ImmiGreet

A mobile app that helps Canadian immigrants secure meaningful employment

Project Type
Solo Student Project for BrainStation UX Bootcamp
My Role
UX/UI Designer
UX Researcher
Timeline
Jan 2022 - Apr 2022
Tools
Figma
Invision
Photoshop
Overview

How might we help new immigrants to Canada get jobs commensurate with their skills and experience?

Although the Canadian government is increasingly accepting highly skilled immigrants, many skilled newcomers are underemployed, which reduces their ability to contribute to Canada economically and socially.

Therefore, I designed ImmiGreet, a mobile app that helps immigrants get jobs commensurate with their skills and experience by providing clear instructions and guidelines for accrediting their foreign credentials.

For this project, I worked on the entire end-to-end design process from research to the high-fidelity interactive prototype.

The Impact

10+

5/5

Tested the feature

Task success rate

By providing new immigrants to Canada the right information to get their skills appropriately and expediently recognized, ImmiGreet helps immigrants find a job that achieve their full potential, while also helps the Canadian labour market to be transformed into one that better recognizes, utilizes and rewards the skills, experience and contributions of Canadian immigrants.

The Problem

Better educated, but earning less.

38%

10%

$50B

Only 38% of university-educated immigrants aged 25 to 54 work at a job that fits their education level.

New immigrants earn around 10% less on average than Canadian-born peers.

Failing to address the earnings gap may be costing Canada $50 billion a year in GDP.

The Solution

A easy way to get new immigrants’ skills appropriately and expediently recognized.

Resume Scanner

Simply upload your resume, ImmiGreet will use machine learning to suggest a variety of positions available to you based on your skills, experience, and qualifications.

Get Accredited

ImmiGreet automatically detects whether your foreign credentials are accepted in Canada and provides you with up-to-date accurate information about getting them accredited.

Quick Apply

ImmiGreet matches your foreign educational background and work experience to equivalent Canadian positions that you can directly apply to.

Design Process

How I got there?

I used the Design Thinking approach for solving this problem.

User Research

If immigrants are allowed in Canada based on their skills, why do they fare so poorly in the labour market?

To have a holistic understanding of the problem space and learn more about my users’ common behaviours, motivations and frustrations, I conducted 30-minute interviews with a few immigrants to Canada between the ages of 25 to 54 who have experience working in Canada to discuss in-depth their employment in Canada.

After conducting user research, it is clear to me that new immigrants want access to accurate information regarding all the factors associated with success in employment for commensurate employment. Rather than thinking about how I could leverage their competencies, I shifted my focus to how I could provide better job market information for them. I then revised my “How Might We” statement to best describes the problem at hand:

How might we better prepare new immigrants by providing better job market information, so that they can successfully find jobs that fully leverage their skills?
Specify the user’s needs

User persona and empathy map

I then crafted a persona that represents my target users and an experience map that outlines how the users currently may deal with the difficulties through job searching in Canada. This helped me build empathy with my target users and to stay user-centred while identifying opportunities where I could intervene with my digital solution.

Design Solutions

Product goals

At this point, the functionality of my digital solution began to become more concrete. The objective for this phase was to engage in a quick and iterative design process to improve the flows and overall functionality of the product before moving into the high-fidelity UI design.

Pain Points
  • Rejection before even reaching the interview stage.
  • Difficulty obtaining work because of over-qualification.
  • Inadequate accurate foreign credential recognition information.
  • ➡️
User goals
  • I want some professional help with my job applications.
  • I want to find a job that meets my competencies.
  • I want to know what extra accreditation I may need to transition into my career field in Canada successfully.

⬇️

Product requirements
Be Useful
  • Get immigrants personalized recommendations on their job applications.
  • Help immigrants find positions that meet their competencies.
  • Quickly determine what Canadian accreditations immigrant applicants will need.
Be Accurate
  • Be clear on the job requirements for immigrant applicants.
  • Be clear on the steps immigrant applicants. must take to get their foreign credential recognition.

⬇️

Design decision 1: personalized recommendations

  • Taking a questionnaire to get users tailored recommendations was my initial thought. However, I soon realized that it requires users to fill out 10+ questions to ensure users get the suitable offers.
  • The high interaction cost might scare users away. Instead, uploading a resume is an easier and more efficient way for users to start.

Design decision 2: instant gratification

  • There is no registration process to distract them before they track application status.
  • I removed any unnecessary content on the home page to allow users to focus and complete the task quickly.

Marketing Site

Please kindly refer to the links below for an expanded view:

Next Step

  • Testing features with users and monitoring feedback to identify further opportunities and areas of improvement.
  • Improve accessibility by adding languages and other feature of voice read to make it more inclusive for a wider audience.

What I’d do differently next time

  • Focus only on design features that move the design process towards a specific goal. Don’t get distracted about nice-to-haves.
  • Iterate as much as I can.
  • Conduct usability testing with the target user group to optimize the user testing results.
  • Don't rush to the design phase. Spend more time on the research phase if possible.

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Let's work together and create something amazing!