TAJA EMMANUS
THE MIGRATION BOARDÂ CASE STUDY
January 2022 thru February 2022
PROJECT VISION
Create a phone app and companion website to design for social good. Specifically, give immigrants access to laws put into simple language that is easy to read and understand.
CHALLENGES
Understanding Accessibility
Overwhelmed Users
Feature Creep for User Needs
Learning from Users
Trying to meet the needs of a vulnerable community requires those users to interact and give feedback on what was helpful vs what was unhelpful. After getting areas blocked out and getting the low fidelity prototypes built, I brought on users for review.
"It's very pretty but cluttered"
"I hope that the text can be translated so that people can actually read the thing. I know this isn't English but why put the translation option there if it doesn't actually work?"
"The search bar doesn't seem to do anything? And what's the other little thing there supposed to be?"
An immigrant working under a visa who needs to understand the laws passed I regard to citizenship because she wishes to some day become a legal citizen.
Monica Johnston
An undocumented immigrant who needs to apply for US citizenship because he wants to be able to bring up his wife and child and build a life together.
Philipe Hernandez
An undocumented worker and human trafficking survivor who needs to apply for US citizenship and be aware of the political landscape because she wants to advocate for those in her situation without worrying about legal status.
Velshka Mor
Crafting User Journey
Drawing up the concepts I wanted to challenge myself to be more creative in my designs without over-relying on existing trends. I wanted to allow easy access to resources and tabs without requiring icons, while they would save space, they might not translate well to users with a different cultural context.
Iterating on Designs
I went through several iterations when working on initial designs. I wanted to put emphasis on being able to tell different aspects of the design from one another. For example, law breakdowns should always look different from news articles.
MAKING TEXT EASY TO DIGEST
The text in the design needs to be easily digestible, I was able to partially achieve this through a hierarchy with typography and text styles, as well as through breaking up articles into smaller sections. However, breaking up text into smaller sections can only go so far so UX writers will have to keep this in mind when they choose wording carefully.
MOBILE FIRST
Mobile-first design relies on utilizing the screen space efficiently without overcrowding the user. This is something I struggle with and will require more studies of various mobile apps to understand this design process more thoroughly
Diverging from trending designs
For this project, I decided to not default to the Hamburger design menu and instead wanted to make moving between pages simple but not distract from the content on the page. Thus why I thought the idea of file tabs to be interesting as it follows the theme of legal documentation and staying organized. Granted this may be a contextual design to European and Western standards.
UNDERSTANDING ACCESSIBILITY
In understanding the user needs for the app and site I wanted to work harder to improve the features of accessibility needs of our users as well. There are users of all ages and ranges of ability that should be taken into account, as well as allowing users the option to protect themselves whenever they first log in. Accessibility means allowing access to information regardless of ability, whether a need to improve visual aids, auditory assistance, language preferences, or status of wealth and citizenship.
OVERWHELMED USERS
At first, many participants were confused about all the options they had to click around without understanding what they were for. To remedy this, I wanted to create an app tutorial for users to be able to take at their own pace. It would be optional and allow users to skip if needed, but allow users who were unfamiliar to have an easy way to understand everything without feeling overwhelmed by it all.
FEATURE CREEP FOR USER NEEDS
I could definitely feel the feature creep coming up every now and then while working on this project, especially when exploring the needs of users for hoping to create a sense of community. Oftentimes, these communities come from those historically disenfranchised by our government and feel silenced when trying to bring certain issues to light. Whether looking for missing people that the police have neither the resources nor care to look for, or creating petitions to support their community in ways the US government refuses to.
Takeaways
I learned quite a bit from the Migration Board project. I learned to put a higher importance on accessibility, gained a better understanding of hierarchy for typography, and so much more. I decided to challenge myself to be creative and not default to the popular design trends.
Conclusion
Understanding how to design is important for meeting user needs but it is not enough to simply understand these principles in theory. Putting in the time and energy to practice these principles to truly understand how to better the user experience with a product. In turn, putting in the energy to extend resources to people with a variety of accessibility needs is more beneficial to me as a designer and the user, than simply hearing the importance of accessibility but never putting it into practice.