2018 (6 months) / Strategic Design & Research Lead / Paper Giant
I spoke about this project on 3CR’s Done by Law program in December 2018. Here is an excerpt from the full broadcast.
Significant barriers prevent international students accessing support for legal problems
In collaboration with Inner Melbourne Community Legal, I led the research and design of the International Students Legal Information (ISLI) multilingual resource for international students to help them understand their rights and responsibilities regarding tenancy, personal safety, family and domestic violence, fines, and study arrangements. Three key issues led to the need for the resource:
Students are afraid to speak up about or enforce their rights due to visa concerns.
Online legal information is fragmented across different legal support agencies and isn’t getting to international students through the channels they most commonly use e.g. Weibo, WeChat.
If students don’t trust a system or the people ‘behind’ it, they won’t use it.
Plain language, problem-focused solutions
I led workshops with international students to explore common issue and generate concepts for what the online resource might involve. Students were then asked to evaluate prototype concepts, both in-person and via survey feedback, leading to further iterations before implementation.
16 common scenarios were legal troubles arise were delivered as comic-style “episodes”, with wording supplied by legal experts and edited by a content expert. The episodes were made available in four languages: English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Mandarin Chinese. The visual format was concurrent with student desire to have “more pictures, less words”.
A custom plugin was also developed to ensure ease of sharing via the most popular social channels identified in research: Weibo, WeChat, Facebook and Twitter.
The resource is now being heavily promoted among the international student community of Melbourne.
Reflections & learnings
If you are not part of a community, find ways for community members to lead workshops and activities involving their peers; recognise when to step back.
Building trust and rapport is critical to uncovering issues, but don’t assume everything is being disclosed as a designer that sits ‘outside’ of the community that enquiries are being conducted with.