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Discovering community pain points and opportunities
2021.8 - 2021.10
Context
Beela is a support network that empowers immigrant women & non-binary people in Sweden to join the tech world promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion. I worked as a lead UX Researcher for 6 weeks with Techfleet-Baltimore, a volunteer-based design community that offers pro bono Product & UX Design work for nonprofits and impact-driven organizations. During the 6 weeks, Techfleet was partnering with Beela for generative research to help Beela better understand their community and prepare for the design phase of the project.
Objectives
We want to learn about the pain points of Beela's community, as well as their attitudes and decision-making processes surrounding immigrating and career transitioning in Sweden. Understanding the community will help inform Beela’s outreach strategy, service design, and content development, so as to expand current community.
As the lead UX researcher, I planned&led the research studies, analysed results & synthesised insights, and presented findings to client with the team across timezones.
Project challenges
This was a short-term project lasted for only 6 weeks and the whole team were based in different time zones. So we had to work asynchronously even for some sythensis workshop. At the sametime, we had to race against time and provide research findings in an Agile environment.
Research Questions
We had our stakeholder meeting with Beela and after the meeting, we had our first 1:1 expert interview with one of Beela's volunteers, who worked closely with the organization. Then we listed out assumptions for Beela's target users and prioritized the goal/research questions for the study:
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What pain points do new immigrants experience when they come into Sweeden
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What pain points do immigrants experience when they transition to tech?
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What are the reasons people join Beela (identify user groups/needs)?
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What are the most impactful opportunities to help new immigrants transition to tech in Sweden?
Screenshot of the project's working board in Miro
Execution
Since we only had 6 weeks (6 sprints), and we needed qualitative and in-depth data, so we decided to conduct user interviews as our main method. In order to deliver findings each sprint, we focused on one research question each week.
1. Identify Participants and Get Smoke Signals
We spent 2 weeks preparing for the actual study, including conducting research about the organization, communicating with stakeholders to prioritize assumptions & goals, and aligning project expectations from a consulting stance. Then on week 3 (sprint 3), we launched a survey screener to validate some assumptions about Beela's current community while getting some smoke signals of our study.
Structure of the survey
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Intro
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Demographics
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Immigration
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Tech Transaction
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Beela
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Availability
Criteria of the participants
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Currently in Beela's community
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Immigrate to Sweden for less than 2 years
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Currently transitioning to tech industry
Findings from the interviews
2. Conduct User Interviews
We scheduled 6 interviews with participants who met our criteria and were able to do interviews in English within the timeframe we provided. Each interview lasted for 60 minutes and was structured into three sections: their immigration process, carer transitioning, and interaction with Beela.
3. Update Research Goal
We conducted 3 interviews on week 4 (sprint 4) before our second stakeholder meeting. We used that meeting to share our progress and some of our findings with Beela. We found that participants had different challenges at different stages, so we created a rough journey map about their experience immigrating and transitioning into tech while interlacing with Beela, so as to highlight opportunities in the process.
However, when we present the map with our stakeholders from Beela, they seemed to be more interested in the career transition instead of these participants' immigration process, as they were more resourceful to make changes in area.
Screenshots of the rough journey map showing during the stakeholder meeting
Original Goals
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What pain points do new immigrants experience when they came to Sweden
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What pain points do immigrants experience when they transition to tech
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What are the reasons people join Beela
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What are the most impactful opportunities to help new immigrants transition to tech in Sweden?
New Goals (after stakeholder meeting)
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What are the reasons people join Beela
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What are the most impactful opportunities to help new immigrants transition to tech in Sweden? (Explore opportunities for impact)
4 Analyse Data and Findings
We adjusted our discussion guide based on our new goals and feedback from stakeholders for the last three interviews. Then we used a debrief sheet to analyze each interview and export the data to Miro in order to organize all findings from each interview.
Process of analysis and synthesis
Key Takeaways
Journey map showing opportunities
Feeling lost in the long career transition process
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Help the community help themselves
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Help to set expectations/motivated stories
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Structured resrouces
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TechFleet model/philosophy of apprenticeship
Getting confused when first join Beela
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Better onboarding process
Seeking different grades of engagement/involvement with Beela
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Leverage slack channel
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'Ask an expert' section/series to engage Beela graduate
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Introduce networking events
Next Steps
Since this was a multi phased project and I was only involved in the phase 1 study focusing on exploratory research, my contribution ended after we shared our raw data, findings and recommendations through the final presentation.
Stakeholders from Beela had a workshop with us discussing about the phase 2 study, and they decided to further explore following questions based on results of phase 1 and recommendations:
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Effective ways to onboard new users
What makes members feel like they are a part of Beela's community
Learning more about partner organizations
Should Beela invest in their own bootcamp?
Should Beela host regular events and meetups?
Discussion board with stakeholders to identify questions for the next phase
Reflection
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Running user research in Agile
It's my first time leading a UX research in Agile. I spent so much time applying the agile format that neglect the core of the process, which's acting rapidly to changes. When I drafted the research plan and questions, I thought that would be the foundation of the whole study. It might be in a traditional environment, but in this specific case, i should have reflected more agile.
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Finding the right people to talk
We used screeners to identify ideal candidates for user interviews, and we did get some potential candidates. But those candidates are still not enough for the interview (we targeted to get at least 6 of them). When it came to losing the criteria, we didn't discuss it, so the person who was responsible for recruiting made decisions based on candidates' availability. If I had the chance to do it again, I would discuss with my stakeholders and project lead the priority of our criteria so as to find the right people to talk to.
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Don't surprise stakeholders
We only had one meeting with our stakeholders in the first three weeks when we kicked off the project. Despite the fact that stakeholders were busy and had different time zone from us, we didn't involve them enough in the project, which led to the change in our research goal. Though we managed to achieve our updated goals, if I had more time or communicated more often with stakeholders, we could provide more insightful data to be used in phase 2.
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