Design of an immigration support app
UX/UI design case study
Hi everyone!
In the following I will describe the design process we went through for our first project of the Ironhack UX/UI Design Bootcamp “Wicked Problem: Immigration”.
Enjoy reading :)
Project brief
Assignment: Wicked Problem “Immigration”
Design Challenge: “How Might We Help migrants find information, complete tasks, and get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city.”
Duration: 6 days
Contributed by: André Fernandes, Miriam Noe, Sophia Plitzner
Methods: secondary research, qualitative research (user interviews), quantitativ research, affinity diagram mapping, lo-fi wireframing, rapid lo-fi prototyping, concept testing with lo-fi prototype
Technologies used: Figma, FigJam, Zoom, Google Presentations
Phase 1: Emphatize
Brainstorming and Secondary Research
To create a solution for the above described design challenge we had to think of an app for immigrants regarding to bureaucratic hurdles to help them with all the necessary paperwork related to immigration.
We started with organizing a work space for all our notes in FigJam. Followed by directly starting in secondary research on the topic of bureaucratic hurdles of immigration. Fortunately, all team members had already experienced immigration themselves. This simplified the brainstorming and secondary research part to get into the topic. For secondary research we searched for online for scientific publications on this topic.
On main assumption of the early brainstorming phase was: language barriers will be on of the biggest pain points for immigrants in the bureaucratic process.
It was important for us to always remember to focus on the bureaucratic challenges (research limitation) and to take a user centered approach.
Our key findings from secondary research were:
- There are plenty of apps that help immigrants with findings friends or housing etc. but but not many to help with the bureaucratic challenges
- Some of the administrations make the immigration process harder on purpose
The secondary research allowed us to get a first overview of the topic and thus define the research framework in more detail and formulate interview guiding questions.
User Interviews
To really follow user centered design thinking we conducted six user interviews with people who did immigration from none-european countries to countries of the european union for work or study.
To prepare for the interviews we had to think of an interview guide with open-ended questions. Open-ended questions were essential to avoid biasing the research by our own biases/assumptions.
We collected the user interview data in an affinity diagram to cluster them and finally find trends (supergroups) in it. Again, to not bring our biases in it, it was important to follow a button-up-approach, which means to bring similar post-its together and afterwards find a fitting cluster headline for it.
Four trends (what we call “supergroups”) have emerged in the data: tracking progress, clear steps, digital autonomy and sense of community.
These overarching themes received the most comments from respondents, and it became clear that these themes were the biggest pain points. Therefore, we focused on these in the further process.
The key findings of the interviews are:
- Language Barries are a factor when it comes to immigrations but it is not one of the main pain points for immigrants (thus, our assumption from the early brainstorming phase could not be validated)
- Immigrants often feel overwhelmed, lost in the process and would like to see an overview of the progress of their paperwork
- Immigrants can find a lot of information about immigration online but are often insecure if the provided information really fits their individual case → therefore, they would like to have a clear step-by-step guide customized for their use case
Phase 2: Define
After gathering a lot of data through secondary research and user interviews we were able to define the research limitation more clearly, crate a user persona, a user journey map and a problem statement.
To have more specific research limitations we defined, that we will focus further on immigrants who:
- have a high educational attainment and exhibit an independent as well as motivated nature
- want to immigrate to a high salery country of the EU for study or work
User Persona: Gloria, the independent immigrant
To know for which user group we want to develop a solution and thus, have a clear direction in the further process, we developed the user persona Gloria. She shows as an example, how our targeted user is characterized.
User Journey Map
Based on this, we created a User Journey Map (UJM) to get a deeper understanding of what Gloria would go through without our solution.
Through the UJM, we were able to see what negative stages Gloria goes through in the immigration process. We wanted to take away these negative emotions/phases from Gloria through our solution and therefore asked ourselves how might we help Gloria in a certain (negative) phase.
These so-called “How Might We Questions” (HMW) showed us design possibilities:
- HMW find a way of filtering information that she needs?
- HMW provide clarity?
- HMW provide orientation on the next things to be done?
For the HMW questions it was important not to think of concrete solutions already, because at this point we were still in the Define Phase and not in the Ideation Phase.
Problem statement
We had achieved the end of the Define Phase by defining our problem statement:
“Immigrants need to find a way to face the bureaucratic process in a more organized way because they feel overwhelmingly lost when the information is incomplete and unclear.”
Phase 3: Ideation
To start the ideation phase, we did the “crazy 8” exercise, where each team member had to generate eight ideas in eight minutes.
