FROM HERE TO THERE
The Dutch helping hand
Designing a solution for immigrants in the Netherlands
Migration is something that mother nature has been doing for millions of years. When it comes to animals, science defines it as “the seasonal movement from one region to another” and it is often related to avoiding low temperatures or finding more food and water. Humans are no different and have been migrating since the dawn of the ages, although nowadays our reasons tend to be much broader: looking for a safer place to live, falling in love with a foreigner, reuniting with your family, inheriting land, finding work opportunities, and so on.
According to NOS, The Central Bureau of Statistics found out that an average of 383,000 highly educated workers or job seekers, who were not born in the Netherlands, lived in the country between 2016 and 2018. Considering a wider timeframe, over the past fifteen years, the dutch international knowledge workers' labor force share jumped from 2.7 to 4.2 percent. While this may seem like a big leap, the Netherlands still has a relatively low rate when compared to its neighbors.
Data from the Migrant Integration Policy Index — a unique tool that measures immigrant integration policies across five continents — suggests that the Netherlands is slightly favorable when it comes to legislating to integrate immigrants into Dutch society.
Even if you’re having professional assistance to relocate, moving to another country — and even a developed one — will most definitely require that you fill up endless amounts of forms and go through tiresome paperwork, to complete a series of obligations in a given period of time to legalize your stay. In general, you’ll probably need to obtain some sort of registration or ID, sign a rental contract, get an address proof so you can set up a bank account, and in most countries, enlist for mandatory health insurance.
My colleagues — Amanda Albino and Vitor Nano — and I decided to engage in solving the bureaucracy surrounding the immigration of highly skilled workers that had recently moved to Amsterdam. To undertake this problem, we started by using a CSD Matrix.
Then moved to quantitative and qualitative researches to learn more about the challenge we were about to face. My team and I segmented our audience to only people that were living in Amsterdam.
When asked to answer how hard was to find information regarding the following subjects, the users revealed that the main areas of concern were related to renting and registering an ID.
When asked, “As an immigrant living in the Netherlands, how would you rate the following topics as obstacles to your immigration process?”. The users responded:
Aside from the cost of getting your paperwork done, the language came up as another rock-hard issue for immigrants trying to settle in Amsterdam. To unpack the quantitative and qualitative research altogether, we developed an affinity diagram:
Through our interviews, we found out that co-workers were a key figure in many tasks since they were necessary to translate documents and contracts.
To get a real grip of what it feels like to be a newcomer to Amsterdam, we developed a user persona:
The more we dig in, the more it became clear that the immigrant needs assistance to deal with dutch legalities. Not only because of the language but also because of the basics of how-to-dutch (things like having to pay different taxes for different types of trash disposal). The user journey below illustrates the emotional progression of renting a house.
In Amsterdam, rental contracts are always in dutch, which can be menacing and frustrating to foreigners. They have to rely on getting help from Google Translate and in most cases, co-workers.
Problem Statement:
Recently-arrived immigrants in the Netherlands need a way to solve the minimum mandatory requirements to live in the country because the required documents and paperwork are not in a language they master.
Hypothesis:
We believe facilitating the understanding of documents for recently-arrived foreigners in The Netherlands will achieve a less emotionally and mentally exhausting settling process. We will know we are right with high success rates and positive user feedback.
From Duck to Dutch
The final idea came up as a task-based point-rewarding system application that would guide the immigrant into completing the legal requirements to live in the Netherlands.
The app would offer step-by-step guided assistance to complete each assignment, with the possibility of finding a local to help you (the Immigrant Buddy) or hiring a consultant to help you along the way (the Expert — inside the “Help” section).
The tasks would then generate points that could be spent with culture, like museum admissions or theater tickets (by partnering with the government), and if you’re an Immigrant Buddy, all of that plus some sort of waiving tax fees. If you’re getting help from your buddy and you manage to complete the tasks, both of you would earn tokens. We also thought about the possibility of integrating the reward tokens with other businesses like cafes and supermarkets, or even public transportation.
