Helping Refugees
Overall, the U.S. has admitted about 76,200 refugees so far under the Trump administration (Jan. 20, 2017, to Sept. 30, 2019). By comparison, the U.S. admitted nearly 85,000 refugees in fiscal 2016 alone, the last full fiscal year of the Obama administration. There are a lot of refugees living in the U.S. today and are not achieving their dreams because of lack of information. We were given a group project on the topic “helping refugee” We made an app trying to help the people by getting around in their communities, finding a sponsor, and speaking to an expert 24/7 about any questions they have.
Brief: We had a brief for a IOS app for refugees. How can refugees get all the information they need? How could they get familiar with their communities? Can we help them by getting them a sponsor?
Scope: We had 4 weeks to wireframe and sketch an app or website.
Roles: We were put into groups of 3 UX design students, (Betty, Stacy, and Connor).
My role was to sketch and design 3 screens. I conducted interviews and user tests as well. I also had to prototype the screens and sketch them to high fidelity mockups. Everyone’s voice was heard. We all played a big role conducting surveys and gather as much information as we could.
Problem: What is a refugees biggest struggle? How could we try to help them get all the help they need to accomplish their dreams?
Solution: Our instructors gave as an idea of creating a survey questions and making it available to the public. In order to find out how we could help them, we created a survey questions and made it available to the public and especially targeting refugees. At first we didn’t get a lot of people taking our surveys seriously but when we each started sending it to people we knew and posted it on all of our social medias we ended up getting a lot of people to join in and take a survey for themselves or from their friends experience. It wasn’t easy to have people take the survey because it took us 2 days to reach the number of people we needed.
It was a bit challenging for us at first. Because we had to make the questions make sense and refugee friendly but we nailed it! We received 83 feedback responses from various types of people. That’s when we started to specifically pin down the main points. Creating a survey questions really helped us with our project. It was like an ice breaker for us. We had an idea of how we are going to design our app after we got feedbacks. Also when we later on asked some of the people to test our app they already had an idea of what we were talking about.
Time to put all our ideas and feedbacks together!
Problem: How do we put all of the feedback we got from others together? And how do we be on the same page with eachother ideas?
Solution: We created a Affinity Map to gather all the information we had and all the feedback responses. And we started to put them all in order in the same categories and sorted them in groups based on their neutral relationships, for review and analysis.
Based on the Affinity Map, we were able to gather information. And sort them in groups for review and analysis. It helped us to unify large amounts of data by finding relationships between concepts and ideas. It also allowed us to organize facts, opinions, and issues into taxonomies in order to help diagnose complex problems and identify common issues. We organised several ideas such as, learning tools, cultural awareness, Medical, housing, and Ride sharing after brainstorming.
We also tried to organise our cards with sitemap. I approached the team with getting a sponsor idea because I know a lot of refugees that struggle because they don’t have a sponsor. And based on my survey interview questions to some people, they included that before the come to the U.S. they have a sponsor to bring them here. But when they are in the U.S. they don’t have a sponsor to help them out with their needs.
Problem: We needed to keep our users needs and actual use cases front and center.
Solution: We created a story map to create the most delightful user experience. We were able to organise all the responses we got from the interview questions and survey questions feedback and break it into parts.
Which then led us to our persona. Creating persona helped us understand our users needs, experiences, behaviors, and goals. Because of our personas we were able to gain a perspective similar to the user’s. It also helped us step out of ourselves and recognize that different people have different needs and expectations.
We came up with the name James Devi. Because we tried to make it look like a refugee that looked like he could be from anywhere and not just a specific country. We wrote the background based on out story map. And I wrote down the goals and some of the frustrations based on the survey interview and survey question responses.
Let the design process begin!
Problem: How is our app supposed to look like? How do we put together the main structure of the app with our site map to meet the goals of our persona?
Solution: We shared the main screens into 3 each and started sketching with pen and paper. And once everyone had an idea of how we wanted the app to look like based on our story map, we started sketching low-fidelity sketches on the sketch app. I did the account, notifications, and settings screen. It wasn’t easy there were many times that I changed my mind and started to do it all over again. Same goes for my classmates as they have mentioned to me. But once we were all through with the low- fidelity sketches, we put them in the Invision website so we can prototype them.
When we narrowed down everything and finished prototyping we were separated and had to finish the project on our own. But of course we had all the help we need from our teammates or instructors. I started by choosing what kind of color I wanted the app to have in order to move forward. I even had to add more screens and change the icons around. But with the feedback I got from my instructors I was able to figure out what to do on my high-fidelity sketches.
It was a bit challenging project since it was my first time. But I am glad I got to experience it because it made me fall more in love with designing in general. I learned and grew a lot in the process of designing this app. I was also able to recognize my strength and weaknesses, as well as my teammates. Stacy always has great ideas and she’s always up to help when needed and bring the groups together and kept us organized throughout the project. Connor is fast at understanding what to do when we are given instructions or shown new tools to use on our project. And always showing us how to do it without hesitating. It was a fun experience.
