Case Study | Wicked Problems: Immigration in Portugal
For my first project at Ironhack, my group and I had the assignment to find a non-digital solution to the following problem: How Might We help migrant people find the information, complete the tasks and successfully get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city.
As an immigrant in Portugal, I already had assumptions about the case, but I put all of them aside and opened my mind to understand better the other immigrant’s issues.

Empathize
Interviews
To solve a problem, we first have to understand it. With this in mind, we went to SEF (Serviço de Estrangeiros e Fronteiras) to talk with our users and comprehend what are the biggest pain points that an immigrant have in Portugal.
We did an interview guide and decided to ask these open questions:
- How did you get the information about the immigration process?
- How clear was the information you found?
- How clear was the information you found on the SEF website?
- How do you feel about the official provided information?
- What was the general feeling through all this process?
We interviewed 12 people, and we discovered that the current biggest problem is:
- Get correct information about the documentation needed.
- More than 60% of them appeals to friends and family already living in Portugal to get this type of information.
Survey
After the interviews, we start to prepare our survey to collect data about the immigration process. Our goal was to identify what are the most common problems that people have when they look for information.

We received 90 responses in total.



So, let’s jump for the insights taken out for the survey:
- 19.8% of the interviewed said the process is not clear.
- 30.8% of the immigrants don’t know what is the exact documentation required by SEF.
- Different SEF workers give different info.
Define
After collecting all the data and insights that we had, we went to the definition of our “How Might We” statement. After voting, we decided: “How might we make the immigration process understandable?”

User Persona
We also used the collected data to build our persona. Most of the answers were from Brazilian women who went to Portugal to live with their husbands. Therefore, we used this to construct our user persona.

In summary, our user persona is Helena, a 28 years old woman who went to Portugal to live with her husband. She is having a lot of trouble to get informations about the immigration process and the family reunion visa because everyone gives her different informations. Your frustrations are:
“website is not clear about the process”
“The process is very bureaucratic”.
Journey Map
To understand how our persona feels during the process, we created a journey map.

Ideate
For this phase of the process, we did a Round Robin to get insights for a possible solution. This exercise was very interesting to see how people with different background think. I, for example, could mainly see the problem through its legal aspects, due to my background (lawyer).
Concept Ideas
As finals possible solutions we tested 3 concepts with users:
1 — A phone line that will work 24/7 in the immigrant language. First, they would talk with an automated customer service, who would give all the correct information about the required documents. This would finish with the problem of contradictory information, because in this line it will be impossible to give different information for different people. If they still have some doubts, they could talk with a human customer service, with a real person.
2 — A seminar that they could enroll, with the previous questions that they have. A specialist would work on these points and clarify them for the participants. After it, they could meet in groups to discuss specifics doubts that remain.
3 — For the last one, we would have an informational point when the immigrant could pick up a flyer with all the frequently asked questions and a checklist for the needed documents.

The Concept Test
We did more 10 interviews with random immigrants that we found on the local markets and received some feedback on our solutions:
- Most of them said that the second option was very scary, because SEF agents could deport them.
- Some of them said the first idea already exists and will probably not work well because they do not feel it is reliable. Also, it takes a long time for someone to answer.
- The third one is the best option for them, because it’s easier than calling, and you don’t have to deal with SEF agents directly.
In the end, we decide to go with the info point and flyer, because it was the most comfortable idea for our user.
Conclusion
When the problem came up, I thought that it wouldn’t be possible to come up with a solution, but I really enjoyed working on it and in the end we proposed useful ideas to solve this issue.
Lesson learned: Trust the process!
Feedback
Now that you have read through to the end, how about leaving feedback on what you think of the solutions we came up with?
I am really willing to hear it from you!
Thank you!
