Wicked problems — a student’s UX case study on young immigrants coming to the EU
Before I start talking about the case study, I must explain the definition of ‘Wicked problems’. a wicked problem is either a cultural or social issue that is so complex, that it seems to be impossible to solve. They are subjected to so many factors that it’s even hard to think where to start.
Immigration
A great example of such kind of problems is immigration. We are going to try to tackle this issue using Design Thinking methodologies and tools. First thing we need to do is empathize with the people affected by the pains of immigration, immigrants.
But, what kind of immigrants? We narrowed down our audience into a smaller group and proceeded to define the design challenge:
Secondary research taught us that most migrants in the EU are under 30 years old and that Europe is home to 21.6 million of third-country nationals. Imagine all the struggles all those individuals had to endure!
Interviewing real subjects
We interviewed 6 immigrants with the same characteristics of our target audience, young people currently living in Europe who initially came here to study. We asked them about how their immigration process felt to them, what were their pain points and everything in between to extract real data.
I’ll post some of their quotes for context:
All the answers allowed us to build an affinity diagram, we clustered the answers that were similar to each other and then started to build groups. After this, we used the dot voting method to extract the burning pain points, and we did so by observing the patterns:
The majority of them expressed discomfort when talking about the process, they always mentioned institutional chaos, long waits, confusion regarding requirements and documents and even some had to hire professionals for them to help through the process.
How might we help migrants find information, complete tasks, and get their paperwork done to start their life in a new city?
We went straight into building an empathy map, a user persona and a user journey to guide us through the ideation process:
Defining the problem
After gathering all the data on what users say, what they do and establishing the main pain points in their journeys, we were able to create a problem statement:
Our ideas
The main idea is to create an app that helps young immigrants through the immigration process, we called it ‘Visafy’. Then, we used ‘Crazy 8’s’ in order to come up with features for it and voted for the ones we thought were completely necessary:
These were some of the winning ideas:
- A drop down to select your country
- A progress bar
- Chat box
- A calendar to check next appointments
- Reminder notifications
- Option to hire a professional (e.g.: an immigration lawyer) ‘Ask a pro’
- Document check
Low-fi wireframes
The process consists on an initial login page that the young immigrant students are supposed to use to log in and begin with the application.
After logging in you see the home screen, which lets you know about your progress and buttons that indicate different actions. We decided to showcase the flow that consists in starting a new visa application from scratch, so assuming that students would click on ‘Start New Process’ you would be then redirected to ‘My New Process’ page then select your country of origin and destination, type of visa and after clicking next, the app would show you what specific steps you have to follow inside your personal ‘My Plan’ page. You also have the option of going back to the first screen and click on ‘Ask a pro’ to hire a professional in your area.
Testing V.1.0
After the first testing session, users let us know that there were some things that we had overlooked and some other things that made no sense to them, I’m going to list some of our findings:
- No need for a search bar
- More ‘go back’ buttons
- Change ‘log-in’ to ‘username or e-mail’
- Many people prefer to log-in with Google
- Unclear what ‘New process’ means, change it to ‘Start new application’
- It was not clear that ‘Ask a Pro’ was a service you had to pay for
- Re-name ‘My Plan’ to ‘My Application’ indicating that this is where you manage your Visa application
- Merge options to simplify the process (Submit documents, Appointments and Help)
- Add clear document step-by-step before clicking any of the options
- Progress bar was well received
Version 2.0.
The second iteration consists in submitting your info to create a custom experience (like in version 1.0.) but giving extra clarity on the document submission process and merging options to keep it simple.
The new ‘My Application’ section consists in reading the instructions on the top of the page and then submit your documents in a specific area. After submitting this documents (that will be linked to the official institutions) a pop-up appears indicating that your documents were submitted and now pending approval. After this, you will be redirected to a new ‘My Application’ page featuring a new progress bar.
Once all the documents are approved, you’ll receive a notification to go and book an appointment for your Visa application. For the ones that still desire it, they’ll still have the option to ‘Hire a Pro’.
Iterated prototypes
Version 2.0. ✳
✳ When we created this version, we kept a calendar option in the bottom navigation bar that disappeared when the user got to ‘My Application’ page. There, they have a calendar in the ‘Appointments’ button and we thought it might be redundant to have both calendar options in the same screen. We later learned that this was a mistake and that the navigation bar should always be the same in all screens. That’s why we prepared a 3rd iteration:
Version 2.1.
You can play with our final iteration below:
After doing some testing with our new prototype, users expressed that it had an organic flow and an easy to understand interface. They acknowledged that it could potentially be a very useful tool for students who’d like to immigrate to the EU in the future.
Non–digital solution
We also created a non-digital solution for our wicked problem. We thought about how some of our interviewees expressed that it would have been helpful to have a guide or book with all the information in one place to guide them through the process, so we created it! Meet the survival handbook:
What did I learn?
This project not only taught me how to work as a team to tackle a UX problem and find a solution, it taught me that whatever you think will work in the beginning will probably change after testing.
User testing is extremely valuable when improving processes and you need to pay attention to what they say, because it will help you open your mind to new perspectives. Sometimes, when we’re so deep into a project, an outsider’s point of view is the very thing that will shed some clarity.
Credit
Last but not least, I want to thank all of the interviewees and classmates who volunteered to be interviewed and do some testing, and to my fellow group members Adam Mazik, Adriane Danel and So Hyun Choi who made this wicked problem wickedly enjoyable ;).
