Case study: How to change immigrants’ negative perception about residence permit process using UX?
Nowadays, many people know someone that knows someone who lives in Europe without European citizenship, right? That’s why among all briefing problems my team (Luisa Koyama, Daniel Simião de Oliveira) and I chose this one:
Important information: the briefing doesn’t show any kind of financial, political or functional constraints. Our focus was entirely on the user and the dream of helping those people.
Firstly we delimited our focus group:
young adults who already live in Europe without European citizenship and need to acquire the first or renew their residence permit. They moved to Europe within the last 3 years.
Secondly we set up our research objective:
to find the immigrants’ pain points during the residence apply journey.
1. Empathise
We followed the design thinking process to organize our thoughts. We ran an exploratory research covering interviews, survey and desk research.
We designed the user journey ‘as is’ in order to visualize the pain points and discover the design opportunities, dividing the journey in “user’s responsibility” (green) and “public service responsibility” (white). According to the information we found both pain points were set in the “public service responsibility” category, as you can see above. They are:
- Find updated and trustful information about the process.
- Costumer service moment and document delivery
(happens at the same time).
We decided to pursue with the second point, because it’s the most painful point for the costumers, as we could check on the interviews and the survey. Additionally, it was a surprise for the team. The users believe that their processes were depending on the person who attended them, not on their documents or on the public organisation itself.
Many interviewees reported that they feel:
- anxiety
- fear
- frustration
2. Define
Our research focused on discovering why they have those bad feelings. This is what we discovered:
They are afraid of (a) not understanding the front desk officer (even though they speak the same language, but it was more intense when they didn’t); (b) don’t being understood and (c ) facing a rude treatment/mistreatment.
why?
They believe their residence application acceptance depends on the person who attends them.
why?
They listen to rumours about other immigrants and the costumer service they face and about a certain cases. They create that belief based on their own previous experiences. They still feel nervous when they have all requested documents in hands.
Intending to better understand this belief we created a persona. It represents the users’ characteristics and helps the team to design solutions focusing on the user:
Thus, what is exactly the problem based on the research?
Problem
How to make immigrants feel more confident while passing through residence document process?
We believe that digitalising the delivery of documents we will make the whole process less stressful, more concise and consistent, enhancing the sensation of trust on the public organisation process and decision. We can measure the success of the project with satisfaction KPIs.
3. Ideate
In order to find the solutions, we did a brainstorming section. Firstly trying the ‘worst idea’ dynamic, but later we agreed trying to find doable solutions was the best dynamic at that moment.
Using all ideas on the board we set together the ones with good affinity, and based on that we did ‘use cases and scenarios’.
The pain point of costumer service contact have many tasks to complete, also the digitalisation of documents delivery need some UX structure, that is why we separated the thought solution in 3 different stages:
- User registration and appliance
- User’s documents delivery
- User’s interview with the officer
Some of the solutions were:
- The user would select the specific application process needed in the app and fill up all the personal information to start the process.
- The user would be able to pay the service fee directly in the app.
- So the app would provide an updated check list containing the documents the user should attach to the process.
- The user would be able to attach the documents directly on the app.
- The app would provide the analysis of the documents by AI (if it was in the right format), and send to the consulate back officer in order to give thumbs down or up to keep the process going.
- In case the documents were wrong, the user would receive a feed back about what was wrong.
- In case they were approved, the user could schedule a digital interview with the attendant, instead of attending an in person meet (what could be done in case of necessity).
- The user would be able to check which stage of process he/she was and rate the experience in the app.
4. Prototype and Test
The team designed the user flow with the lo-fi prototypes to test the concept, and contacted 4 immigrants to check it up.
The interviewees were questioned about the app’s objective and the screens functions. Based on those interviews we had many learnings and iterations.
The best outcome was the comprehension of the app’s objective by the users.
To add
- The progression of the user’s journey in a new page
- To correct some terminologies
- Adjust some images and text sizes
- Include login by social media accounts
To remove
- Attendant selection option
- Notifications
- Unification of service attendant
- “in analysis” and “approved” screens
Part of the new lo-fi prototype version is displayed below:
This challenge was very intense and fast!
Next steps:
- Understand the process required to generate a digital temporary residence document.
- Test the prototype usability
Some personal key learnings are:
- Always understand the best qualities of my teammates and use it to improve the work. Everybody helps with different intelligences.
- We never know what we gonna discover in the interviews, we need to be open with active listening.
- Sometimes a solution we thing will give good feelings, instead can make people more anxious. That’s why testing is so important.
- Take a huge and complex problem, cut it in pieces, resolve one step at time and be patient.
Thanks for reading this post! Please, feel very welcome to comment what you think or to give suggestions.
See you next week, reader.
