Wicked Problem: Immigration — Case Study Project 1
Read my case studies
Writing my first case study.
The past few years, well more than a few, were not great for me. I had to interrupt my studies for health reasons and the road to recovery was long and rough but I started to get better. The thing about getting better is that now you have to have other goals and I was not ready to go back to university but I also still needed to actually accomplish something, that’s when my cousin Kika Barreto, (she has a profile on here go check it out!) told me about the Ironhack bootcamp and how perfect it would be for me. I was intrigued and looked into it and was fascinated by the world of Ux/Ui design. So here starts my journey with Ironhack.
For our first project for Ironhack we, Michelle Klein, Martina Codato and myself had to design an app around the “wicked problem” of immigration. We had to unpack that. First of all, what is a wicked problem?
Horst Rittel defines it as
“… a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision-makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.”
Immigration on the other hand might seem obvious but just to make sure we’re all on the same page I found a definition from the Oxford Languages dictionary:
“the action of coming to live permanently in a foreign country”.
Ask anyone who’s gone through the immigration process and they’ll tell you “the information is confusing” and the system is “thoroughly confusing” so that fits. Our job here with the app is to simplify the process so as to help migrants make the information less confusing and make sense of the process. But who are these migrants? Where are they going? If we leave the problem too vague and open-ended it will be nearly impossible to turn in a solution that can actually help anyone so we decided to narrow down our “who” to migrants from outside the E.U. (as we thought they needed the most help) and the “where” to Germany since that’s where most of the team lives.
For Ux/Ui design work it is thought that we should divide our process into the following steps:
We’re going to go through most of them to different degrees but unfortunately it’s not within our scope to actually implement and materialize this into a functioning app at this time. I will also add a 7th step for my thoughts about the process.
Empathize
First we start with the secondary research, that is to say research using secondary sources of information. There are many places outside the E.U., where are they coming from? Who are they? How old are they? Why are they immigrating and what for?
We found two interesting graphs:
One for the ages of immigrants
And one for their origins
From these we find that most adult migrants coming to Germany fit within the ages of 20 to 40, and that most migrants coming to Germany from outside the E.U. are from Asia. Unfortunately we could not find information specific to the ages of immigrants from outside the E.U. so we had to make do. It did not occur to us at the time to find out statistics for what the visas they use to come to Germany are, (Work, Student, Family Reunification), and if we were to revisit this project that would be something to look into.
Next we had to find out the requirements for the different kinds of visas needed to immigrate, which should have been relatively straightforward. We found most of the information on the Federal Foreign Office website but we would have needed to call an Embassy to find out exactly what documents we would need. We decided that for the scope of our project we didn’t necessarily need to know exactly what all the documents were but I would like to investigate this more if we were to work on this again.
With our research mostly done with we figured it was time to start working on our interviews. We focused our questions on things like what their first steps were when they decided to immigrate, how they found the information they needed, if they had help along the way and how they felt about the process.
The interviews went relatively well. It was my favorite part of the project, followed by the secondary research. I love talking to people and hearing what they had to say. I only wish we could have interviewed more people.
We interviewed a total of 6 people. They all immigrated between the ages of 20 and 35 and of the people we interviewed two were from the European Union at the time of their immigration (one was from Denmark and the other was from the U.K.) the rest were from outside the E.U. (Norway, Georgia, Bangladesh and India). Although we were looking to interview people from outside the E.U. we thought their insight could still be helpful, and due to the time constraints we couldn’t be too picky about who we interviewed.
The interviews went great. There was one interview that started off on the rocks that still makes me cringe but Michelle saved it heroically and you could barely notice it by the end. From these interviews we realized that immigration was a messy process, maybe more so than we had anticipated. We even have the story of an interviewee who needed a residence for a permit but needed the permit to get a residence. Their employer pretended to be their residence to smooth the process along and everything worked out but immigration is littered with seemingly impossible and sometimes paradoxical requirements and migrants need a lot of help to make sense of it all. Common pain points we found include difficulty with finding appointments, confusion with regards to which documents were needed at what time of the process, the language barrier and even knowing what they had to do once they got to Germany. We heard someone say, loosely in her own words, “you never know if you have the right documents or if something is missing” which we thought was important since it caused a lot of stress and anxiety.
Define
After all of the interviews were done we extracted data from the notes we took and started working on an Affinity Diagram. We separated the data into various clusters organizing them by commonalities and found ourselves a few groups of information from their reasons for moving, the different kinds of help they had along the way to their pain points like bureaucracy, timeline and language barriers.
