Case study: Immigration
By: Michelle Leon
Tags: UX, Immigration, Surveys

A variety of obstacles comes to daily life when a person seeks to immigrate to the US or even another country; language, commute, culture forms part of the challenge, but there is a more complex situation they may face — legal paper work.

It has never been an easy task to figure out the right documents you may need to apply for a visa. This is the first step you need to tackle before moving to another country or if you are already in the right place with the right paperwork and want to remain legally in the country, you may face the same situation when you first applied — more paperwork, more documents to track, more confusion.

For this reason, we analyzed the problem and ideated solution as a team that lead us to our most valuable finding.

1. Discover

The Surveys:

It was important for us to get more in depth into the specific problems people were facing while trying to immigrate the US either for school or work and also trying to keep their status as legal. After gathering the data from the 24 responses that we got from the surveys were able to get insights of their pain points.

3 major pain points:

Anxious not knowing your status

Struggle to get in contact with the government agency

Not knowing the exact documents that should be submitted

The Interviews:

After getting the data from the surveys, we were ready to interview. We were lucky enough to know people that had gone through the process and were able to provide us with their experiences.

We asked the following questions from the 6 people interviewed:

When did you apply and what did you apply for? Did you get it? How long did it take you to get the visa/citizenship? Where did you go to find out information? Did you contact a lawyer/immigration assistant? What was the most difficult/tedious part of the process? Did you ever feel like you were stuck and did not know where to go next? If so, when? How did you keep track of your process individually? (Any services, noting down, in your head etc.) Looking back, what would you have done differently if you were to redo the process? Would you have paid for a service that guided/helped you through the process?

We took notes of their responses and all 6 faced a common denominator: struggled with paperwork, status of the documents and a disorganized government platform.

“From day 1, I was very overwhelmed by information and lack-there-of… even many of the forms were quite illegible and hard to understand. ” “The lack of knowledge in regards to the timeline was the most nerve-racking part of the process”

2. Define

Affinity Diagram

As a team, we started grouping our ideas together and giving them their proper categorization. After sourcing through our ideas we had a more concise understanding of what immigrants faced.

Empathy Map

This part of the project was significantly important. We understood who they are, what they go through and what are they expenriences. We were are to put ourselves in their shoes and so we could come up with a solution.

User Persona

At this point, we had a clearer vision of who we were designing for. We created a user persona — Isabella, the anxious immigrant that struggled with her student visa soon to be expired and wanting to apply for a work visa and stay in the country after graduating school. She doesn’t know what are the requirements she needs to know before hand in order to apply for a work visa due to the lack of information that is presented to her on the website.

Journey Map

This step guided us through the journey of the user’s feeling and emotional state while applying for the visa. It helped us connect more with the user in order to ideate solutions.

Problem Statements

User needs a way to keep track of the visa application process because a mistake could lead to visa rejection.

process because a mistake could lead to visa rejection. User must get frequent feedback on the status of her application as the lack of updates can be confusing, stressful and overwhelming.

of her application as the lack of updates can be confusing, stressful and overwhelming. User needs a way to get personal assistance for better guidance as online resources can be vague, confusing, and can lack information.

How Might We

After the data gathered we were able to pin-point what part of the process they struggled the most. Rephrasing the problems that they encounter made it easier to understand and tried to find the best possible solution.

3. Develop

Once we went through the ideation process, we sorted out and define our ideas on how we can tackle this problem. By using the MoSCoW method we were able to prioritize which solution would come first and which one would not be part of the process.

Minimum Viable Product

Our services will be a source of information on the visa process, it will guide through each step of the way and also, it will have a feature that allows you to track you application status.

4. Deliver

Vi-zy will be a desktop service that will provide you guidance from the beginning of the sign up, with human interaction and helpful immigration advisors that will make your process easy-peasy.

Key Findings:

This challenge was a little overwhelming as we completed it in 4-days sprint and not to mention, virtually.

Brainstorming is key!

We learned that it is important that you listen to your user in order to formulate the best solution for them, not us.

The wording of the question in the survey and interview is important in order to understand the data that later on lead us to a solution