Case Study| A Solution to Migration Challenges
“Research feels like you’re blind.” — Laura Korčulanin
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Our first project at Ironhack was to research about how might we solve how migrant people find the information, complete the tasks and successfully get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city.
This subject was special to me — as a former Refugee Resettlement Case Manager. I’ve seen how difficult it is for new migrants to adapt and complete the process of legal migration. I often dreamed of creating a platform addressing many of the common barriers to self-sufficiency in a new country.
For this assignment, it was vital for me to enter with a totally open mind and let the research guide the solutions — not my ideas or personal experiences. We focused on isolating, researching, and understanding the problem granularly.
The Process:
We started the design process by trying to understand the users’ unmet or unarticulated needs. We could only do this by doing thorough user research to ensure we were solving real problems in our user’s lives and to gain the big picture. Our goal was to gather plenty of quantitative and qualitative data to analyze and draw conclusions. User research happens at every stage of the process!
EMPATHIZE
Surveys:
In order to come up with a survey that would allow us to collect important information we needed to discover about our users, we first started by creating a Lean Survey Canvas (developed by Chris Thelwell). This was the ultimate brainstorming session. We arranged, crumbled, and rewrote many sticky notes in this process. We tested our arrangement several times on random users before inputting the information into a digital survey.
Our requirement for the survey was that the users must have been through legal migration within the last five years. If not, they were immediately taken to the end screen thanking them for their time anyway. We tried to diversify our data by collecting surveys from personal connections across the world and random people by utilizing slack channels + social media groups.
Our goal was to have 30 completed surveys but received 46.
Here were the key takeaways from the surveys:
This showed us that most migrants came because they either wanted to work, study, and/or to survive.
This showed us that most migrants relied on online resources and friends/family for information before arrival.
This showed us that paperwork, language, culture, and housing were major pain points in the process.
In our survey, we created an optional question that allowed the participants to share other helpful information. 26 participants gave additional information.
We completed the survey from start to finish in six hours. In the real world, this process could take days/weeks/months to complete. The more data and user insights, the better the results.
Interviews:
The next step in our research phase was to conduct interviews. First, as a team, we decided on five main open-ended questions to ask participants to gather the missing data and learn. Also, we came up with supporting questions to ask just in case participants did not go into detail.
We tested our interview questions out to other classmates and random staff members who did not know what problems we might be trying to solve for. They gave us critical feedback in which we iterated on. As a team, we came up with a script on what we were supposed to say to the participants and put ourselves in the correct frame of mind. Migration is a very sensitive topic so we must behave in a humble, sensitive, confident, and empathetic manner. In any interview phase, it’s vital to start the conversation by building trust.
These were the following questions we asked:
1. How has been your experience living in Portugal as a migrant? How long have you been here?
2. What are the main differences between the two countries?
3. What was it like before coming here? Why did you choose Portugal? Who did you come with?
4. What resources did you have access to before arriving? Paperwork? Friends/family? How many institutes? How long did it take?
5. What resources did you have access to after arriving?
6. What would help you the most to make this process easier?
Extras:
1. What was your proudest moment as a migrant?
2. What was the most discouraging moment as a migrant?
3. If you had a magic wand to fix anything, what would you fix?
Here are some major points we heard from our interviewees:
“I had no idea how to obtain the documents — what a “NIF” was — nothing!” “The people are the key to success. If you know people, you will be okay.”
“I still don’t trust the system.”
“You can do anything you put your mind to. At the beginning, though, it was not easy.”
“After being here for a while, I’m like a social worker for my community.”
“I lacked the support from my community.”
“Community is important.”
“There is no one to give specific support.”
DEFINE
Affinity Diagram:
At the end of five interviews, we gathered together to write key points, feelings, and thoughts on sticky notes. We used those main ideas from all interviews and the data from surveys to try to categorize the information and notice trends. Arranging this data took a lot of time. We easily agreed on some matters and disagreed to compromise on others. There are multiple solutions in design.
“How Might We” Exercise:
After organizing our data the best we could, we chose key ideas/thoughts as design opportunities. “How Might We (HMW)” statements help reframe problems as opportunities. We took all of our key ideas/thoughts and turned them into HMW statements.
HMW statements are not supposed to indicate the solution.
HMW statements rephrase insight into a question.
We cannot start thinking about the solution yet.
Take a peek at our chaos:
Our HMW statement that we felt like encompassed everything well was:
“HMW help users become self-sufficient living in another country.”
User Personas:
The next part of our process was to develop user personas. Due to the surveys not giving complete stories, we chose two interviews we felt like embodied our targeted users. From our survey, we saw that most migrants came to a new country to work and/or study. We created two bios that embodied both situations.
To build these user personas — we mostly stuck to the individual interview but inputted other data we found consistent in other interviews of the same situation, desk research, + data from the surveys.
Here are the two user personas we came up with:
Empathy Map:
After creating the two main user personas, we began our empathy map. Empathy maps shed light on which problems to solve, and how. Empathy maps allow us to try to understand the sentimental aspects of our users through their situations, actions, feelings, and emotions.
User Journey:
User journeys are an incredibly helpful tool in depicting the big picture of their overall experience. They allow us to further empathize with our personas by breaking down specific steps so we might find ways to increase their overall satisfaction with the service and help the user achieve their goals.
I really enjoyed trying to break down the actual steps, trying to process the user’s emotions and pain while thinking about design opportunities to solve.
Brainstorming Solutions on our HMW Statement:
Individually, we brainstormed solutions for our HMW for ten minutes.
We were encouraged to think of multiple and even wild solutions that we haven’t even discussed yet. It was great coming together as a team, as we all took different approaches. One teammate naturally focused on the Portuguese community and government (as an example) and their role in our user’s journey.
IDEATE
Then, we created a mindmap of solutions with all of our separate sticky notes.
Round Robin:
With a paper split into 3 parts, we each selected an idea from our mindmap to begin a basic design solution from. We had 3 minutes to sketch a layout, then passed our paper to the right. We expanded upon our teammate’s sketches with 3 minutes again. After 3 rounds, we chose screens that we wanted to focus on for design solutions:
TEST
Concept Testing:
We chose three ideas to begin concept testing. We decided to break down our ideas into very simple concepts to test:
We asked 5 people their initial thoughts and received vital feedback:
“People in Nepal don’t trust online payments — in person is much better.”
“I need to trust the other person. How do they know me?”
“I like the physical toolkit better. It seems more trustful.”
“Exchanging values — might give me more trust.”
“Local post offices could be huge pain points in certain countries.”
“I want to know it’s possible for me to succeed.”
“I want to see documentation more than reviews.”
Service Blueprint:
Our next step was to build what is similar to the user journey map — but with much more technical details. A service blueprint is a diagram to visualize the relationships between different service components. This allows us to reduce redundancies, improve customer experience, and converge siloed processes.
We looked at our user journey and concept test for guidance as we created the service blueprint with our proposed solution.
