A wicked problem — Immigration bureaucracy

This is the Case Study of my first Design Challenge at the Ironhack Boot camp. It was developed in three days by a team of three designers and the main goal of this essay is to reflect the importance of UX research.

Never before has humanity experienced such a large and diverse amount of migratory flows. Mobility and globalization have certainly made it easier and more frequent to seek (and find) life opportunities outside our homeland.

That doesn’t mean the process is easy!

Along with the experience of migrating comes a number of bureaucratic tasks that need to be fulfilled to legalize the journey in the host country.

Our task was to design a Mobile App to help migrant people find information, complete tasks and successfully get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city.

Living in Berlin gives one the experience of either being an expat or knowing many. Also bureaucracy is an everyday live theme for anyone living in Germany.

As a first step, the group brainstormed all ideas, experiences and feelings that the imigration bureaucracy process provoques on each of us, creating a complex mind map.

As the image above shows, the theme is vast and challenging. So our next step was to formulate questions which could help us grasp or rather outline the matter and the users.

We then proceeded with interviews trying to validate (or invalidate) assumptions and preconceived ideas.

Relying upon the insights of the interviews was fundamental to reach a broader and more real user profile.

As an immigrant myself and living in Berlin for less than two years, the topic can feel very familiar, which leads me to a dangerous sense of knowing already all there is to know about the issue and getting mixed with the user.

So building an Affinity Diagram in this initial phase of analysis helped us dig deeper into the user’s behavior trying to find their main pain points and motivations.

The main pain points found were not understanding the processo, not having a clear order of events and the language (specialty in person appointments).

“I just arrived in Berlin and I don’t know where to start!” “ I find it confusing to handle paperwork because I don’t speak German”

“HMW guide non-German speaking immigrants through Berlin’s administrative process despite the language barrier ?”

Since immigrants are so diverse, we synthesized the profile of our users into a limited set of needs that we thought were important to represent patterns found in the interviews. We did that by creating a persona:

To approach our user’s behaviors, attitudes, and expectations towards the product we used a Storyboard to simulate real life situations and opportunities for our device to be used.

We opted for low-fidelity prototyping in the initial stages of the design process to gain insight as early as possible. It was clear that further research was needed and wireframes can surface usability problems to consider before investing time in the development.

The challenge was overwhelming and along the way we created restrictions which helped us narrow down and isolate clear needs from our users. Without this, we ran the risk of dealing with too many problems at the same time.

The first drafts of our wireframe reflect this. We created a profile filter to isolate user’s wishes, preventing them from getting lost in the disinformation loop with steps that lead backwards.

We also tried to fulfill the lack of organized information described in the interviews, creating a page of content for each of the bureaucratic documents in detail.

The device also includes a system that translates back and forth formulaires that can be filled out and delivered through the app.

Investing and trusting on research proved to be the most important phase of the process and needs to continue.

Creating other personas with a different profile (age, stage of the process, other necessities, families…) can give us a more complex view of the user’s behaviors, attitudes and expectations towards the product.

Further research on iconography and organograms. Since language and lack of understanding of the whole process are the main challenges, a system based on non verbal language making the app more visual and less wordly can simplify and speed the user’s experience.

Connecting users with translation services in loquo, and escort service for in person appointments.

Finding out more about our competitors and how people are using existing products will also be important in the near future.

The experience was very interesting and I thank my colleges Blas Alvis and Boris Bojara

Originally published at https://medium.com on March 28, 2022.