The Affinity Diagram led to the Empathy map, starting from the gray at the top in chronological order ending with the center:
Who are we empathizing with
What do they need to do
What do they see
What do they say
What do they do
What do they hear
What do they THINK and FEEL
which led us to another part of the project I very much enjoyed, the User Persona.
We created our User Persona, her name is Adventurous Aadita.
She’s 27, she’s from Bangladesh and she’s feeling very overwhelmed with the immigration process. The information she finds online is confusing, getting appointments is a hassle and she needs help with keeping track of all of the documents she needs for different parts of the process.
With that we were ready to make Aadita go through a User Journey Map to figure out when and where she struggled.
We found that it was very much a rollercoaster ride with many highs and lows. So many steps, so many documents and appointments before AND after you get the visa. All the way from getting her documents and getting an appointment at an embassy or consulate all the way to the various documents she needs to get and sort out once she gets to Germany. After we did some work to visualize her process we came up with our problem statement:
“ Immigrants from outside the E.U need to find a way to organize and find the needed information because otherwise they will find themselves being overwhelmed and getting lost.”
Having figured out the problem we needed to solve, it was time to brainstorm a solution.
Ideate
We did some crazy 8s, that is to say we each gave ourselves 8 minutes to come up with 8 ideas. I’ll be the first to admit I’m bad at working under pressure and I came up with three designs at most. Luckily for me Michelle and Martina were much more competent and we wound up with more than enough to work on. We all have our strengths and this is not one of mine. We decided we liked Martina’s design the most and decided to take it to the next stage.
Prototype
We did some sketch-work for an app, but it was Martina again who came up with the design we wanted to go with. Take a look at her lines, I’ve said it to her before but I love her line-work.
We start off on the home page where you can choose your origin, from within the E.U. or without. From there you find a checklist of steps and documents you need to get to track your progress. It can even link you to specific calendar pages where you can check for availability and then schedule various interviews and meetings you need to attend. That page can also link to a map with the location of whatever embassy or office you need to go to. To avoid frustration over needing to know whether or not our users have the right documents or if anything is missing we decided it would be important to be able to check your documents and your progress on the profile page. The last features we thought about were a page for frequently asked questions and a community page for users to answer each other’s questions and possibly even get tips and connections for when they get to their destination.
Having done all that it was time to test our idea.
Test
We had notes to include the registration process, an introduction to the community page and to clarify the appointment page so as to show the selection process for which appointment, where and what. All valid points and things we didn’t think of when making the prototype. There was also a note about changing the community icon, but considering this was a low fidelity prototype I don’t think we were married to it either so I don’t blame us too much.
Implement
I wish we could have implemented this project in a more concrete way but unfortunately for me this is just a theoretical exercise and we were done with what we were supposed to do. I’d love to revisit this in the future, do mid fidelity and high fidelity prototypes, do more testing and even launch but that’s going to be for some other time.
Thoughts
I guess now that all of this is out of the way it’s time to tell you what I think about all of this. For starters Kika was right, Ux/Ui design is really interesting and it might be early for me to say but it might be a good fit for me. The problem itself was also very interesting to me personally as someone who has lived in at least 6 countries and more cities, (I might clarify in my bio if I have time), and I wonder if I would have enjoyed myself as much if the topic didn’t relate to me so personally. I really liked doing research and interviewing people. Anyone who knows me will tell you I’m a very curious and talkative person, it has even been said that I am charming and I think that might have been where I naturally shined. I wish I could have shown more about my interviews but I didn’t know how to record them at the time so you’ll just have to trust me. I also wish I had more time to study the problem and do more interviews. Creating the User Persona and the User Journey Map wasn’t as fun but I still enjoyed it. I like to think I’m pretty creative and it was a lot of fun using the information we had to create Adventurous Aadita, a name I came up with myself. I will say things started getting less fun when we had to start thinking about applying all of this in app form. Testing is when things got fun again, seeing users use the product for the first time, asking them questions, giving them tasks, but I could see that if we went through this process for longer it would turn into a rollercoaster of ups and downs, testing and making prototypes and I don’t know how I would feel about that. Ultimately I thought the whole experience was thoroughly enjoyable even if there were parts that were less fun.
I hope this was as enjoyable for you to read about as it was for me to go through and write. Comment on the post if you have any comments or questions, I’m very talkative so I’ll probably respond haha.
My project mates Michelle Klein and Martina Codato both have medium accounts so feel free to follow them and read about this project from their perspectives!