Using design thinking and technology to connect displaced communities’ workforce to the local market of cities in Brazil — Design for social change.

ROLE

Research, UX/UI & Strategy

TIMELINE

Jan - Dec 2018

MOTIVATION

Passion Project + Scientific paper for Laureate Universities - Brazil

DESIGN TEAM

Thiago Dalcin - UX/UI Designer
Vinicius Cassol - Project Manager

PROBLEM

One of the central problems regarding the resettlement of immigrants is access to equal work opportunities. Mano amiga deals with the issue of unemployment and informality among the community of displaced people.

RESEARCH

We've conducted semi-structured interviews with domain experts (immigration specialists) and potential users (refugees from Venezuela and Senegal):

I was looking for answers to the following main questions:

01  How was their process of searching for a job?

02  What are the main difficulties when searching for a job?

03  What were the main channels used to find and apply for opportunities?

04  How was their relationship with technology?

Experts Interview

User Interview

Meet Daniel, one of the interviewees. He is brilliant and has a rich curriculum. But getting a job in his field is a quite difficult journey. 

Daniel, a charismatic dude at his work

"I was in the middle of my second college degree in international relations in Venezuela. I speak four languages fluently. But there's a gap between qualified people and employers, even more for immigrants and refugees."

Daniel, 25 years old

USER NEEDS

01 Help on translating skills and creating compelling CVs
02 Need a channel that bridges the gap with employers
03 Understand cultural underlying rules of behavior and approaches

The user
journey

Based on the user research, we've mapped the journey to provide the big picture of the current experience along with the main pain points. The main outcome here is the opportunity section that gathers ideas that can possibly solve the user's pain points once turned into features of the system.

User Journey Map of Alejandra (job seeker persona)

Design
Challenge

How might we help refugees and immigrants to feature their skills and experiences, in order to attract attention and connect them to potential employers?

The two main points that the solution tackles are: a scalable way of automating the creation of curriculum — translating skills; and connecting them to potential employers that see great value in diversity in the work environment.

The solution

WHY MOBILE FIRST?

I was quite surprised that among ~1,250 Senegalese refugees in Porto Alegre, 92% of them had a least one smartphone.

Digital interaction is a reality for most of the immigrants and refugees that I had contact with during the research. Both Senegalese and Venezuelans use social media (Facebook and Whatsapp) on mobile as the cheapest and fastest communication channel.

MULTI-LANGUAGE CHATBOT

Collecting the user's strongest skills in a natural way. Speaking the user's language and respecting their mental model of interaction (Whatsapp users).

Powered by the collected data and open positions, the system suggests the top opportunities for the candidate.

Even though the system was mobile-first, the main idea of the project was inclusion. It made total sense to create a compelling experience for tablets and desktop also. A total of four breakpoints, designed with Adobe XD.

HOME PAGE

OPPORTUNITIES MATCH

USER CURRICULUM

Validating Ideas

The main goal of user testing was to identify usability issues, and more importantly, discover if the overall idea would actually help them in real life.

End-user testing the prototype

LEARNINGS

01 Users thought they would be charged at some point

02 "Share my CV" feature would be very helpful, once usually they apply to job posts via social media groups.

03 Users spotted ambiguous questions in the chatbot interaction.

04 Users were quite excited about having a way of creating their CVs in their own language. This feature alone showed the great value and could help them to have fairer access to opportunities.

Learnings &
Insights

01

Designing with purpose

This passion project has changed my life. Especially because it's focused on users with critical needs. More than learning with these people, I was able to connect with their dreams and huge resilience because, despite all their struggles, they are essentially happy.

02

Avoiding assumptions

The hardest thing about this project was avoiding assumptions and thinking straight into solutions. I thought refugees wouldn't have access to smartphones and would never use the same apps I use. During the research, I found out how I was wrong.

03

Next Steps

This project is very much like a hobby to me. After the first cycle of learning - designing - validating, I'm pitching the idea to potential partners to build the MVP. If you're interested to know more, please drop me a line. :) 

NEXT PROJECT

Sales Teams Meet Growth 

Made with love in Berlin