NEST

At the start of the Discover phase, I began to draw from research articles on the topic of immigration in the Netherlands to learn more about families wanting to move here.

• In 2021, most people moving to the Netherlands were European. The largest age group was 25-35 years old.
• The level of education varies greatly within both EU and non-EU groups, with EU migrants usually having a higher level of education.
• In 2021, labor and family reunification were the most common motives for relocation.

Next, I conducted a Competitive Scan of nine available solutions and a more in-depth Heuristic Evaluation of three of them. The competition only catered to certain limited aspects of the problem, and none offered a personalized approach.

I created a Google Forms screener survey to gather participants for my research. The survey had 22 participants from the target group - people planning to move to the Netherlands from all over the world. Here's what it revealed:

Although I knew from the survey that the audience could mostly find all they needed online, I wanted to see if that could be validated through the interviews. I chose five people that I identified as good candidates (both EU and non-EU backgrounds, moving to the Netherlands with their children for various reasons).

Based on the insights collected so far, I used affinity mapping to organize them into three areas: gathering information, prioritizing tasks on the to-do list, and community/connecting.

Next, I created an empathy map and a persona and experimented with the JTBD framework to synthesize the research and truly understand the users’ needs.

At the start of the design stage, I formulated user stories to help identify the key user flows needed for the MVP. I broke them down into three primary flows:

1. TASKS: A to-do list feature that allows task management based on user input.
2. INSIGHTS: Articles about life in the Netherlands curated according to the user’s profile and interests.
3. MY LOCALS: Connecting with locals and learning from their personal experiences.

The features share the core idea of offering highly personalized content - based on the input provided during account creation. This solution is designed as an app to meet the persona’s need for convenience.

After creating the wireframes, I moved on to the style guide. I decided I would rely heavily on iconography and visual cues to communicate to the desired audience. The decision to go with orange as the main color was made for the sake of brand presence (orange=Dutch). I balanced it out with white cards and solid colored backgrounds for the inner pages, making sure colors and typography met accessibility standards.

I then created the hifi version of every screen. If you're curious, you can check out my entire Figma file.

At the high-fidelity prototype stage, I conducted two rounds of moderated and unmoderated usability testing, which resulted in a usability test report.

The app received positive feedback, as well as uncovered areas of future improvement. Some of the critical points were:

If time was not an issue, I would have explored features such as “create family group”, rewarding users for completing tasks, maps integration and develop a strategy for involving locals in the program.

Being my first UX / UI project, I quickly learned that intuition is good to have but you should never rely too much on your own assumptions. Rather, go out and test, iterate, then test, then iterate again.

If this product ever got to the development stage and shipped as a native app, I believe that all its functionality and features would need to be supported by a substantial amount of testing and research to make sure that it brings real value to its users.If you want to know more, you can check out the entire case study.