Min-Wen Liu

Project: Hello Skills

Role: UX Designer, Researcher

Project type: UX concept, Website

We took the course for human-centered design from Acume online course by IDEO. In our team had 3 UX designer, 1 UX researcher and 1 anthropology PhD student.

Hello skiils is a project to create a platform to help the refugees who has work experience, professional skills or degrees and looking for a job in berlin.

Plan our research

In the first step we planed our research, we had interviews with different kind of target users, 3 refugees who had work experience and looked for a job, 1 expert interview, a staff from job center berlin and worked for the refugees program, and field research in refugee camp berlin.

Desk research

In the first step, we did a desk research to know how other platforms are doing to help the refugees?

There are many different facebook group, website, platform for refugees, most of them are about onboarding questions, languages, culture, etc.

Field research: Refugee camp volunteering

I went to the refugee camp in berlin, it's called LAGeSo (Landesamt für Gesundheit und Soziales), before I went into the first building, I saw there were a lot of refugees wait on the street, sat or laid down, some people were with their babies and children. And then I went to the building for all volunteers and waited for the person who organise the job for volunteers. I was in the group to help to give dinner to all refugees, but it was very difficult, because the situation was chaotic, there were two lines for dinner, one for men, one for women or parents with children, but no one wanted to follow the rules, because everyone was hungry.

And there were also many problems about the volunteer management, work time was too long, some people already worked for more than 12 hours, and language was also a problem, there were many international volunteers, but many people only spoke their native language, so the communication was really difficult.

User research: Interviews with refugees and expert

So we planed 3 interviews, we invited one staff (I) from job center berlin and two refugees (H.K&H.N) from Syria.

First was the Expert interview, we collected all of the questions about the refugees program:

- What is the working process? (Which steps do you take to help the jobseekers?)

- Can you help us to understand about your job? (tell us about your job)

- Difference between this program and the regular “Job center” help.

- Tell us about experiences you have had so far?

- The biggest challenges?

- The difficulties they meet?

- Can you share some success stories with us?

- Can you tell us about how you handle specific jobs?

- Do you have cases of people with interrupted studies or work experiences?

- Who exactly is able to take part of the program?

- Can they relocate for a job?

- How long can they stay?

- Which documents do they need to take part?

- Which languages do they speak?

- Is there a language problem?

- Which jobs/qualifications do they have often? (Design/medicine/law…)

- Are there other initiatives?

- What happens to people with interrupted studies?

So after the interview we got many informations, we tried to use design thinking process and tools to analyse those insights.

User insight - Identify problems & opportunities

We tried to understand what kind of problems they met, what was the biggest challenge, for example this was the process the have to do when the refugee arrived germany: the first thing was registration, after that they could get their ID and train ticket, in the first three month the refugee could only learn language or went to school, and between 3th-16 months was the limited access, the refugee could stay in berlin and continued their study, but not allowed to work. After 16 months the refugee was planed to finish their german school with level B2, and the could move freely to find a job.

Ideation workshop

After the all research phase we started to brainstorming and created 3-4 ideas, and then we invited more participators to join the ideation workshop, the refugee who had professional work experience and looked for a job, they were from different background, IT, engineer and news media.

Persona, user journey and concept

In the beginning we present 4 ideas and concepts, solutions, stories, so the participants wrote down ther feedback about our ideas, they shared us their experiences, like what kind of problems the met, do they think is it useful? and why? So in this process we discussed all questions and start to brainstorming.

Ideation, create concept

Then we separate into two groups to create concepts, we had different directions, one concept called: “Be my Translater”, the goal was to help refugees solved their problems in life, e.g. made an appointment with LAGESO, rent a house, bought stufff, applied for school or job, it's like a communication tool to translate languages. The Helper can support with different topics or even made a video to explane it.

The other concept called “Professional Match Up”, the goal was to create a website that helped refugees to find the local people who had experience and lead them to the job, just like the mentor, and after discussion we deside to do this concept because it more close to our idea, and there were already a lot of platform, tools for translation.

Sketch, Prototype

After this deisgn thinking workshop we collected all feedback and concepts then create the flow and interaction map for this website, in landing page the visitor can choose they are a new comer or local people who wants to help, then in this website will have more features like they could choose their professional area, create a meetup or other activities.