UX RESEARCH : The case of the immigration in France.
This is my first project as Ux/Ui designer with a team in IronHack Paris.
The project is about the immigration in France and finding the main pain point of the migrants who are trying to get their paperworks done. And deliver a digital solution which can help them.
As someone who loves to travel, i know how overwhelming the travel organisation can be…. imagine how difficult it can be to settle in another country!!
In 2020 even with the covid situation over 700 000 visas were delivered in France.
the problem statement is:
How Might We help immigrants to find the information, complete the tasks and successfully get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city.
Sayana, Stefania, Yanis and “moi-meme” ( team) used the Design Thinking Approach to conduct this project.
QUALITATIVE AND QUANTITATIVE
While talking about this project, we realised that one member our team member had to face the same issue with the immigration system, that reminds us that it’s important not to“ think as if I was the user”.
We decided to do quantitative data research and we gathered every informations we could have find on Mural so that we can concentrate on the interview’s guide.
Because it’s important to choose wisely the questions to ask to our 4 interviewees; It allowed me to find the right questions in a good order that would make the most sense for our users.
The goal was to understand how they felt about the immigration process they all went through in one way or an other; Adam is an American freelancer in Sneakers design/ Melissa is a Ireland native who used to live in U.S/ Djenabou’s born in Guinea and her husband is french/ Merima is a german student.
That enabled us to define the patterns and reveal the main insights:
Information is hard to gather, it’s confusing
Public institution are not very helpful and not good communicators
No Direct help: personal network are the most efficient way to have first hand info
All theses pain points contributing to the emotional stress and frustration of being far from what you used to know{ home/mother language }.
Coming from different places and migrating to France for different reasons, i found that most of the persons instead of turning to institutional resources actually turned to social networks and family first for information.
“Figuring out the process of immigration is like a treasure hunt .”
In order to have a good understanding of the users, we tried to create an affinity diagram but even having all of the data and the information we needed — it was a difficult exercise to give each idea its proper categorization.
Once it was organised it as a team , we felt a real strong understanding of the persons we interviewed; theirs problems, theirs feeling, theirs needs.
EMPATHISE
Empathising with our users and understanding who they are, what they go through, and what they are experiencing was crucial !
It allowed us to put ourselves in the users shoes, to understand who they are as person as human being so that we can start to concept and ideate on what kind of solutions we can come up with to help them.
USER PERSONA
Using all of the qualitative and quantitative data we had gathered thus far, we created our user persona, Sarah The resolute migrant worker
Sarah, an expat working in France, she has a university diploma and no children. She needs a way to find information on the process of immigration for her specific case in one place because figuring it out is overwhelming, frustrating & time-consuming. What Sarah wants to accomplish is to get her paperwork done to be able to stay in France.
We will know we reached our goal when institutional resources become the primary touchpoint for getting information on immigration processes.
USER JOURNEY MAP
Once we had our persona we did a journey map to understand all the stages she goes through to get her paperwork done.
Our user journey map was a paramount part of the process for us as it’s what lead us to new ideas on how we could help our user.
We uncovered one main pain point: the origin of the frustration of the user comes from the fact that institutional resources are a confusing source of information: the information is spread in to many places and it’s hard to find a contact.
This major issue causes the user to go on a hunt for information and she turns to alternative resources like expat facebook groups and friends who already went through the immigration process and share their experience with her.
It helped us being more empathetic and keep in mind her emotional journey to be able to settle.
So that is the design opportunity we decided to focus on.
IDEATION PROCESS
With this in mind, we began to generate ideas by doing “crazy 8” rounds. We joined all our craziest ideas together and i was kind of surprised to see how challenging it was “to think outside the box”.
We came up with 3 main ideas/concepts :
“the Waze of the immigration”,
“The personal butler”
“the custom social network”.
we decided to break them down into actionable functionalities focusing only on the ones useful to solve Saras needs:
A tracker to guide her step by step through the process providing at the same time all the information and assistance she needs.
Low Fidelity Wireframe and Prototype
We continued to draw our solution melting our ideas to create a low fi wireframe :
a mobile app with a tracker that will guide Sarah in her journey to settle in France; that would provide all the infos she needs at any moment, give her all the contacts and forums to speak to a real person, have all the documents and forms she is looking for, tell her when each step is accomplished and finally when the paper-works are done.
We used Figma to design our mid fi wireframe based on the combination of our work together
CONCLUSION
Key Finding: Information on immigration processes is sparse, unclear and sometimes incoherent.
Next Steps: Turn the wireframe into a prototype and test it with user to see if it reduces the time to complete the process and the frustration into finding the necessary informations.
Surprise : The users currently rely a lot on peer or social networks to figure out the process and not on institutional resource.
I really enjoyed working on this project, to share and work with others. A good team is important and leads to a better work and design solutions . I realise Iteration is an important step during the process, and reminding myself that i am not the user.
I have learned a lot during this first week.
