Empowering Pathways
A Design Sprint for Immigrant Legal Navigation
Summary
I designed and facilitated a high-impact, 3-day Design Sprint that brought together a diverse coalition of advocates, immigrants, and technologists to tackle a critical challenge: improving access to legal information for immigrants. This sprint led to the development of innovative concepts, one of which has now evolved into ImmPath AI, an AI-powered tool transforming how immigrants navigate the complex path to legal status. New Way Now: Justicia Lab provides immigrants with legal guidance in 30 seconds using AI and AI for Social Good e-book
Sprint Goal
Empower immigrants and advocates with a collaborative national immigrant legal content hub that reduces duplication, combats misinformation, and ensures everyone has access to accurate and up-to-date information.
My Role
As the sole sprint designer and facilitator, I orchestrated the entire 3-day workshop at Pier 57 in New York City. I was responsible for:
Planning and preparation: Working with Google.org, Pro Bono Net, and Justicia Lab to define the sprint challenge and recruit participants.
Facilitation: Guiding 30+ participants from 9+ national advocacy organizations and 5+ immigrant/refugee newcomers through ideation, prototyping, and user testing.
Synthesis and direction: Ensuring that the resulting concepts were user-centered, addressed real-world challenges, and aligned with the goals of the participating organizations.
Communication: Presenting the sprint outcomes to Google product Directors from Chrome and Play.
Problem
Millions of immigrants and asylum seekers face significant hurdles in accessing accurate and timely legal information. This challenge is multifaceted:
Information Overload: Advocates struggle to keep pace with the constant updates across various platforms, leading to inefficiencies and potential gaps in service.
Misinformation: The proliferation of inaccurate or outdated information creates confusion and distrust, jeopardizing the well-being of immigrants and refugees.
Language Barriers: Limited access to information in multiple languages hinders effective communication and understanding, further marginalizing vulnerable communities.
These challenges create a critical need for accessible, reliable, and multilingual legal resources that can be deployed quickly and effectively.
Solution
To respond to these pressing issues, I designed and facilitated a collaborative Design Sprint focused on creating a national immigrant legal content hub. The sprint process involved:
Bringing together diverse perspectives: We united advocates, technologists, and, crucially, immigrants and refugees themselves to ensure that the solutions were deeply rooted in user needs.
Rapid ideation and prototyping: Through structured exercises and collaborative activities, we generated a range of innovative concepts, including:
AI-Moderated Chat Groups: A platform that connects individuals with relevant support groups, moderated by AI to promote safe spaces and flag misinformation.
Inmigrantes al Día: A language-toggleable platform that aggregates verified news and information from official sources.
Personalized Checklists: A tool that creates actionable checklists and reminders tailored to individual immigration journeys.
User testing and validation: We engaged immigrant/refugee newcomers in ideation and concept validation on Days 2 & 3 to gather feedback and refine the prototypes.
Process
"Understand" Phase: We established a shared foundation by incorporating diverse methods to foster a deep understanding of the problem space. This included:
Leadership perspectives and lightning talks from experts, providing a broad overview of the challenges.
An impromptu panel on AI considerations, addressing specific concerns and questions about technology's role.
Exploration of user needs through relevant articles, speculative "Tweets" envisioning future impacts, and current personas and journeys of immigrants, ensuring a user-centered approach.
To effectively navigate the multifaceted challenges in immigrant legal navigation, the 3-day Design Sprint employed a structured and collaborative approach involving 30+ individuals from many diverse backgrounds and contexts.
"Define" Phase: We articulated user goals using the "Jobs To Be Done" framework, and clarified desired outcomes by creating a future press release.
"Sketch" Phase: Teams engaged in rapid ideation through sketching exercises. Given that many participants were unfamiliar with sketching in this context, we began with a fun practice sketch to build confidence and familiarity with the process.
"Decide" Phase: We selected promising ideas, often using dot voting, and refined them into concise one-pagers.
"Prototype" Phase: Teams developed tangible representations of their solutions.
"Validate" Phase: We tested and iterated upon prototypes through rapid research validation with potential users.
Presentation: Each team presented their concepts to Google product leadership, ensuring alignment and gathering valuable feedback.
This iterative process, incorporating diverse perspectives and practical exercises, was instrumental in driving the development of innovative and user-centered solutions.
Trade Offs
To meaningfully design solutions for immigrant legal navigation, our design sprint prioritized:
Diverse Stakeholder Inclusion: Strategic recruitment with Justicia Lab ensured participation of advocacy groups and immigrants/refugees with lived experience.
Comprehensive "Understand" Phase: Curated expert presentations provided a deep understanding of complex legal challenges.
Language Accessibility: Multilingual materials and live interpretation addressed language barriers.
Flexibility and Transparency: Unscheduled Q&A sessions on AI addressed participant concerns, ensuring comfort and understanding.
These efforts, while demanding, were crucial for developing user-centered and impactful solutions.
Lessons Learned
This sprint provided invaluable insights into:
The power of cross-functional collaboration: Bringing together diverse stakeholders, including those with lived experience, led to more innovative and effective solutions.
The importance of user-centered design in social impact: Directly involving immigrants in the design process ensured that the solutions were relevant, accessible, and empowering.
The effectiveness of rapid prototyping: The sprint format enabled us to quickly generate, test, and refine concepts, demonstrating the value of iterative design in addressing complex challenges.
Impact
The sprint not only generated innovative concepts but also fostered a sense of collaboration and shared purpose among participants.
Tangible Results: The sprint yielded three key concepts with the potential to significantly improve access to legal information and resources for immigrants and advocates.
Long-Term Impact: One of the concepts born from this sprint has evolved into ImmPath AI, an AI-powered tool developed by Justicia Lab to help immigrants navigate complex legal processes. This demonstrates the lasting impact of the sprint and its contribution to real-world solutions.
Innovating for a better future with generative AI
AI for Social Good
“As nonprofits seek innovative solutions to advance their missions and drive social impact at scale, they’re looking to AI for help. Through the inaugural Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI, 21 nonprofits and social impact organizations received mentorship, technical training and Google Cloud credits to explore gen AI’s potential and implement innovative solutions to achieve their goals more efficiently.
This eBook highlights the current challenges in three main fields and the work of 11 of the organizations participating in the Google.org Accelerator: Generative AI.”
““Huge thanks to Noah for raising his hand to be the Sprint Lead for a Google.org Immigration Advocacy Design Sprint! Noah was an incredible Sprint Lead... I’m incredibly grateful for Googlers like Noah who go above and beyond to leverage their skills and expertise in support of innovative nonprofits and governments, helping to demonstrate Google’s social responsibility in the process. Thank you, Noah!!!””