foojee.org - part one

On arrival in a safe country like the UK, people who are refugees and asylum seekers have to navigate complex systems like applying for immigration status, getting a child into a school and finding somewhere to live, often while not speaking the local language very well.

Language can be a barrier to getting the right support from people qualified to help, like social workers and immigration advisors.

In the spirit of oral storytelling and the passing down of wisdom, foojee.org is a website that hosts digital stories as a means of providing accessible information about life in the UK as told by those who have done it before.

The project followed ‘Design Thinking’ as a method because of it’s user centric approach and scalability.

To empathise with and understand the difficulties refugees face in their daily life narrative inquiry was used as a research method for studying the way participants experience the world through the stories they tell. The project followed Connelly and Clandinin’s (1990) method of narrative analysis, broadening, burrowing and storying and restorying.

The data collected through semi-structured interviews was used to inform both the design solution and the issues covered in digital stories. The above diagram illustrates the method.

Transcripts of the interviews were then coded in the computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) program ‘Quirkos’. Initially, instances of issues participants face in their daily life were highlighted and assigned to a topic under the following formula (<ISSUE> - <DESCRIPTIVE TOPIC>) in a process known as Descriptive Coding. In the second round of coding, the topics were grouped into categories so that visually, areas of need could be found at a glance.

Empathy maps were created by combining the data from the interviews with information from newspaper articles and the literature to give a broader view of the users’ world (Gibbons, 2018). The process of doing this allowed for the identification and subsequent creation of initial personas.

The initial coding and empathy maps identified five possible personas. They included two advisors and three clients. From these three extreme users were identified as they had the most diverse needs of each other. These personas focussed on the goals, challenges and motivations that the user may have in their daily life and accessibility needs.

The second analysis aimed to identify and smooth the participant’s accounts into a coherent narrative for use in both the personas and digital stories. Two of the seven basic plot-lines identified by Booker (2004) were used to smooth the life story of the participants, these were ‘Quest’ for client stories and ‘Overcoming the Monster’ for advisors. Providing this backstory, gave reasoning and a more holistic view of the persona needs and goals..

An experience map based on the current level of digital support was generated to visualise the needs of advisors and clients and identify opportunities by synthesising the information from the interviews with participants together with observations made in the competitor analysis. The process identified that much extra work was required by both advisors and clients to translate information and share it (often printing out the webpage or writing notes).

To understand how the website might fit into the lives of the user, story matrices were created based on the journey points identified in the personas.