For a more holistic understanding of the wider challenges faced by living abroad, I spent a lot of time buried in the academic research and literature. My research unexpectedly revealed that foreigners in Germany felt they lacked access to educational resources, community and technical support for information and communication technologies.

Our persona hypothesis consisted of five different archetypes which we used to facilitate discussions about our users needs, desires and varying contexts of use. Through careful analysis of our research, we identified sufficient behavioural variables to segment our user audience. These variables could be categorised into activities such as frequency of use of the scheme and motivations such as reasons for expatriate. We discussed the personas with our client to develop a clear picture of who the design of the website and need help-programm would target in phase 1 and later in future releases.

Many Nordics arriving in Germany for the first time only have a prepaid phone and not necessarily a fast internet connection. For our audience we needed to develop a solution that worked effectively on low-bandwidth connections. We embraced these constraints from the outset and opted to strive for a simpler and accessible solution.

Knowing who exactly I was designing for allowed me to ask myself how the app fits into the lives of the users. I imagined ideal experiences and focused on how our personas think and behave rather than getting into specifics about interfaces, technologies or business goals.

Keeping the scenarios at a high‐level allowed us to work fluidly and explore concepts that we could easily communicate with our team and client. They formed the backbone of our requirements, and allowed us to express these from both a functional and emotional perspective allowing for further empathy with our users.

Combing through our research and brainstorming the different things people do before, during and after events, webinars etc. allowed me to come up with a broad set of tasks–quickly. I categorised and segmented the tasks into behavioural affinities and aligned content and features. This gave me a way to visualise what existing functionality and content would be useful, what tasks needed supporting, what opportunities were available to innovate and also what could be discarded from the existing website/ app.

Afterwards, I entered all the ideas into a spreadsheet and prioritised them against our personas needs, tech feasibility, and business objectives. This informed our phasing strategy for the app, the product feature roadmap and the product backlog.

Understanding the usage contexts of the app helped me develop a clear vision of the tonal expectations of our users. To communicate the personality of our app to our client and team, we developed a set of experience principles. These were used to sense‐check design decisions, articulate core values and describe key attributes the app experience should uphold for both the users and the brand. The principles were used constantly to drive the aesthetic, feel and overall tonal direction of the app.

Instead of wireframing, I opted to sketch my designs on paper. I used paper prototyping techniques to bring the designs to life and evaluate them with our users. This helped me work rapidly and led me to consider more ideas. With paper prototype, I could test early design ideas at an extremely low cost. Doing so let me fix usability problems before waste money implementing something that doesn´t work.