEF workers with help signs delivering pamphlets with FAQ’s and documentation needed
- Cinema sessions with movies explaining everything with popcorns
- All the process must be visible for everyone
- Info point at the hotspots around the city
PROTOTYPE
“They slow us down to speed us up. By taking the time to prototype our ideas, we avoid costly mistakes such as becoming too complex too early and sticking with a weak idea for too long.”
– Tim Brown
Prototyping for me is the most challenging and funny phase because you have to mix concrete information (insights, quotes, and data) and creativity to develop concepts, make sense with all qualitative and quantitive information into something tangible and actionable.
Our mix come up to this:
- Phone line 24/7 > Type 3 you get recorded voice telling all documents needed > at the end you schedule an appointment
- SEF Seminar, submit a form with questions> SEF worker at a cinema explains everything about the immigration process > Time do Questions&Answers in smaller groups to explain more specific topics.
- Info points around the city > Pamphlets with FAQ’s and Checklist with Documents needed > Autonomous Process
TEST
We went to the streets to test our concepts and was surprised to receive all the comments and come to understand that probably what we thought to be awesome… were weak ideas. We realized some perspectives that we hadn’t even imagined, we even felted we had to repeat this part of the process and test again.
Target: Immigrants that used SEF services
Location: Foreign supermarkets and hairdressers
Quotes from Interviews
“Phone it will be great to skip the queue”
“Phone calls can take hours”
“SEF seminar it’s a good idea because I would have someone to relate to”
“I’m afraid to go to the SEF event and put on a van and deported to my country.”
“Pamphlets would be nice because I wouldn’t have to change my agenda to go to SEF services”
“SEF already have pamphlets”
CONCLUSION
Our final presentation was based on role play, our main goal was to focus on our persona (Helena, remember?) and we proposed to solve this challenge creating a pamphlet with FAQ’s, Documents Needed and for further information call our phone line to ask for more specific questions.
Key-Learnings
This process was very interesting, I was enthusiastic about everything and I had the best feeling ever “this is what I want to do” even so I have to be honest if we had more time and this project was a professional one I would suggest to go back to the ideation phase because we tried very common ideas and testers (and myself, actually) didn’t have wow effect.
To Improve: Teamwork productivity.
To Learn More: How to do effective questions.
Lessons Learned: Presentation needs clear user research data and I prefer brainwriting over brainstorming.
