00:10yes, my name is Astrid Astrid Webber, and I work in user experience research at Google and
00:17today I'm going to talk about
00:18Redesigned information offerings for Refugees or how we spent this summer
00:242017 working on the European refugee crisis and
00:27When I say we I really mean we and not only myself this was the project team
00:33Volunteers from throughout Google, and I came together to work on this challenge
00:38And we did have a partner at the International Rescue Committee
00:43One of the world's biggest NGO leaders I guess in the space of refugee work
00:48And so we joined forces with them and google.org sponsored them also
00:54beyond this project to like make information
00:57offerings as accessible as possible for refugees which resulted in the following brief really like much boil down to
01:05Redesigning the mobile website and digital information offering for refugee.info which is a website a mobile website as well as an app
01:13To make it as easy as possible for refugees to find relevant information
01:18Before I deep dive into what exactly we did. I want to give you a little bit of context about refugee crisis
01:24It is at the moment the majority of refugees that come to Europe are entering through Greece
01:30They're coming from Syria, Afghanistan
01:35Somalia, Pakistan, and other countries you see the dots on the map
01:41indicating how much they come from each country
01:44it's the largest actual refugee crisis that we're facing at the moment since World War II and
01:50A total of 65 million people worldwide are currently displaced with the status of official refugees
01:57reasons for humans becoming refugees
02:02persecution for your political, ethical,
02:05ethnicity, or nationality or
02:07Many refugees are simply forced to leave that country because of war.
02:12In July MST International actually released a new report in The Times magazine, which had this headline
02:202017 on course to be the deadliest year yet for Refugees crossing the Mediterranean
02:24And just before we went on to our deployment the Wired magazine wrote a story how online misinformation creates more obstacles for refugees
02:33Including I'm sure you know like smugglers that have like interests in actually making good business
02:39With refugees as well as many other sources of information that come together on the social Internet
02:46Some of them being valuable and others not so much for being outdated
02:51So I want to show you real briefly the app as it is or as we found it when we started working
02:57It's just very important to say that this app and mobile website came together over the last three years. The organization
03:04Acted when help was needed and the information needed to be brought together
03:08So you see an organically grown app over three years with a lot of information on it
03:15And it became such a density
03:17That even the organization itself in the end
03:19Sometimes didn't know where exactly things were, so there is a wealth of information on one side and a terrible
03:25Usability on the other side. Just to give one example you see the little map here in the middle with the pins
03:31Which looks really good because you can
03:34Tell, okay there's different services probably for me available at different points of interest throughout the city
03:39But the bad thing is you cannot actually know
03:42What is hidden behind each pin you have to go to a different side so you're losing the
03:46Geographic information if you want to know the content
03:48Which I think we can all agree is not a great experience. Back to us in the field we were following a very classical
03:55User centered design process to structure our work. We started off with doing user research
04:00To familiarize ourselves with the needs of the refugees, their daily life, there habits around information
04:06Gathering and their journeys actually throughout the website as well as other offerings
04:12And then we brought this information together
04:18The insights and ideated the whole thing, did a brainstorming and in the end prototyped and designed
04:25And then actually our deployment ended, but we have been continuing to work on this over the last half a year
04:33Things have come together, and it's in beta now which I'm happy to tell I'm going to show you a few slides later
04:39What came out of it. But back to research because I'm a researcher
04:42So I'm very interested in to that part, how research can actually help to
04:47Inform a project like that to be really user centered. We started off with focus groups
04:51This was organized for us by the IRC
04:54Because we wanted to get to work the very first day right, so we had to rely on them and they were great at organizing
05:00All these people. I might have not started over the focus group with my first research method,
05:05But really you're there in the field to take whatever you get and to make it work
05:08So we did that. Then we had the opportunity
05:11To continue with in-depth interviews one on one, which gave us the opportunity to have people speak up more personally
05:18Really valuable, and then we went into the field, so we did visit the refugee camps. We were able to observe
05:26that was really really valuable because behavior and
05:30Opinion, as everyone knows who's in research, can be two different shoes
05:33and so we were able to
05:36information that in the end we as a team could sit down and really like go through critical user journeys in the existing site and
05:42app and identify some of the weak points
05:45by doing so. So, that was our all about research process in a nutshell and
05:50Let's see how actually our research helped to form a better understanding of refugees and information needs
05:57Just a quick disclaimer here. This is a much larger research project so if you feel like, 'oh
06:02There's just certain aspects. I can think of other ones.' Be assured there is a lot more aspects
06:07I'm just going to present a few of them. If you're more interested come speak to me afterwards I can
06:13Talk about this probably forever.
06:15First of all, as a researcher we all learned
06:19It's a lot harder to build up that trust and rapport that we need in order to have valuable UX research
06:26Relationships with our research subjects, right because people are very frustrated. They've been in that case
06:33This part of the research happened in Greece. They'd been there for a long time. There was frustration
06:37There was previously bad experiences with people who wanted stuff from them
06:41So it took a lot longer to actually like
06:43make them understand and build up that trust that is needed for them to actually engage with you and
06:49Tell you and show you what's important for the research, and we needed to manage our information gathering
06:56and interacting with the users
06:58To the fact that a lot of people were indeed traumatized and had these bad experiences before, so which resulted in to us
07:06actually not taking video
07:07Not photographing, as you will see very little photographs and those if you show that you see are actually
07:13Pictures that are not from the research trip
07:15But that are under a Creative Commons license because we want to protect the people that we work with
07:20We shied away from like having really large groups
07:23we gave women the opportunity to be interviewed separately. We interviewed families and people who knew each other together and
07:31just tried to keep things low level so that the participants could feel as much less normality
07:38As possible and not be disrupted by us. Let's go to the first hypothesis
07:43Which is a really interesting one because initially we were told, oh you're coming to that refugee project of course it's mobile first
07:49Right everyone is expecting
07:51People bring along their mobile phones so that a lot of people from these countries that we looked at research shows us
07:58mobile phones is often the first time that they got online so they are very very familiar with mobile phones, right?
