Village Exchange Center project: The Design
We collaborated with...
We collaborated with Village Exchange Center (V.E.C.), from the city of Aurora in Colorado, to develop a digital resource guide for the Natural Helper's program. Natural Helpers are immigrants and refugees who have become accustomed to living in the United States and volunteer with V.E.C. to help newer arrivals find the resources and community they need.
The program had a paper version of their resource guide but found frustrations in keeping it updated and distributed to the Natural Helper volunteers. Our team worked with V.E.C. to identify the Natural Helper's needs and translate them into design elements for the digital resource guide.
Below describes our design process. The user research portion of the project can be found in more detail here:
First Round of Prototyping & Heuristic Evaluations
We sketched out our first prototypes using pencil and paper after our team first became more familiar with the refugee and immigrant ecosystem in Colorado and began our relationship with V.E.C. and their Natural Helper program. We were designing for a mobile application and used other resources guides such as 211.org, an online and mobile app resource center for the United States and parts of Canada, for inspiration and example.
We put our paper prototypes into an interactive prototyping tool POP and performed heuristic evaluations of our design and reiterated.
At this time we also created storyboards to help us envision the steps Natural Helper Volunteers take in order to fulfill their task of informing newer community members and how they may potentially interact with a digital guide.
Pivot to Web Application & Digital Prototypes
As new information appeared (V.E.C. preferences and lack of access to certain technologies from the users), we moved towards designing a website over a mobile application. With four major research findings from our user research: (1) A need for community feedback, (2) Flexible service categorization, (3) The need for locational context, (4) Password lapse considerations, we began brainstorming how to meet these user requirements. We also held considerations for the needs of the V.E.C. staff.
We developed a digital, interactive prototype for Natural helpers using Adobe Experience Designer.
User Testing & Design Iterations
Icon recognition was one issue we found during testing.
The digital prototype went through two rounds of user testing, and iterations were made from the findings after each session.
We also found that using more specific language in our navigation was beneficial to users
Along with finding issues with language use and icon recognition, we also gathered feedback for designing towards our research findings. We designed to enable community feedback, categorizing services for staff, having location contexts available, and tackling the issue of users forgetting passwords.
Features for Community Feedback
The resettlement ecosystem has many moving parts. Service details and offerings change over time. One thing that makes the Natural Helper's program so effective is it's ability to communicate changes. We wanted to replicate the responsiveness to ecosystem changes within the digital resource. We implemented a flagging system to allow members of the community to signal when service information needs updating or if a service is not represented.
Flexible Service Categorization
Many providers had an array of services and several interviewees mentioned confusion when guessing the category (such as health, childcare, etc.) to search under. We designed the digital resource to allow V.E.C. staff to easily cross-categorize listings. This allowed services to appear under multiple categories, encompassing a wider mental model for how end-users categorize services.
Need for Locational Context
A factor in choosing a service was the users ability to travel there easily and in a timely manner. Our final prototype included multiple maps where users could view service plotted by location. We also designed for finding services based on current location.
Password Lapse Considerations
The Natural Helpers had an issue with password recall. To advocate for accessibility, easy access, and the Natural Helper's program's philosophy to foster independence in new arrivals, we opted for designing a more publicly accessible system instead of restricting to only Natural Helpers and V.E.C. Staff. V.E.C. staff alone would have logins to see community flags and edit the platform.
Final home page of the digital resource guide
Impact & Handoff
This project brought to light many issues that a user experience researcher and designer may face. Our team constrained and focused a broad overarching question of "How can we apply technology to help refugees in Colorado?" to identifying stakeholders and programs, specific needs and areas technology to could be applied, and designing for a specific user group within the community (Natural Helpers). We overcame ambiguity, gained trust with our partners, and designed an end product which Village Exchange Center forwarded to their developer for implementation.
Writing about the work was published in the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference June 2018 under the title "Using Experiential-Learning and Iterative Design to Benefit Colorado's Refugees".