Ironhack project 1: Wicked problems — Immigration
INTRODUCTION
As a UX/UI design bootcamp student in Paris’ Ironhack campus, I have to achieve several challenges on my way to become a fully trained UX/UI designer. These projects are aiming to prepare us students to face real world cases and help us to structure our work when the time of facing these real world cases will come.
For this project I was helped by Kristiina, Coralie and Amine 3 of my classmates. We worked together all project long during about 10 days.
So, time to get into it!
The first project is all about the Design Thinking process. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Design Thinking, it can be described by a method used by UX designers when trying to tackle a problem and solve it.
HOW DO YOU APPLY DESIGN THINKING?
Well, there’s many ways to use Design Thinking to solve a problem but the most common use is to divide it in 5 steps that are nested between themselves:
EMPATHIZE — understand who are you designing for
DEFINE — synthesize findings and define a problem statement
IDEATE — generate ideas to solve the problem
PROTOTYPE — illustrate the main idea in order to test it
TEST — test with people and get feedback on what works and what doesn't
When you’re done testing, the feedback helps you to iterate on your project which can lead you to do it all over again as the whole process is a loop until you get your final solution.
For our case today, we’ll use this 5 steps Design Thinking method. Which leads us to wonder what is the topic of this project:
How Might We Help migrants find information, complete tasks, and get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city.
This brief is deliberately broad for us to find a more precise problem and then ideate a solution to solve it. The Design Thinking process will help us to do all this. So without further ado, let’s get into it.
EMPATHIZE WITH THE USER
In order to figure out a clear problem related to the brief stated above, we had to understand who are our user and do some user research in order to solve a problem that actually exists in people’s lives.
First, we conducted some secondary research to help us fill some knowledge gaps on the subject. We had two main sources of secondary research:
- Internet research: media articles, government websites, migrants social media groups…
- Personal experiences: Kristiina and Amine have both went through their own immigration processes in order to come in France so we had already valuable information
With all this secondary research, we already had some assumptions about the subject:
- Information is scattered everywhere, you don’t know where to look
- Language barrier is a problem when searching for information and actually going through the procedures
- Immigrations procedures length varies depending on the country of origin
- France is regularly seen as country where administrative processes can be a mess
At this stage we had a clearer view of the project but we still needed more information to define a precise problem. We had to do some proper User Research and at this point we could have considered two different approaches:
- Surveys: it’s a quantitative method which helps you getting a large amount of information for a single type of user. It also helps you save time on your project timeline.
BUT the data can also come up incomplete and for this project we wanted to get very detailed information that we could deeply analyze to help the team find a clear problem. So this is why we went with…
- Interviews: this qualitative method is great to get more truthful information by having a true conversation with identified and accurate users.
Time and ressources being tight on this project we decided to focus on interviewing people that already migrated in France, no matter what country they came from. We then interviewed 7 people that matched our criteria and gather all our findings in order to look for patterns.
In order to do this, we did what is called an Affinity Diagram which basically helped us gathering all the answers into several catergories and look for common grounds between the different interviewees. Here are some of the interesting pain points we identified thanks to this process:
- It’s hard to find trustworthy and official information without having to look on different channels
- Some immigration procedures take ages to complete
- There’s a lot of back and forth paperwork sendings without any apparent reasons
- Hard to find destination country information when you’re not speaking the local language
With these points identified, we’re getting closer and closer to a more precise topic and obviously a problem to solve. It was time to jump into the next step of the Design Thinking process:
DEFINING A CLEAR PROBLEM
With the pain points identified above, we could then work on defining a problem. But as UX is all about the user, we have to come up with our main user, our persona, who would be the typical person that would use our final product. This prevents us to try to design a solution for everyone that would please.. no one.
So let me introduce you to Emma, our main persona:
Thanks to our main persona and the information provided by our 7 interviewees, we could have a clear view of the main immigration process from the moment you look for information to the moment that you’re finally settled in France.
In order to put the pain points identified earlier with the whole immigration experience process, we came up with a full User Journey Map which is a tool to get a better picture of the users mood and action during the whole immigration procedure.
This journey map confirmed much of our assumptions and research findings and helped us narrow the brief even more: As we could see in the chronology of events, the visa procedure is the first one our user is going through.
