Immigration checklist App — A solution to confused immigrating bureaucratic process.
Case study
In the first week at Ironhack Bootcamp, me and my team Claudia R. went through the journey of solving the wicked problem using the Design Thinking method. The expectation of this project is a low-fidelity version of our final product.
What do migrants struggle with?
Along with the journey of relocating to a new country, migrants face different challenges starting their lives in order to achieve the primary goals which force them to move. Therefore,
How might we help migrants find information, complete tasks, and get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city?
Discovery empathise
Einstein have said
If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions
Keep in mind that each migrant has unique experiences. However, there are still common pain points, for instance, they are all struggling with a number of bureaucratic duties .In order to create a solution to this wicked problem, we conducted secondary research to have the first view of it, then narrowed down the scope of the research. Basing on research results, we decided to focus on users, who are migrants and come from other continents and relocated in Europe .
How might we help migrants find information, complete tasks and help their bureaucratic works done to start their new life in new city and country?
We ideated to identify prospective candidates and arranged for interviews in order to gain insights into their motivations, pain points and feelings, goals and needs. After obtaining the data from six interviews, we began to extract data and built up our affinity diagram and identified problems using Figjam.
Key findings of pain points:
- Overwhelm and confusion among students
- Incomplete reliable official resources.
- Lack of process overview.
- Lack of community support.
- Language and culture barrier.
Defining the problems in human-centric way
To fully understand our users and create a user-centered design, we built up our primary user persona and user journey map.
Our persona — Studious Sia and her journey map help us understand and prioritize user’s needs and their pain points. How Might We questions were brainstormed and ideated to define research’s problem statement:
“Working International students need a way to keep track of different application processes for settling in their new country because the overwhelmingly incomplete and inaccurate resources prevent them from finishing their applications on time.”
How might we help Sia keep track of different application processes and prevent her from felling overwhelmed?
How might we help Sia get an overview to completed tasks?
How might we help Sia store the documents and arrangement for each time usage?
Creating ideas
The more ideas, the better! We challenged the assumptions and explored the unknown space by implementing brainstorming, Crazy 8s and MOSCOW techniques. We took into consideration of what is most important for users, collected, categorized, refined the best features and illustrated the happy path of our final product.
Final design low-fi prototype and concept testing
Taking into account the problem and must-have features, we created our lo-fi prototype of Sia’s happy task: creating and scanning documents to prepare for opening a new bank account. After that, we tested the interactive prototype and had the final path as below:
Key learnings
After six days learning and doing the project, facing all the stress and happy moments, I have gained much more than I imagined.
From our mistakes and achievements, I improved further my team-work and communication skills not only in the real but also in the virtual enviroment. These skills are very important in UX because they create an open-mind to empathize with others, with users and with the people that I work with. Therefore, the problem is understood precisely.
The Design Thinking process and related techniques to understand the problem and find out the solution. Interviews and secondary research are extremely crucial in understanding the problem and empathize with the user.
Be patient and trust your team. This is a happy journey that every single step is worth the effort. Keep learning.
Thank you for reading my case study. Feel free to leave comments.
