Connecting Refugees
Connect, Build and Share
Anandita Aggarwal | Communications Manager
Bonnie Jiang | Survey Designer
Hsiao-Han Tseng | Contextual Inquiry Designer
Madel Leal | Product Manager
Max Xu | Project Manager
Adobe Illustrator & Visio
Sep 2019 - Dec 2019
Survey Design, Interviewer, Visual Design, Stakeholder Maps, & User Flow Design.
01 Framing - What is the Challenge?
During the semester of Fall 2019, we partnered with the Office of Global Michigan to research and deepen our understanding of how refugees in Michigan navigate mainstream services. The Office of Global Michigan wanted to understand how mainstream services are being accessed during and post resettlement. Our team focused on conducting user interviews with the target population and secondary stakeholders.
The project has lots of freedom and the scope was unclear to us. We realized there were many opportunities for this research project. We would like to achieve as much as possible for this underrepresented population. However, the time given is limited. We needed to define our project objective and scope within a short amount of time and scarce resources.
Due to the nature and limited time on the project, we want to frame the problem scope early on. We first map out our stakeholders in this project and interviewed our clients to agree on our scoping document.
We agreed on three objectives:
Conduct interviews with refugees and service providers.
Based on interview patterns and analysis, provide accessibility to mainstream resources in the community, and encourage refugees to approach these services through encouraging user experiences.
Providing recommendations on how to improve user experiences.
Another major issue our team faced was the sensitivity of refugee situations.
We spent plenty of time training our members to have conversations with sensitive populations.
We implemented a mixed-methods approach. To start with looking into this sensitive population, the team began a series of rounds of discussions to set the scope of the project. In addition to the mind mapping activity, the team also consulted the mentor from the industry and gained valuable insights.
As a team, we decided to conduct a secondary literature review to deepen our understanding of refugee policies in the U.S. and our findings support the notion that the current political climate indirectly affects the resettlement process for refugees.
A consulting report by Public Sector Consultants on service providers in the Southeastern Michigan Area including interviews with service provider employees and volunteers.
Article highlights data by the numbers of refugee demographics. Data is being pulled from the state department. Data is from the year 2016
Provides individual links to explore refugee information related to policy, practices, and other policy briefs on asylum information.
The article discusses the social clash between Michiganders and refugee resettlement.
During the recruitment process, our team spent a relatively long time designing the interview protocol. The team was also very meticulous on vocabulary choices since users may have different sensitivity levels to the semantic choice.
Our team spoke to seven users who either directly or indirectly involved in the refugee resettlement process. People we interacted with included users who immigrated to the United States as refugees years ago or who directly worked with them to make their transition easier.
Below we provide an affinity wall with key themes and insights we gained from user interviews. Our goal for the affinity map was to synthesize key themes and provide a visualization of those findings.
02 What did we understand?
Although there are many resources available to the refugees, they are unable to utilize these resources completely. Below are some key trends and recommendations based on interviews we conducted with both our target and secondary users.
Finding 1
Theme: Transportation Challenges
Most refugees use buses or public transportation to get to their destination. Challenges can include bus times, identifying bus stops, lack of access/technology for checking the details of the bus, language barriers and identifying the right routes to get to their destination.
Finding 2
Theme: Sense of Community
Another key findings from our preliminary interview, was that most refugees did not have any family ties in the United States, and they were looking for a sense of belonging. They connected with the people from the same ethnicity or country to feel at home.
Finding 3
Theme: Education and Job Placement
The users may have received education in their home countries, which may not always be recognized in the United States. The refugee might have a hard time finding a job that matches their qualifications, and might have to settle for a low-paying job.
Finding 4
Theme: Length of stay in US
Refugees who immigrated years ago much more comfortable getting interviewed and talking about the process when compared to a refugee someone might have immigrated recently.
Finding 5
Theme: Financial literacy
As mentioned above, refugees lack basic financial understanding when transitioning into the new country. They are unable to manage their finances and make use of the financial services available to them.
03 Future Research - What is Next?
The team faced some challenges when recruiting potential users due to lack of time. The team identified the research flow for future research, which helps to standardize the research process. The team hopes by referencing to this diagram, the future research can recruit target users more successfully.
04 Conclusion
We hope that this documentation of our process and key findings provide insight for future iterations of this project. We learned from both service providers and other stakeholders we interviewed the sensitivity of our target users and although we faced challenges with recruitment efforts, we hope that we’re able to outline the best strategies to continue the work. We hope that this provides a strong foundation for our client: Office of Global Michigan, to continue to work with the School of Information.
Recruitment of refugees takes time and established rapport is important. Having someone that already works with refugees directly is helpful to recruit target users.
We recommend building on our current interview protocol to ensure that it is thorough and that questions are framed in a way that is sensitive to target populations.
Have a translator for the two or three most common languages spoken by refugees in the Michigan area to overcome language barriers for user interviews.
Meet refugees where they are and perhaps provide incentives for their time.