We compared the ideas and everyone could vote for their three favorite ideas (dot voting with fire and heart stickers) to sort out ideas. We also thought about which ideas we could combine because all of us came up with a lot of similar ideas, just with different approaches to solving them.
Afterwards we organized the best ideas in a MoSCoW Matrix:
The MoSCOW Method helps to cluster the ideas in four sections:
- Must have features
- Should have features
- Could have features
- Won’t have features
Due to a short project duration we had to focus on a solution (app) which meets the must have features and asked ourself: what is really crucial to meet Glorias main needs?
Therefore we defined a Minimum Viable Product statement (MVP statement) based on the must haves:
“The goal of our app, at the bare minimum, is to help immigrants go through the bureaucratic process in a more organized and less overwhelming way.
By creating a Profile, users will have the possibility to see which paperwork is required for their specific case and with the Status Overview, they can easily monitor their remaining/pending tasks.
The app will also provide the option to contact other users, who are actually going through a similar journey.”
User Flow
Now that it was clear what the MVP to be developed is, we created the optimal user flow (happy path) that Gloria goes through. Happy Path means, that the assumption is made, that no technical errors or human failures exist. It shows how Gloria would smoothly use our app with the least amount of clicks and effort.
We decided to split the user flow in two flows, because the immigration process is not done in one day (like e.g. ordering food in a delivery app). That is why we thought it is more logical to show the steps Gloria is doing at the beginning of the whole process (flow 1) and what she would do some days/weeks later in the middle of the process (flow 2).
Flow 1:
- Gloria is at the beginning of her immigration. She wants to start with all the necessary bureaucratic work and decides to get help from our immigration app.
- She signs up in the app and answers all the information regarding to her background and goals. Based on that the app generates a customized overview of all necessary steps she needs to do and all documents she needs to provide. Gloria has 1% of the work done at this point (1 % because she signed up and filed out her personal data).
- She starts to read step 1 “visa application guide”. To get further information on that she clicks “examples and tutorials”. After getting enough information from the tutorials she goes back to the visa application text. When done reading this whole section (step 1) she clicks “done” and the app will bring her back to her customized overview page.
- There it visible that she has now 10 % of her work done. At this point she decides she has done enough for her immigration today and exists the app for now.
Flow 2:
- Some days later she wants to continue her immigration work. She already did step 2 some days ago and now starts with step 3.
- She clicks on “step 3: insurance” and the insurance guide page is opening.
- She reads about the insurance and feels a bit lost, because she does not understand everything what is written there. For this reason she wants to find help by asking other people who went or still going through a similar process than her.
- She clicks on “community” button and the app directs her to the community area where she can first she an overview of all users with a brief information about them (their way). She finds one user (Maria) which seems to have a similar case than her and therefore clicks on that user’s profile.
- The app shows her the storyboard of Maria. Gloria reads about her and decides to send her a message to ask for advice.
- She has to wait for Marias answer and exits the app for now.
Phase 4 and 5: Prototype and Test
Low fidelity (lo-fi) wireframing and lo-fi prototyping
After having the user flow done we started to create lo-fi wireframes to build a lo-fi prototype of our app. While creating the wireframes and the prototype it was important for us to think about were the user would intuitively click after each step.
Concept testing
For conducting the concept testing, we had real users (our former interviewees) click through the lo-fi prototypes. We asked them questions about what they see on the screens and where there are ambiguities for them. The concept testing made it clear to us, which points in our flow are already clear and which we should further develop.
The feedback we gathered from the concept testing was:
- The overall idea was clear to the users
- The documentation section was not clear to them
- They wished it was easier to find the community feature/section
- It was not clear why Gloria already had 5 % done at the beginning
In the following you can see which changes we made based on the user feedback (red framed):
The changes are above just shown on one of the wireframes/screens as an example but we changed the community and document button in each wireframe it was included.
Final prototypes
After these adjustments, we created the final prototypes for our two user flows:
Prototype user flow 1
Watch this prototype also in our Figma Design File.
Prototype user flow 2
Watch this prototype also in our Figma Design File.
Next steps
In the future we could think of including features like letting the users upload all of his/her documents to the app. The app would send all of the documents to the specific institutions but, for that to happen, we would have to do more research to answer two main questions:
- Is the users actually comfortable on uploading documents online?
and
2. Is it actually legal and technical realistic that the app could function as a bridge between the user and the government?
