This is now a the Digital Citizens project.
It started as Redesigning intake forms.
Thousands of unaccompanied minors are crossing the Mexico/U.S. border every year. In most cases, they will be asked to fill out a form as an evidence in immigration court. But as we all know, talking to a lawyer is always scary even for adults, these 7 to 9 years old kids who most of them don’t even speaks English often shutdown while facing the lawyer. Sharon and I tried to redesign intake form for unaccompanied minors, we like to transform the whole experience to a more visual and playful way, by creating virtual characters to guide them along the way, we hope this redesign can help these young tell their stories, which tends to be their greatest defense in court.
In the process, Sharon interviewed lawyers at Safe Passages and Catholic Charities and got some wonderful feedbacks. Based on the feedbacks we decided to narrow down out prototype to three most difficult questions:
- What type of place did you live in? (city, village, countryside, etc.)
- When you were young, who did you live with? (parents? grandparents? siblings? other relatives?)
- Are you afraid to go back to your home country? If so, why?
We soon drew some paper prototypes
And Lastly, we build our prototype based on the same wireframe and here's the outcome. One thing worth mentioned is that to answer the third question: Are you afraid to go back to your home country? If so, why? We made the illustrated little boy call these kids and record their answers so the lawyer can determine whether the kid is in danger or not.
Below is our first prototype
And it evolves to KYR project
After redesigning intake form, we take the project to the next step. Know your rights(KYR) is a course provided by many NPOs here in United states which aims to educate unaccompanied minors the basic rights about them, from the rights to be educated to how immigration court works. KYR is very important for those kids but a lot of NPOs are understaffed and lacked of tools to help them teach KYR, so we decided to create a tool to help them digitalized KYR.
At first we decided to build a mobile app for the project. The app will included series of legal supports and quiz to better help kids understand the concept of law and court. Below is our userflow:
And our wireframe for it, you can also check it on Marvel.
And now, Juntos.
Although it got good feedbacks in user testing, there's still something missing. A dedicated app might not be the best way for us to reach for the kids since it requires downloads and we cannot make sure that they can all have access to smart devices, so we decided to switch from app to web app, which will allow us to have access to more users and would not be limited to certain devices.
In this early version of website, we use video to teach kids KYR courses. You can also see the website here.
This is still an ongoing project.