With this Journey Map, we had identified two main moments where our user is getting a little overwhelmed and stressed out:
- When our user is starting to get information and realizes that it’s hard to find the right one
- When our user has to send additional paperwork during the application without having read about it before due to lack of clear information about it
This is the moment we had come up with our problem statement:
The ambitious citizen of the world needs to prepare for her new life abroad in a faster and more seamless way
because the information needed to complete the procedures is scattered and untrustworthy.
The problem being stated, we then looked for ideas in order to solve it!
IDEATE TO FIND A SOLUTION
Ideation is all about translating out problem into a solution. In order to find the right one, it’s very important to make sure that we’d go through a large quantity of ideas and not just stay with the obvious ones we could already have.
There’s plenty of ideation methods and process but we tried to focus on 2 of them: Worst Idea and Crazy 8.
- Worst idea: it’s all about finding the worst ideas to solve a problem in order to find the good ones. Basically, we all came up with the worst ideas and then each one of us took a couple of them in order to make them better and so, to turn them into good ideas.
- Crazy 8: the goal of this method is to come up with 8 ideas in 8 minutes. We focused on the ideas that we generated in the Worst Idea method and each one of us tried to generate 8 more ideas based on them.
With these two methods we went down the ideation funnel to come up with our main idea which would be to have a centralized platform where our user could find all the information she needs to complete her immigration process in her own language.
PROTOTYPE AND TEST THE SOLUTION
As I stated earlier, our project had time and ressources constraints so we had to focus on a low-fidelity (or lo-fi) hand drawn prototype in order to create and test it quickly and then get feedback and modify it as quickly as we designed it.
Low-fidelity prototype focus on the content and layout with basic shapes and no color. The goal here is just to make the test user understand easily how to navigate between the several screens and know about the main functionalities.
So the first screen of our app would be a pretty straightforward one: the login/signup page:
Basic page with basic functionnalities. The interesting part is the “language” selector on the top right corner which would change the language of the following screens and also content if changed.
Our second screen is a carrousel of screening questions that would lead to a bespoke profile page with information that would suit the situation of our user.
Then, when the user has answered all the screening questions, the next page is a summary of all these information which can be edited if necessary. The next step to the user is to go to the “My project page”
This page is one of the most important of our app. It’s sort of a task manager which displays all the procedures and processes you have to go through in order to migrate abroad smoothly. As we stated earlier, let’s focus on the Visa part.
When the user clicks on the Visa section, the app now displays an advancement diagram where the user can see how much of the Visa procedure she has done so far. The list below the graph represents all the task she has to complete in order to get her visa. Let’s click on the first one.
Now our user is on the first Visa task page. There she can find all the official and up to date information in her own language about how to start her visa application. When she’s through all the information she can click on the button to be redirected to the official French Government website first Visa form application. As soon as she has completed the form, she can mark this task as completed and then the previous screen will evolve because she’s moved forward in her Visa application process.
When our user would have completed all the Visa procedures the app indicated her to do, she’d have this screen saying to her that her application is done and that she can move forward with the other procedures.
There it is. Our first solution.
Thanks to testing feedback, we got some insights about how to improve our solution. We’ve made the detailed Visa task screen clearer by making drop down menus instead of displaying all the bulky information directly when the user arrives on this screen. The Profile Page is also an addition thanks to the feedback we’ve got. Indeed, in our first version we did not have this page and the feedback we had was that we could not verify nor modify the information the user has provided in the application.
The feedback we got also helped us to think about further improvements such as a multi destination country platform instead of only being focused on France but also some sort of automatic task completion marking with our app being linked with the authorities directly.
CONCLUSION
That’s it. This is where our project ends. The next step would be to create a high fidelity prototype in order to going through more accurate testing but the project frame stops right here.
The time constraint has obviously been a challenge in this project. It has been very challenging to achieve all these in such a short amount of time and I really feel that with more time we could have come up with a more “finished” solution thanks to having more time on each step of the process.
But overall it has been a great project. My groupmates and I worked together all the way to come up with the app showned above. Huge thanks to them and to our teachers who helped us all project long to make sure that we would stay on track.
Thank you also for reading this article. I hope you found it interesting and I’m looking forward to offer you more UX/UI material in the future.
