With the rise of the refugee crisis in the Middle East, our team at Civic Tech Toronto and some colleagues began wondering what we could do to help.
Our Approach
Many projects addressing the refugee crisis jumped head first into building solutions. Since we were all unfamiliar with the field, we decided to carry out an extensive design research phase before building anything.
Since this is purely a volunteer based project, the first thing we had to decide was the scope of our work, and where our interests lay. We decided to build something that would last beyond the fleeting media hype, and that would help refugee sponsors rather than the refugees directly. Since it was also a learning project we wanted to try out different research and design methodologies that we hadn't used before.
The Process
We started by going to information sessions and interviewing experts in the field to understand what was going on and what pain points stood out. I wrote out an interview guide which our team then used to interview several sponsors and understand their stories: what motivated them to take on such a big responsibility, and how do they work cooperatively on such a sensitive and difficult topic.
After sharing our notes and extracting the themes of our research, we wrote out insights then ideated around possible solutions. Examples of our findings included:
"People need to know the status of their application and get frustrated with the lack of transparency."
"A disabling fear of failure can stem from working with a new group of people"
As a team we began brainstorming solutions to these problems -- how could we encourage sponsorship groups to build on their momentum and work well as a team. We started with a blue sky, "anything goes" approach, and gradually moved to more concrete ideas that we could prototype. As a team, we settled on the idea of a community driven "progress bar", where users can see the progress of their sponsorship process in context of how the broader sponsorship community. (Funnily enough, the idea originally came from the insight that adding a progress bar to a website can increase conversion rate because users feel like they've come a long way.)
Here's a mockup I made of what the dashboard interface could look like:
Although we hoped to test out this concept and build a minimal version of it, the group (somewhat ironically) lost momentum and put the project on hold. Although we'd hoped to make it further with this project, we learned a lot and hope that our research will be helpful to groups working on similar initiatives.