A Culture-Centered Design Approach to Improve a User Interface for Migrants

Sammanfattning: A web application known as the Virtual Volunteer has been developed by IBM, the International Federation Red Cross and the Red Crescent Movement. The aim of this application is to extend support to migrants beyond the physical help they receive. The application is also a resource for volunteers who want to help migrants. This paper explores how a culture-centered design approach can help to improve a user interface and enhance the usability for a global audience using Virtual Volunteer as a design case. By conducting multiple interviews and task completion tests with verbal protocols, the results present two independent redesigned prototypes.  The culture-centered design approach yielded valuable feedback and data from the migrants that would not have been possible to collect from a more traditional approach like the one employed when creating the Virtual Volunteer in the first place. The results also revealed that all functions in the application were not clearly understandable for the migrants as they were for the Swedish volunteers. The overall results of the design case shows that a culture-centered design approach together with common usability methods are efficient to use when developing user interfaces for migrants and volunteers.