TFC Middle East Online Community
A digital product servicing as an anchor for migrant and transient Filipinos to connect in times of dire need.
Role:
UX Direction: managing content strategy, wireframing, and visual design
User research: as an individual contributor, I was responsible for working with product managers in the region to conduct guerilla user research that would guide in the creation of user personas.
Problem:
Overseas Filipino workers in the Middle East were being exploited & abused
Solution:
Design an app & responsive website for users to actively communicate with TFC’s Crisis Management Team in time of crisis
Results:
Significant, relevant, continued engagement between the users and the TFC Crisis Management Team re: critical info about legal help, job search, and housing
Providing a trusted platform for sharing welfare concerns
When governments, and local legislators fell short in fulfilling the critical needs of OFWs being abused and exploited by their superiors, my team and I at ABS-CBN took on the challenge to design a solution that would help fill that void and provide a trusted platform for them to reach out.
Doing The Research
In order to understand our users better and to grasp a better understanding of the gravity of their situations, I worked with the PMs in our Middle East hub to conduct guerilla research virtually with the following goals: quickly learning about our users, validating their needs, and prioritizing features with scalability in mind.
Designing The Experience
In designing the experience expeditiously, it was quickly apparent from our users’ perspectives that the following features were priority:
1.) Messaging feature to connect users
with TFC Crisis Management Team
2.) Easy, accessible info to jobs postings and legal help.
TFC EMEA Crisis App - Information Architecture (MVP)
Finally, I worked together with my visual designer to craft a familiar, trustworthy, mobile-first design that we would release as a prototype for remote and local usability testing and insights gathering.
Lessons Learned
The sprint team was high-performing and agile which allowed for on-schedule shipping of the project. I feel proud to have lead the charge on a great need to overseas workers, helping solve a major problem for users in that region of the world.
The organization made strides towards a digital transformation by further adopting an international, cross-functional user-centric methodology. Business decisions had previously been opinion-based without user validation and solely backed by quantitative marketing assumptions. This project introduced decision-making based on insights into what users actually need and do when interacting with a product/service. It was an honor to be of service to our users and also personally, as a mentor to the UX team and our collaborators.