08:03But through our research we actually saw
08:06That it is not so much mobile first, but really app first, that we should talk about
08:11because while people were very familiar with
08:14social media applications and message message
08:16application through people and
08:18Friends that have shown them how to use those, a lot of people actually didn't know how to operate a mobile browser
08:24what it is that you put in as a web address and that you need to type something so when looking into why the
08:31Current site wasn't used as the NGO wished it to be, there was a lot of 'aha' effects that we had there
08:39Told us that whatever we come up with
08:42Needs to be as easy to be used as a mobile app and indeed probably via mobile app
08:47And it should be advertised and shown to the people where they spend their time already
08:51Which is Facebook and messenger applications where they do hunt for information to inform the next steps on their like refugee journey
08:58Secondly we were told all refugee camps have Wi-Fi
09:02That's great, but again it really takes
09:05something else to go and understand what it means because what it means is the WiFi spot is in one place and
09:12That means you need to be physically really close
09:14Which means that people come there early will get more access than others who come later and those people who
09:21occupy that area, which in many cases were men,
09:24Make the case that women don't feel that comfortable to actually go there and join in, so women much more largely
09:31Were in the non-WiFi areas of the camps and didn't have the access. Again something that we would not have known if you weren't there
09:39Which of course implies that you need to look into how you can facilitate that process.
09:43What do extra spaces mean? What do women only spaces, family spaces mean?
09:48to make sure that the information offerings actually do also meet your target group and
09:53Along with the previous insight, we discovered something else
09:57information channel number one is peer-to-peer
10:00conversation. So rumors dominate the information landscape and reach people offline as well as online and
10:07Refugee.info didn't really cater to that
10:09Particular model. It is thought from the perspective that people come to a website and have questions
10:15And then they look for their answer within the site
10:17And then they take their reply or the answer and they go and put it into practice
10:23But refugees really wanted to go on the site and verify the rumor is true
10:30What mattered to them. This is what their friend told them
10:32But it was a friend of a friend of a friend who came up with that, so they couldn't be sure this is actually real and
10:37trustworthy information. They also made the experience that policies were changed on them day by day and that information
10:44That didn't have a date
10:45when it was released was not worth much because it could have been already outdated by the time that they needed it and
10:52so with these research findings and many other ones in mind, we developed a new concept for refuge.info the app, as well as
10:58A mobile website on a clean and very accessible UX design. So one hard piece of that was actually developing a concept
11:07for the clickable progress graph
11:10that we developed so that if refugees could understand their individual Asylum case and
11:16Navigate it and really find that information because this was like the number one information need
11:21But this needs to be accompanied by concept of categories and content that addresses refugees needs
11:26They've got to travel, border control, but also aims to motivate them to take advantage of available
11:31education offers, work, and social activities and
11:34Lastly we developed a social media strategy to make the very important plug-in that the app itself is actually being used
11:42From the places where the people naturally already spend their time
11:45Here is a little quick sneak preview you see our warm welcome, which came together because when you previously went on the page
11:53Actually the language selection was somewhere buried far down. People
11:59Especially important Farsi, as well as Arabic, as well as English should be offered all these languages, but then also
12:04where are you geographically because the moment you can tell us where you are geographically we can already take a lot of the
12:11Additional information away, so it's getting more simple for you
12:14And so rather than having the refugees figure that out for themselves we got it done through that process
12:20The second thing I want to show you is the new landing page
12:24Homepage that people come to. The new information all has dates
12:28And there is.. we're developing the background or way so that this can be automatically updated in
12:34A rhythm so people really know that information was released it was checked for me
12:39And I can trust this information and real
12:42Similarly like Facebook using like a long scrolling page, so rather than going into a lot of levels of information architecture
12:49The idea is that people can actually browse along and find a lot of content that way. And lastly I want to point out the bottom nav
12:56Navigation bar which is a lot simplified so that that people can go into categories,
13:02Find the area that they're interested in Asylum, aesthetic
13:06Area, and then the area of more still being updated
13:10Alright and with I have come to the end of my talk
13:13It can honestly be overwhelming to work on a subject like that we heard of people
13:18Dying along the journeys, families breaking apart, and people on levels of suicide threat
13:24but it's really hard for people who live in very privileged situations as we all do here in the Bay Area and
13:30showing the empathy and understanding
13:32Throughout all the steps of the research and project was really important
13:36I'm really really glad that we have the IOC as a partner because they are professionals and we learn so much from them and they
13:43Really, taught us good lessons, and we got to interact with users and be like a good researcher
13:49But also a good human being in those situations and for me personally the biggest
13:55Comfort and this context comes from that even though you can't like
13:59Rescue the individual, and you can't like decide over their case because we've got can't give the people your own passport
14:06You can still like or we could luckily work on this big idea that we develop this app
14:11which hopefully can scale and then give a lot of good information to people to make better decisions to
14:18Reach places where there is
14:21An opportunity to find home again, and so if you are now interested to get engaged with refugees
14:27In the Bay Area and there's several organizations of refugees living in San Francisco. I learned in the Bay Area. They're looking for mentors
14:34They are looking for people who can give
14:37yeah, just integration into a like mainstream life, so
14:41Look on Google Maps on Google, and you will find a few of them. Thank you
