Obtaining a visa in France — A UX case study
Or the story of 6,7 millions of immigrants — 9,9% of the total population in France*
*Source : https://www.insee.fr/fr/statistiques/3633212
A few years ago, my Taiwanese friend asked me to accompany her to the Prefecture. She always handled everything by herself, but this one process became too complicated: she needed help. It was the first time I experienced the visa process in France and, at that time, I thought to myself “ Thankfully, my parents and I have the French citizenship, thus we don’t have to go through the process ”.
Definition
Immigrant* : a foreigner born in a foreign country and living in France.
The project
Have you ever applied for a French visa? Well, my friend’s story is the story of millions other people. It’s a story of a person landing in a France and being lost in the long and heavy process of getting a visa. As a UX Designer, I decided to work a solution to help migrant people find information and complete the bureaucratic tasks so that they can start a new life in France.
The team
Immigration is a complex issue. To understand the problem, I worked in team alongside three UX Designers. Since I have more experience as a Designer, I made sure my team focus on data and avoid making assumptions. We all took part in each step of the design process : user research (secondary research, immersion, interviews), problem statement, persona, user journey map, user flow, solution.
The research
You live for nothing during 2 years.
K., a refugee from Syria, talks about the await period for his visa in France
I worked in pair with each teammate for the interviews, one interviewing while the other took notes. All the interviews were recorded with the approval of the 8 users. While collecting the data, themes were found about the visa process in France : delay, general information, cost, language barrier, solidarity, customised information. We identified the 3 biggest pain points :
- The information is hard to find and differs from one source to another
- The service doesn’t apply to each person’s specific situation
- Official websites have a bad interface
The process
To define the problem statement, we used the affinity diagram and dot voting methods. Gathering the common points of the interviewees, we wrote a persona with the following goal : “ Sara, the foreign student living in France, needs a way to find customised information about the visa process quickly because she needs to complete the hiring process with the company as soon as she graduate.”
We will measure her success by two criteria :
- Finding the information is done in a smooth and linear process
- The user does the process with confidence and without anxiety
The opportunities
While following Sara on her journey to obtain a work visa in France, we identified design opportunities in those stages :
- The process of finding all the information she needs is repetitive and tedious
- The waiting line is very long when she goes on site, and she can’t identify the service adapted to her situation
The solution
Once we had the design opportunities in mind, we used the Crazy 8's method, and we drew one idea per minute, for a 16-minute and a 8-minute sessions. The 8 favourite solutions were deconstructed into features, among which we chose the most relevant one according to our problem statement. We prioritise the “Godfather” feature, who’s role is inform, notify, but also give an emotional support to the user. The second most important feature is the centralisation of information and a form, so that the information is adapted to the user. As the persona is a digital native and finds most of the information on her smartphone, the service would be in the form of an app.
The retrospective
From the problem statement and the user flow, the next step is to proceed to the user interface, then to usability testing. Defining the problem of an important societal issue was the main challenge. Oftentimes, in order to understand the real problem, I had to take a step back, and review the collected data, make another research, ask a few more questions to the users. Being flexible through iteration is key. Having a good teamwork is a good challenge, and it’s always a great joy to learn from teammates, through their new ideas, feedbacks and energy.
Thank you for reading ! 🕵🏻♀️
